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The <output> Tag

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag
664•todsacerdoti•13h ago•152 comments

Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/11/0238213/microsofts-onedrive-begins-testing-face-reco...
156•dmitrygr•2h ago•45 comments

Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/06/datablocks-white-label-drives/
100•thomasjb•5d ago•57 comments

How Apple designs a virtual knob (2012)

https://jherrm.github.io/knobs/
68•gregsadetsky•4d ago•41 comments

GNU Health

https://www.gnuhealth.org/about-us.html
279•smartmic•5h ago•78 comments

Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing
167•skevy•7h ago•87 comments

AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/10/amd-and-sony-tease-new-chip-architecture-ahead-of-playstat...
267•zdw•16h ago•326 comments

The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/twin-towers-construction-photographs/
156•kinderjaje•4d ago•77 comments

Windows Subsystem for FreeBSD

https://github.com/BalajeS/WSL-For-FreeBSD
184•rguiscard•14h ago•64 comments

Microsoft Amplifier

https://github.com/microsoft/amplifier
177•JDEW•6h ago•113 comments

Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/
217•Ch00k•14h ago•136 comments

Building a JavaScript Runtime from Scratch using C

https://devlogs.xyz/blog/building-a-javaScript-runtime
50•redbell•3d ago•19 comments

A quiet change to RSA

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/10/06/a-quiet-change-to-rsa/
73•ibobev•5d ago•25 comments

People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/people-regret-buying-amazon-smart-displays-after-being-bo...
60•croes•3h ago•24 comments

All-New Next Gen of UniFi Storage

https://blog.ui.com/article/all-new-next-gen-of-unifi-storage
20•ycombinete•3d ago•12 comments

I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

https://fulghum.io/album-cards
531•jordanf•1d ago•183 comments

Wilson's Algorithm

https://cruzgodar.com/applets/wilsons-algorithm/
30•FromTheArchives•7h ago•6 comments

Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium 137

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/indonesia-says-22-plants-industri...
16•geox•1h ago•6 comments

How to check for overlapping intervals

https://zayenz.se/blog/post/how-to-check-for-overlapping-intervals/
70•birdculture•6h ago•20 comments

Crypto-Current (2021)

https://zerophilosophy.substack.com/p/crypto-current
11•keepamovin•5d ago•3 comments

(Re)Introducing the Pebble Appstore

https://ericmigi.com/blog/re-introducing-the-pebble-appstore/
249•duck•23h ago•46 comments

Otary now includes 17 image binarization methods

https://alexandrepoupeau.com/otary/api/image/transformers/thresholding/
4•poupeaua•4d ago•2 comments

How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

https://james-simon.github.io/blog/chicken-cooking/
163•jxmorris12•19h ago•95 comments

Discord hack shows risks of online age checks

https://news.sky.com/story/discord-hack-shows-dangers-of-online-age-checks-as-internet-policing-h...
128•ColinWright•2h ago•41 comments

Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto

https://blog.tangled.org/intro
295•mjbellantoni•1d ago•81 comments

Rating 26 years of Java changes

https://neilmadden.blog/2025/09/12/rating-26-years-of-java-changes/
64•PaulHoule•3h ago•61 comments

Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland

https://www.bluewin.ch/en/entertainment/nobel-prize-winner-opts-for-suicide-in-switzerland-261946...
466•kvam•13h ago•434 comments

A Library for Fish Sounds

https://nautil.us/a-library-for-fish-sounds-1239697/
29•pistolpete5•4d ago•4 comments

Programming in the Sun: A Year with the Daylight Computer

https://wickstrom.tech/2025-10-10-programming-in-the-sun-a-year-with-the-daylight-computer.html
160•ghuntley•21h ago•52 comments

Show HN: I invented a new generative model and got accepted to ICLR

https://discrete-distribution-networks.github.io/
625•diyer22•1d ago•87 comments
Open in hackernews

Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/06/datablocks-white-label-drives/
100•thomasjb•5d ago

Comments

econ•4h ago
OT

> Half of tech YouTube has been sponsored by companies like...

It just struck me that the product reviews are a part of the social realm that is barely explored.

