Looking to see if anyone else with MX500 4TB drives in hardware arrays is getting stonewalled on warranty replacements.

The Situation:

Drive: Crucial MX500 4TB 2.5" SATA (S/N verified defective with heavy physical sector degradation/POST lockups).

Status: Under active 5-year warranty.

Distributor (CFD Sales) & Crucial JP response: Stock is "exhausted" (I'm sure they have extra in storage "just in case") due to Micron exiting the consumer channel. Crucial JP support claims they are only a "troubleshooting window" and refers back to local distributor.

Remedy offered: A cash refund based on the original 2024 invoice price.

The Problem: Due to current NAND market pricing, a 2024 historical invoice refund doesn't cover half the cost of an equivalent 4TB 2.5" SATA TLC drive (like an 870 EVO) in Japan today. My array strictly relies on 2.5" SATA bays (M.2 slots are full), so an NVMe swap or taking a cash loss to downgrade capacity isn't viable.

Escalations to RMAdesk@micron.com and privacy@micron.com have gone completely dark for 2+ months. They're completely blackholing me.

Is Micron/Crucial doing this globally now—offering lowball historical cash refunds on EOL/withdrawn consumer drives rather than fulfilling cross-shipments or enterprise SATA inventory pulls? Has anyone successfully forced a current-market-value payout or B2B hardware cross-shipment out of them recently?

I'm considering having a physical library for my favorite albums and artists to be ready for a world without online streaming or downloads. I'd like to at least have a format that can last my lifetime, but it would be neat to also have a format that future music historians could theoretically dig up and access centuries from now.

I've looked into a few options:

Multiple MP3 players with Micro SD cards - I liked the thought of this, but I ruled it out when I learned that SSDs and Micro SD cards are susceptible to degradation even in storage. I estimate a system like this would maybe last 15 years if I'm lucky.

CDs - these would be better, but they're still susceptible to degradation over decades, not to mention that disks can be fragile. This system would maybe last 50 years without online access.

Vinyl records - this pleases my inner hipster, but physical storage space and equipment lifespan is a concern. Vinyl records are very fragile and lower quality playback equipment degrades them faster.

M-disks - Archival blu-ray seems great for this. These are supposedly tested to last 1000 years in ideal conditions. I need to do more research, but this is my preferred option.

Sheet music (just for fun) - transcribing the music into sheet music, printing on archival paper, and locking it away for future use. This would be a personal gift to future music historians. I studied music in college and spent a lot of time in music history lectures pondering how many masterworks were lost to time simply because it was written on low quality paper, stored badly, or any other reason. There's entire eras where all we know about their written music comes from stone tablets. Maybe I'll go the extra mile and carve "never gonna give you up" on a tablet some day.

Hello,

Found this drive on e-bay (sadly sold as I was looking into it).

Its a 2022 drive with 2400 hours on it. I know hours can be wiped an reset to 0, but can they be "faked"? Its about 100 days, which seems too long to leave it running to fake it after having it wiped to 0 hours.

My only other guess would be (besides it just not being used a lot) - someone bought a wiped drive and then used it for 2400 hours and sold it again?

I’ve been cleaning up my HDD drives ever since they became quite expensive due to the rise in SSD prices. Plus, I have a lot of files that are no longer available or hard to find on torrent sites/forums but are taking up valuable space (car diagnostic stuff and schematics).

I bought these Verbatim DVD's and plan to use 4,550 MB on each one.

According to Nero DiscSpeed, there should be enough space with a little bit for Nero to do it's things.

Hiya all 👋

I'm currently sitting on a pile of old photographs and slides that I rescued from shoe boxes at my parent's house.

Along with this I have about 7 VHS tapes, and some old CD/DVDs as well...

I'm looking to buy the correct scanners/devices to digitize each of these. Bonus points if the device has a built in way to restore, or even improve the quality 🤞

Is there currently a 2026 consensus, that I can start looking into, to potentially purchase? I think the sooner I start chipping away at this pile, the sooner I can be done 😅

I'm seeing a lot of suggestions online, like the Epson FastFoto FF-680W for quick batch photo scans... But that was released in 2018 😕 , and I'm worried technology has moved on since then.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated 🙇‍♂️

Just found 2 16Tb wd mybooks for 200€ total.
Not sure if the smart stats are fine tho.
Gemini said that guy might be scamming.
Thanks in advance :)

Tripod shut down permanently on April 24, 2026, after Lycos ended all operations

Advice Needed

Does anyone know how to do webpage retrieval for an site that is shut down?

