Hi, I bought an 18TB WD Elements off Amazon, which was listed as " Used - Acceptable", and said something about damage to the outside. I took this to mean, at worst, someone had shucked the drive and sent a dud back, but the price was good in the Current Market Conditions, so I decided to take a punt.

It's arrived, and aside from some dents in the packaging (which I assume is what they were talking about in the description), the contents look pretty clean, and there's no sign of any interference with the drive (it was even in the original sealed plastic bag). What tests can I run so I can smoke test before the return window expires? Thanks!

So, after receiving my Stormforge N10 with a few status LEDs knocked clean off the board in shipping, and getting a partial refund from Aliexpress, I decided I'd change the colour scheme to pink (for drive presence) and purple (for activity).

Somewhat inspired by a Hello Kitty themed audio mixer/effects rack build, I decided to go with another sanrio character, Kuromi. Because all my homeys stan the goth rabbit.

The factory backplane in the N10 runs the activity LEDs directly off the P11, the drive activity pin on the SAS/SATA power connector.

The original blue LEDs draw about 1.7mA each. I've seen conflicting reports as to how much current this pin is supposed to sink, from 100uA to 15mA. The most reliable resource I could find is a manual for Seagate SAS drives that said 3.3V @ 15mA. The factory LEDs run from the 5V rail but *should* in theory have enough voltage drop across them to stay below 3.3V.

Purple LEDs are not very efficient. I'm running them at about 14mA, which *should* be within limits if most drives are similar to seagate's, but given how expensive hard drives are right now I don't really want to risk it.

So I build this little buffer circuit to run the activity LEDs. It draws about 220uA @ 0.6V on the activity pin, and should be able to handle >40mA for LEDs

https://github.com/lucym202/N10-LED-Buffer

I used the wiki to find some great sources of data for a class last March. Is there somewhere else where these torrents can be found? /u/archivist ?

Facebook marketplace in my area is selling four 8 TB hard drives each with 60,000 power on hours for $140 each. The drives also have power on counts and the high 200s. How high is too high when considering a used drive? I would likely keep 16 TB in Cold storage but I don't want to waste money if the drives are too used.

All of the research I see shows people referring to the power on counts more than the hours, but no one gives their thoughts on what the range of good versus too high is. Thoughts are appreciated.

https://legacygames.com/legacy-games-closure-faq-everything-you-need-to-know/

Legacy Games is shutting down, encouraging everyone to download their owned games before the shutdown date as once it has passed it will no longer be possible to do so.

I saw someone mention that the installer is temporarily placed in your temp folder when you choose to install.

Has anyone got a tool for grabbing all installers for all owned games in your account?