Imagine a video website like TikTok or YouTube etc where all videos are organized under products. Priority to those who purchased the product and a category ranked by how many similar products you've purchased.

The thing sort of exists currently in some hard to find corner of TEMU etc but there are no channels or playlists.

Aurornis•3h ago
The reason you don’t see videos arranged by product is because everyone knows not to trust unknown creators telling you how great a product is.

Viewers want to see opinions from specific people they’ve come to trust, not the first video that comes up for a product.

aspenmayer•3h ago
Coincidentally or not, those folks who have more subscribers usually charge more for their consideration. That’s why I generally trust Steve of Gamers Nexus more than other folks, because they don’t do ads except for promoting their own products, so there’s no conflict of interest. On the one hand, Gamers Nexus doesn’t manufacture their own hard drives, but on the other, they publish their methodology and have a reputation to uphold, so I would trust their judgement regarding testing computer hardware more than folks who do engage in outside advertising.
markerz•2h ago
Alternatively, unknown creators have less incentive to falsely promote or lie. It’s the reason I tend to trust random strangers on Reddit than popular YouTubers who have achieved monetization and sponsorship.
econ•2h ago
They don't have to tell you anything. Just unbox and show what they got.

I just purchased a bicycle chain cleaning device. It was absurdly cheap. The plastic was extruded poorly, it was hard to assemble, it was not entirely obvious how to use it. However! It did the job and it barely got dirty. I expected it to be full of rusty oil both inside and outside but it accumulated just a tiny smudge on the inlet. If anyone made a video it would be a fantastic product.

noAnswer•21m ago
1. You could be that anyone.

2. The world is filled to the brim with videos about "fantastic products".

9dev•29m ago
I don’t trust big channels especially, because I assume they have just sold themselves out to the biggest sponsor. Influencers only exist due to campaign deals, where companies try to sneak their ads into your mind by abusing your inclination to trust another human being. All of it is sickening.

In comparison, I’d rather read a general review magazine with a long history. At least they don’t try to trick me into believing they are working out of the goodness of their hearts, and they usually aren’t married to a single big sponsor.

Online reviews are broken beyond repair.

numpad0•1h ago
There's Kakaku.com[1] in Japanese Internet for all consumer electronics, Minkara for cars, bookmeter.com for books, and 5ch.net as fallback. It's surprising that there's only Goodreads on English Internet that everyone have heard of...

1: https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ | https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/...

speedgoose•4h ago
I admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold storage, because I’m not the one replacing the failing hard drives.
stirlo•3h ago
And I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance.

Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.

patrakov•2h ago
Not really. I know that my sleep is worth more than the difference between HDD and SSD prices, and I know the difference between the failure rates and the headache caused by the RMA process, so I buy SSDs.

In essence, what we together are saying is that people with super-sensitive sleep that are also easily upset, and that don't have ultra-high salaries, cannot really afford 18 TB of data (even though they can afford an HDD), and that's true.

gambiting•1h ago
Well, again, well done on being able to afford it. I have 24TB array on cheap second hand drives from CEX for about £100 each, using DrivePool - and guess what, if one of them dies I'll just buy another £100 second hand drive. But also guess what - in the 6 years I had this setup, all of these are still in good condition. Paying for SSDs upfront would have been a gigantic financial mistake(imho).
jabart•3h ago
Every drive is "used" the moment you turn it on.
malfist•3h ago
There's a big difference between used as in I just bought this hard drive and have used it for a week in my home server, and used as in refurbished drive after years of hard labor in someone else's server farm
deodar•3h ago
Drive failure rate versus age is a U-shaped curve. I wouldn't distrust a used drive with healthy performance and SMART parameters.

And you should use some form of redundancy/backups anyway. It's also a good idea to not use all disks from the same batch to avoid correlated failures.

kklimonda•3h ago
datablocks.dev has a page explaining what white label and recertified disks are [1]. Those are not disks used for years under heavy load.

1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-recertified...

jabart•3h ago
Enterprise drives are way different than anything consumer based. I wouldn't trust a consumer drive used for 2 years, but a true enteprise drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.