Three decades of internet service gone, just like that. It was great while it lasted and I am forever thankful to Tripod for cementing childhood core memories.

However, I did not manage to back up my website in time. The website I put my heart and soul into is gone forever.

I have tried archive.org and my website cannot be found there. Not even a page was scrawled. I searched up other old websites of mine, from Blogger and Wordpress - everything was there. I am not sure why the Tripod one isn’t.

Does anyone know how to retrieve a website back?

I am in need an external storage solution. I have 4 x 4TB hard drives that I pulled out of my old MacPro tower after the video card died on it. The drives contain misc. stuff (movies, music, pictures, etc.). I did not have it setup as RAID or anything, just individual drives. I was looking at getting an external solution that I can drop these drives into and came across the Terramaster D8 Hybrid 2 unit. Anyone have any experience with it? I do also have a few M.2 drives that I can populate the open slots with as well.

I’ll mainly be using the unit between a couple of laptops (Win & Mac). Nothing that I am storing on the drives needs to be available 24x7, which is why I’m not really looking at a NAS solution (yet). Especially with the cost of NAS drives.

So, what are y’all’s thoughts on the D8?

Hey everyone, I’m looking for advice on designing a backup system for a somewhat specific setup.

I currently have two 8TB hard drives configured as RAID 0 on Windows 11, giving me roughly 16TB of usable storage. I understand that if one of the drives fails, I could potentially lose everything on the RAID.

I chose RAID 0 because I want to use all the available space, and I don’t want or need to back up the entire 16TB. Most of the data on the array is replaceable, so losing it wouldn’t be a major issue.

What I want is a selective, modular, automated backup system that only protects the data that actually matters to me.

What I DO want to back up

• Photos
• Family videos
• Current work and projects
• Program configurations
• Personal or irreplaceable files
• Anything else that would be difficult or impossible to recover

What I DON'T want to back up

• Movies
• TV shows
• Installed games
• Installed programs
• Files that can easily be downloaded again
• Other large, replaceable files

For software, for example, I don't want to back up the entire installation folder. I only want to preserve important configuration and user data such as .INI, .CFG, .DAT files, profiles, presets, save files, etc., where applicable.

Basically, I want to define specific folders and files that should be protected rather than creating a full clone of the RAID.

What I'd like the system to do

I’m planning to use an external hard drive that normally stays disconnected and stored somewhere else. I would probably connect it about once a week.

Ideally, the process would be almost completely plug and play:

1. I connect the external backup drive.
2. The system recognizes that it’s the backup drive.
3. The backup starts automatically.
4. It compares my selected files against the previous backup.
5. Only new or modified files are copied.
6. The backup stays up to date without me manually selecting files every week.
7. Once it finishes, I disconnect the drive and put it back into storage.

I don't want to manually start a complicated backup job every time I connect the drive.

What software, method, or setup would you recommend for achieving this kind of selective, automated backup?

I’d also be interested in hearing how you would approach the overall strategy for a 16TB RAID 0 containing mostly replaceable data, but with a much smaller collection of personal files and projects that actually need protection.

If you use a similar setup, I’d especially appreciate hearing:

• What software you use
• How you define the folders/files to back up
• How you handle program configurations and save data
• How you automated the process when the external drive is connected
• Whether there are any problems or limitations I should be aware of

Thanks!

So I recently picked up a stash of like new Seagate portable 2TB hard drives for cheap, and to my surprise they are shuckable. My Openmediavault server is running 3.5" WD Green drives from 15 years ago with >120K hours so I'm expecting them to die at any moment. I have all my drives to spin down to save power, and I'm also running MergerFS + SnapRAID, so the parity drive only spins up once a day to do a sync.

I would think that 2.5" drives handle frequent spin up/downs better than 3.5" due to less mass, but the long life of my WD Greens have somewhat disproven the claim that spinning up/down often has any meaningful impact. I also don't think I care about the lower performance of SMR since this server doesn't do any heavy workload other that maybe some easy media streaming. I really like the fact that 2.5" drives are so power efficient which is why I'm running an old WD Blue 2.5" as my NVR drive. ~20K hours and no problem with the 24/7, so I'm not entirely convinced that 2.5" drives are as flimsy as you'd think.

