Needfuldoer - Linus Tech Tips (original) (raw)

8,532

April 15, 2021

December 31, 2024

  1. Can you post a photo, please?
  2. Where does it hit on the cooler? Would removing any of these plastic tabs buy you enough room?
  3. For devices with file systems, it's a good idea to safely eject every time. That gives your OS notice to finish writing everything to it, and tells the drive to spin down if it's a mechanical hard drive. You can usually get away with just yanking a flash drive as long as it's not being actively written to, but there's a small chance you'll corrupt data.
  4. My router uses less than 20 watts while it's running. You're not going to save an appreciable amount of power. Exactly. How is it supposed to receive a wake-up signal when it's powered off? Plugging it into one of those remote-control outlet things would work, if you're awake enough to press the off button, but then you're adding a couple more watts to its power draw while it's running so it's a wash.
  5. And here I am trying to come up with a quiet enclosure for my PowerEdge rack servers... "Need"?! Who said anything about "need"?
  6. Again, it's highly unlikely they did anything but wipe the SMART data. If you're that concerned about it, return it and buy a 1 TB SSD to stick into the enclosure instead. All you're doing is worrying yourself into a frenzy over a "what if" scenario.
  7. Clearing SMART data is trivial with a few tools. Editing other attributes is possible, but unlikely since it won't appreciably affect the drive's performance or what a customer would see from a cursory glance. Why are you so worried about that? If you're that worried about your drives, you shouldn't be buying cheap recycled ewaste from AliExpress.
  8. Your processor is old, but it supports Quick Sync Video. If you have a Plex Pass and you're just transcoding H.264 to H.264, that's all you need. (And if your media files are already in a format your client devices can play, it doesn't need to transcode at all when you're on your LAN.) If you don't have Plex Pass, it's a moot point. Hardware transcoding is a subscription feature. At least it means you don't have to burn your PCIe x16 slot on a GPU.
  9. Reiterating the question won't change the answer. Used drive sellers usually get piles of assorted used hard drives in bulk, wipe their SMART data, and zero the drive out as a burn-in test. That will eliminate any failing drives from the lot, while giving the appearance that all their drives are low-use. (Rolling back their odometers, basically.) As for changing other parameters, they have no reason to do so. You're talking about selling used 2.5" hard drives. There's not a whole meat left on the bone once they've been tested, because they've long since been outclassed by SSDs. They're probably just stuffing cheap 2.5" drive enclosures with whichever cheap used 2.5" hard drives they can get their hands on in sufficient quantity. Again, you're buying cheap stuff from AliExpress. You're going to get whatever mystery meat fits the vague specs in the listing.
  10. In which country? What's your budget? Can you buy from a site like eBay or does it have to be from a "real" store?
  11. If you already have an AM4 system and you want to get a few more years out of it, I'd say yes it is. If you need to buy a motherboard, you're better off buying into a platform with a future (AM5 or LGA 1851).
  12. Are you using NTFS with a 512 byte cluster size? That will cap out at 2 TB per partition. Try formatting it with a 4 KB cluster size.
  13. The SSD goes into the slot at an angle, then you tilt it down and engage the clip to hold it in place. You might have to remove the screw that's closer to the slot if your SSD is longer than that.
  14. [ Moved to Programs, Apps, and Websites ] How old is this laptop? How much memory does it have? Does it have an SSD with a reasonable amount of extra space on it? There are plenty of Minecraft server guides out there, but you might be better off renting a Realm (or hosted third-party server instance) instead.
  15. The first iGPU generations that support AV1 hardware decode (AFAIK) are Intel 11'th gen and RDNA 2. (So I think that counts out all the AM4 APUs.) Can you add a modern low-end GPU? I think an Arc Alchemist card will do all that for you, even if your machine doesn't support ReBAR.