Quote from Toshiba's paper on this. [1]

Hard disk drives for enterprise server and storage usage (Enterprise Performance and Enterprise Capacity Drives) have MTTF of up to 2 million hours, at 5 years warranty, 24/7 operation. Operational temperature range is limited, as the temperature in datacenters is carefully controlled. These drives are rated for a workload of 550TB/year, which translates into a continuous data transfer rate of 17.5 Mbyte/s[3]. In contrast, desktop HDDs are designed for lower workloads and are not rated or qualified for 24/7 continuous operation.

From Synology

With support for 550 TB/year workloads1 and rated for a 2.5 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), HAS5300 SAS drives are built to deliver consistent and class-leading performance in the most intense environments. Persistent write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity for your mission-critical applications.

[1] https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss-v...

[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/HAS5300/...

Spooky23•10m ago
There isn’t a significant difference between “enterprise” and “consumer” in terms of fundamental characteristics. They have different firmware and warranties, usually disks are tested more methodically.

Max operating range is ~60C for spinning disks and ~70C for SSD. Optimal is <40-45C. The larger agents facilties afaik tend to run as hot as they can.

numpad0•3h ago
Returns are known bads.
Aurornis•3h ago
I would also prefer having a large number of high capacity SSDs so I could replace my spinning hard drives.

But even the cheapest high capacity SSD deals are still a lot more expensive than hard drive array.

I’ll continue replacing failing hard drives for a few more years. For me that has meant zero replacements over a decade, though I planned for a 5% annual failure rate and have a spare drive in the case ready to go. I could replace a failed drive from the array in the time takes to shut down, swap a cable to the spare drive, and boot up again.

SSDs also need to be examined for power loss protection. The results with consumer drives are mixed and it’s hard to find good info about how common drives behave. Getting enterprise grade drives with guaranteed PLP from large on-onboard capacitors is ideal, but those are expensive. Spinning hard drives have the benefit of using their rotational inertia to power the drive long enough to finish outstanding writes.

dleeftink•2h ago
Curious, what's the use case for wanting your data backed-up without fail? Is it personal archives or otherwise (business) archive related?

Not to say you shouldn't backup your data, but personally I wouldn't be to affected if one of my personal drives errored out, especially if they contained unused personal files from 10+ years ago (legal/tax/financials are another matter).

EvanAnderson•2h ago
Any data I created, paid to license, or put in significant work to gather has to be backed-up with 3-2-1 rule. Stuff I can download or otherwise obtain again is best effort but not mandatory backup.

Mainly I don't want to lose anything that took work to make or get. Personal photos, videos, source code, documents, and correspondence are the highest priority.

cm2187•16m ago
You can find cheap used enterprise SSDs on ebay. But the problem is that even the most power efficient enterprise SSD (SATA) idle at like 1w. And given the smaller capacities, you need many more to match a hard drive. In the end HDD might actually consume less power than an all flash array + controllers if you need a large capacity.
mvanbaak•3h ago
I have a dozen refurbished exos disk in my storage machine. Works super! SSD for bigger storage is simply too expensive
LorenPechtel•3h ago
RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.
dragontamer•1h ago
Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle.

Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID.

Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutions that more easily allow you to move hard drives around without tying them to motherboard-slots or other such hardware issues.

f_devd•1h ago
FYI XFS is not redundant, also RAID usually refers to software RAID these days.

I like btrfs for this purpose since it's extremely easy to setup over cli, but any of the other options mentioned will work.

zozbot234•1h ago
btrfs RAID is quite infamous for eating your data. Has it been fixed recently?
f_devd•47m ago
I believe RAID5/6 is still experimental (although I believe the main issues were worked out in early 2024), I've seen reports of large arrays being stable since then. It's still recommended to run metadata in raid1/raid1c3.

RAID0/1/10 has been stable for a while.

lproven•1h ago
> Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically

RAID does not mean or imply hardware RAID controllers, which you seem to incorrectly assume.

Software RAID is still 100% RAID.

cm2187•15m ago
Might be a bit adventurous for primary storage (though with enough backup and redundancy, why not). But seems perfect for me for backup / cold storage.
hddherman•3h ago
Hello, author here! It's a nice surprise to notice my own post here, but the timing is unfortunate as I'm shuffling things around on my home server and will accidentally/intentionally take it offline for a bit.

