We dressed like this in the 80s and 90s, too, and still do. Despite all the various fashion movements over time, my experience is that most people dress like this most of the time. The fashion of simple comfortable clothing changes very slowly.

One of my favorite movies, looking forward to it finally making it on Monsterdon

You should try and figure out why you believe this. Clearly people here don’t agree, and it doesn’t ring true to me either. How many people do you actually know who seethe with hatred for the US?

Sorry, on demand is not a good way to state this, it’s just how my weird mind thinks of things. By “on demand”, I mean, like you are actively using it to store something or view something. If you’re not intentionally doing something with it, the drive should be completely idle. That’s more of a target than a requirement, though. It’s a way to keep storage drives tidy and not littered with temporary cache files, or databases used to store runtime state by various services. It’s just a strategy I like to take, to keep bulk storage separated from the applications and services that use it.

Even if a usb drive is intended to be permanently attached, it should still be treated as a temporary component. The reason is so that if something happens and the drive is disconnected, it limits the disruption to the system. You lose your media and documents until it’s reattached, of course, but the computer keeps chugging along happily.

If you use it for writing log files, then its loss can disrupt those services (and also prevent the problem from being reported). Also it’ll be constantly making noise, which can be annoying.

That’s my reasoning, anyway, you might prefer it done differently.

I’m not mixing up units, but let me better explain what I mean. The max speed is only in a best case scenario with a single sequential reader, and that speed drops dramatically when adding other simultaneous operations because the read head needs to seek to different locations. Random read speeds regularly test at less than 1MB/s, and even though multiple sequential streams wouldn’t be random, it’d still require plenty of seek time.

I did a little testing on a drive I have here just now to make sure I’m not completely full of shit. Single stream read was about 120MB/s and I was surprised how well it handled multiple read streams. My drive could handle roughly 9 sequential read streams from different locations on the drive while staying above 10MB/s, so while it wasn’t reaching its max speed, it wasn’t horrible, matched your expectations almost exactly. The real killer, though, was writing. If I added in a single write stream, the read speed dropped to about 1.5MB/s because it seemed to strongly prioritize writing over reading. Maybe some configuration could improve this? Interestingly, adding more readers improved this, but only up to about 4.5MB/s.

My results shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s just one drive and me mucking around with dd, but I think still illustrative of what I was alluding to, that if you are using a single HDD for multiple things simultaneously, the performance can suffer badly. Actual performance will depend on its use, of course, and honestly the results are way better than I expected, so this isn’t likely a realistic concern at all unless you will be constantly writing large amounts of data to the drive.

Thanks for calling me out on this, these are really interesting results, I think.

2.5" is going to limit the storage size a lot. So if you need >4TB, the internal option isn’t going to work. A janky solution would be to route the SATA and power connector outside the mini-pc so that you can fit a larger drive, but that’s going to be pretty ugly, and still limit you to only a single drive.

A single hdd can be fast enough to serve UHD ripped 4k video, but it’s much closer to the limit than an ssd would be, and might not be a great experience if you will be doing anything else with that drive at that time. Having a cache drive or multiple hdds in an array (or even better, both) greatly improves this.

A usb enclosure would let you easily have multiple hdds, but as everyone will say, they are less reliable. My opinion is that while you should never use one as a boot/system drive, they’re fine for bulk storage for home use. Make sure you’re not writing logs or anything like that to it, it should be on demand use only, and you might have to reconnect it occasionally. Anecdotally, I’ve never had issues with usb enclosures, they’ve worked fine for me in the past and I continue to use one for backups, but maybe people with some horror stories would have very different views on this.

No, this is mostly a Hollywood thing to indicate that the traffic is real bad and the driver is real mad. The reality is that birds aren’t allowed to drive, and probably wouldn’t even want to.

Pretty sure its Hot Fuzz

I had a setup similar to this for a year or two that ended with an hdd destroying itself one night. Probably because of the drive and not the usb enclosure I was using. Until then it worked fine, it’s definitely a viable route.

If you can swing a desktop pc case it’ll probably end up easier and cheaper and have some headroom for upgrades, that’s the route I went down after trying an escalating series of mini-pcs and running into their limits one too many times.

Nice selections! I’ve been waiting on the 9800x3d for a while, expected it to come out early next year, but the future is now and I’ve also got an upgrade in the works. Still waiting on memory to arrive, but should be quite a bump from the 3900x I’ve been rocking since its launch.

I have a few kindles, have upgraded over the years and have been able to use them all in the same manner:

With a new device I connect it to the internet and update the firmware to the latest version (the factory installed version has had a lot of missing functionality in my experience). Then I block it from my network, delete the AP entry and put it permanently into airplane mode.

When purchasing an ebook from Amazon you can download it for usb transfer and I organize it on my laptop with Calibre.

Calibre can also strip drm, but if you’re transferring it to the device you downloaded it for it isn’t necessary.

Amazon may at some point in the future change all of this, but the content I have already downloaded can not be revoked and is usable outside the Amazon ecosystem if the drm is removed.

That narrow band of survivalists who are not unnaturally interested in fire

We don’t get to vote for a target, just a direction in which to ever so slightly turn. When far off course, every choice will continue to lead in the wrong direction, but over time those small corrections will add up. Hopefully.

Middle aged men today? They’re millennials and that’s called a 1000 yard stare.

You’ll understand soon.

Yeah, have had a similar experience. I find the more specific or niche a question is, the better google is at finding relevant pages. DDG is perfectly fine the rest of the time, though, so I keep it as the default.

Had this for dinner last night. Paired it with some tortilla chips to help round out its nutritional value. Might do it again tonight. It’s called The Mediterranean Diet.