My main concern is that these are Seagate Rosewood drives, of which apparently is infamous for its lack of reliability. But it also seems that the failures could be due to them being used in a portable environment where people are rough on them, or not properly unmounting, causing head sticking to platters/crashes. So would it be a bad idea to use these in a NAS? Truthfully, I have enough of these that I can easily swap out if they go bad but it's more of an annoyance in wasting time.

Hi I’m aware of that i need to have multiple backups and i have just one so far, which is 4.5TB on one external hardrive that i use for my Jellyfin server and also has docs, photos etc.

I can’t afford to have multiple hardrives or a NAS right now so would be best path be to buy another 5TB external hard drive and have a copy there?

I posted this on r/TrueNas first but I haven't had any replies yet. Hopefully someone here can help.

I had a pretty basic setup with Core and I was trying to install Stash and Whisparr but plugins no longer work so I upgraded to Scale. I'm still getting used to it right now.

I'm not that technically savvy but I managed to install Whisparr via YAML and Stash ok. Now the thing is how do I add files? I'm not sure if I have the right directories setup or if I'm missing something.

This is how my Datasets are setup right now.

KANSAS
- apps
  - stash
  - whisparr
- data
  - downloads
  - media

I need help with these things

• what directory I should choose for Stash
• what to choose as my root folder for Whisparr
• how to add files so they can be accessed/discovered by Stash and Whisparr
  • do I have to set up a SMB? what directory should I set up as the SMBs?
  • how do I add the files? do I drag and drop them using Windows Explorer like I did when I setup Plex on TrueNAS Core?

Google did help especially figuring out how to install Whisparr since its not in Apps on Scale and had no idea what YAML is but I can't figure out how to do the rest and I'm kind of lost for what I do from here.

services:
  whisparr:
    container_name: whisparr
    environment:
      - PUID=3000
      - PGID=3000
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    image: ghcr.io/thespad/whisparr:latest
    ports:
      - '6969:6969'
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /mnt/KANSAS/apps/whisparr/config:/config
      - /mnt/KANSAS/apps/data/downloads:/downloads

I have Whisparr set up as its own user and it has Full Admin but I'm not sure if that's needed? What access should I set it to?

In the title. I have approximately 20TB of data (and counting) that I'd like to A) back up as securely as possible and B) be able to access more or less immediately. As it stands now, I have it all backed up to an internal HDD that I've put into an external enclosure, essentially turning it into an external drive. I'm considering getting another 20TB drive and doing the same thing.

The thing is, I don't like to leave this drive running all the time because I don't want to increase the chance of mechanical failure. Maybe I'm already being overly cautious on that front. I know there are other storage options (NAS/RAID) but I have no idea how they work or whether they are significantly different from my current setup. This ended up being a bit ramble-y but hopefully someone gets what I'm trying to convey.

EDIT: SOLVED

I've acquired a few used SAS drives and would like to integrate them into my NAS server.

My server natively supports sff 8643 (which is a really nice board) that you can see here.

However the SAS drives don't show up, not even in the BIOS, I suspect this is more of an issue with the sector size being different and formatting the drives could help (I'll do it as soon as the drives show up)

However in my research I've read that most commercial board's wont read SAS drives unless it goes through a PCIe connection.

So my question is do I need to get a PCIe HBA that the drives go through or can I connect them to the board directly with an sff cable like this.

(for what it's worth I have already got an HBA backplane from an HP server but that connects via sff cable too and not PICe)

NOTE: I live in a country with no access to Amazon and the like, so AliExpress is my best option unfortunately.

My current setup is a RAID5 (SHR or whatever) consisting of 3x 6TB drives, with the 4th slot being unused. I'm currently at 8TB used out of 12TB. It's 4TB of all sorts of miscalleneous data I kept since I was a kid and which I dump on the NAS whenever a drive is full or I replace my computer. Linux ISOs mostly, with some private data. Recently I've been using it for storing local AI models, which accounts for another 4TB, but of these, 3TB are definitely in the "can easily be redownloaded" camp.

My data has survived 20 years so far without ever having backups on most of it. I know, it's heresy on here. But for me, RAID and caution was good enough. This was fine when the internet was more open as I always figured I could just redownload most of it. However, I feel like the attacks on a free and private internet are really ramping up in the past two years, and it's possible within the next 10 years there will be no more unauthorized sites accessible from my country.