Here's a Wayback Machine copy of the page when that does happen: https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...

leobg•3h ago
I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in.

The author is using a ThinkPad T430.

Any experiences?

tw04•2h ago
If you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.
amelius•2h ago
Why is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.
beagle3•1h ago
Individual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time.

However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in trouble.

amelius•1h ago
I've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB is low.
beala•2h ago
The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them.

Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services.

[1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...

mannyv•2h ago
Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb.

I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they seem to be fine.

zettabomb•1h ago
RAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID users.
beala•35m ago
Yes I should have specified that this advice is specific to RAID configurations in NAS applications.

If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were designed for.

The issue is that they were not designed for continuous use, or much more demanding applications like rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy, because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little more research after posting my last comment and came across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attach...

Yokolos•35m ago
What may work anecdotally can't necessarily be used for official recommendations for a large range of users across an unknown range of hardware configurations. If it works for you, that's fine. That isn't sufficient to make a general statement that everybody will be fine using external USB drives, particularly for RAID, especially when people will then make you responsible if something goes wrong for not making sufficiently safe recommendations. You understand that, right?
bluedino•23m ago
I've had the same thing from random disconnects etc from various USB hard drives and SSD's over the years.
whazor•2h ago
When I used a laptop as server, the battery became a spicy pillow. I think laptops are not designed to be running continuously and on warmer temperatures than normal.
m2has•2h ago
I’ve use an P51 for about a year now with no issues. I initially bought 6bay DAS, but I’ve since moved to pure SSD storage inside the laptop.
dheera•1h ago
> I was about to buy a NAS.

The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

ericd•1h ago
I'm considering doing the same, I guess one would basically just be splitting functions, a dedicated NAS, and a dedicated server for all the functions that Synos tend to perform (generally not very well, but at least with pretty low power usage).
Xss3•42m ago
I think they just released some new prosumer ups.
VTimofeenko•33m ago
I believe Synology's UPS monitoring is based on nut-server[1]. In my setup, I am running the server on a separate machine that reads UPS state over USB and Synology is just a client. Maybe UNAS could also just work as a client.

[1]: https://networkupstools.org/

rovr138•37m ago
You can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID wouldn't be good.

If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID, http://www.snapraid.it

If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone. These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be useful,

- https://rclone.org/local/

- https://rclone.org/combine/

- https://rclone.org/cache/

Good luck o7

phil21•7m ago
I ran an old Thinkpad as a home router and small home server/NAS device for quite a long time, usually swapping out my old work upgrades every 3 years or so.

They all had onboard gige so it worked fine - native vlan for the inbound Comcast connection, tagged vlans out to a switch for the various LAN connections.

They were from the era of DVD drives so I was able to put an extra HDD in the DVD slot to expand storage with. One model even had a eSATA port.

They worked great. Built-in UPS and they come with a reliable crash cart built-in!

buckle8017•3h ago
These drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial.

White labeling avoids lawsuits.

aftbit•1h ago
I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune.

I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they also feel just an order of magnitude too small to me. How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS? Archiving rarely used stuff out to individual pairs of disks could work, as could running some kind of cluster FS on cheap nodes (tinyminimicro, raspberry pi, framework laptop, etc) with 2 or 4x disks each off USB controllers. So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.

dragontamer•1h ago
I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something.

"Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one.

--------

IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being sold off at incredible rates.

Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility, BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.

toast0•1h ago
If you want 100TB, you need a bigger NAS than most, and that makes most of the DIY NAS not so good. 2-4 drives seems to be where DIY shines. These days motherboards often stop at 4x sata, so you'll need a HBA or USB (eww).

Personally, I just don't have that much data, 24TB mirrored for important data is probably enough, and I have my old mirror set avaialable for media like recorded tv and maybe dvds and blu-rays if I can figure out a way to play them that I like better than just putting the discs in the machine.

hexagonwin•1h ago
What exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
bluedino•20m ago
Weren't shucked drives (removed from enclosures) referred to as White label drives at one point?