Also, even if the status quo remains, it's becoming harder to replace old/non-popular Linux ISOs, as sites focus on zoomer content. Recently I tried looking for a semi-popular belgian comicbook that is 30 years old, and couldn't even find it on the modern sites or LibGen. But it was on my NAS. So I have hard-to-replace data.

So I decided I want peace of mind from data loss and began to do some research, including this sub's past threads.

To be clear, 99% of my data doesn't change week-to-week. I just need offsite backup in case I get 2 simultaneous drive failures on my RAID5, or a house fire, or accidental deletion. All extremely unlikely but non-zero chance.

The two options I'm down to are:

1. Backblaze Personal Backup $99/year + one-time purchase of a single 12TB drive. I know from reading this sub that it doesn't backup a NAS. The plan would be to buy a 12TB and hook it up to an unused Windows desktop as an internal drive. The NAS would run a weekly job to backup the latest data to the Windows drive over Windows Share (Hyperbackup or something like that. The data would be encrypted by the NAS before transfer to Windows. Backblaze client picks up the changes to the local 12TB drive, and backs it up to their cloud.
2. Heztner Storage Box If I'm understanding this right, for 21 euros per month (252 euros/year, $292/year), you get 10TB online storage to use as you see fit. That's 3x more expensive than Backblaze. However, if I exclude the AI models from my backups, my data would fit on the 5TB variant for 11 euros/month ($153/year), which makes the price a non-issue.

I'm tilting towards Backblaze not because of the price, but because:

• Their backup service has been around for so long that it's comforting. I don't want to have to remigrate, I'm too lazy and busy.
• The option for them to mail you a drive containing your data seems handy in case I get two drive failures. Beats spending a month downloading 8TB, huh?
• I'm in Canada and Backblaze is in the USA, so faster transfer speeds in case I need to restoring a single directory that was accidentally deleted

Your advice, comrade?

Months ago my drive stopped showing files on Linux Mint. I couldn't fix it. On Windows it said I could format it. I realized I didn't have anything important on the drive save for some video edits I did in high school, so I decided to format it today. The drive just works? I really hope this wasn't another scare and issue Linux mint caused me. I've just about had it with the OS and am planning on reclaiming the space for Windows 11 which runs smooth after I reinstalled it.

one question: why does every LLM keep telling me that RAID 5 is better than RAID 6, when RAID 6 can survive two drives and RAID 5 can survive only one?

Chats with these models are work product now, and all four platforms can take them away: account bans, accidental deletion, or history that quietly stops being served. I went through the native export path on every platform. All four exist, none is complete, and two have traps. Written up so you can set a schedule and forget it.

ChatGPT

Settings, then Data controls, then Export data. A zip arrives by email: conversations.json with everything, and chat.html, the whole history as one page. Link expires in 24 hours. Gaps: one blob, no per-conversation files, and the wait ranges from minutes to days on big accounts.

Claude

Settings, then Privacy, then Export Data. A zip of JSON arrives by email, usually within minutes, covering conversations and projects. Same 24 hour link expiry. Gaps: memory entries are not included, and again one blob of JSON rather than per-chat files.

Gemini

takeout.google.com, and here is the trap: the product listed as Gemini exports your Gems configuration, not your chats. Deselect all, pick My Activity only, narrow it to Gemini Apps, and switch the format from the default HTML to JSON. You get MyActivity.json, an activity log with one record per prompt and response. Gaps: it is a log, not conversations, there is no per-chat structure at all, and history that Gemini's backend no longer serves is not in it.

Grok

The only one with no export in the product. What exists is the xAI account data download at accounts.x.ai/data, sign in with the account you use for Grok and request the archive, which is reported to include grok.com conversations as JSON. For Grok used inside X, coverage through the X data archive is inconsistent in my testing, so if someone here has a definitive recent result, that is a genuinely useful comment.

The pattern across all four: the native exports are account-level compliance features, not archival tools. They give you everything as one undifferentiated blob, on a link that dies in a day, in formats built for lawyers rather than for reading. None gives you a single conversation as a file, and none does Markdown or PDF. For per-chat files I use a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), which exports individual or bulk conversations as TXT, Markdown, JSON or PDF on all four platforms, and I will leave it at that since this post is about the native paths.

My schedule, for what it is worth: native export from each platform on the first of the month into a dated folder, checked once that the zip opens, never read again. The blob is the insurance, the per-chat files are the working copies.

What are people's retention setups for AI chats? I have not seen a good answer for diffing two monthly ChatGPT blobs to find what changed, and I suspect someone here has already scripted it.