• 4 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssd

    You’re looking for the Media_Wearout_Indicator which is a percentage starting at 100% and going to 0%, with 0% being no more spare sectors available and thus “failed”. A very important note here, though, is that a 0% drive isn’t going to always result in data loss.

    Unless you have the shittiest SSD I’ve ever heard of or seen, it’ll almost certainly just go read-only and all your data will be there, you just won’t be able to write more data to the drive.

    Also you’ll probably be interested in the Total_LBAs_Written variable, which is (usually) going to be converted to gigabytes and will tell you how much data has been written to the drive.




  • As a FunFact™, you’re more likely to have the SSD controller die than the flash wear out at this point.

    Even really cheap SSDs will do hundreds and hundreds of TB written these days, and on a normal consumer workload we’re talking years and years and years and years of expected lifespan.

    Even the cheap SSDs in my home server have been fine: they’re pushing 5 years on this specific build, and about 200 TBW on the drives and they’re still claiming 90% life left.

    At that rate, I’ll be dead well before those drives fail, lol.


  • Hell I almost got snagged by one recently, and a goodly portion of my last job was dealing with phishing sites all day.

    They’ve gotten good with making things look like a proper email from a business that would be sending that kind of email, and if you’re distracted and expecting something you can have at least a moment of ‘oh this is probably legitimate’.

    The giveaway was, hilariously, a case of using ‘please kindly’ and ‘needful’ which uh, aren’t something this particular company would have actually used as phraseology in an email, so saved by scammers not realizing that americans at least don’t actually use those two phrases in conversation.


  • I just uh, wrote a bash script that does it.

    It dumps databases as needed, and then makes a single tarball of each service. Or a couple depending on what needs doing to ensure a full backup of the data.

    Once all the services are backed up, I just push all the data to a S3 bucket, but you could use rclone or whatever instead.

    It’s not some fancy cool toy kids these days love like any of the dozens of other backup options, but I’m a fan of simple and well, a couple of tarballs in a S3 bucket is about as simple as it gets since restoring doesn’t require any tools or configuration or anything: just snag the tarballs you need, unarchive them, done.

    I also use a couple of tools for monitoring the progress and a separate script that can do a full restore to make sure shit works, but that’s mostly just doing what you did to make and upload the tarballs backwards.


  • I’m finding 8 years to be pretty realistic for when I have drive failures, and I did the math when I was buying drives and came to the same conclusion about buying used.

    For example, I’m using 16tb drives, and for the Exos ones I’m using, a new drive is like $300 and the used pricing seems to be $180.

    If you assume the used drive is 3 years old, and that the expected lifespan is 8 years, then the used drive is very slightly cheaper than the new one.

    But the ‘very slight’ is literally just about a dollar-per-year less ($36/drive/year for used and $37.50/drive/year for new), which doesn’t really feel like it’s worth dealing with essentially unwarrantied, unknown, used and possibly abused drives.

    You could of course get very lucky and get more than 8 years out of the used, or the new one could fail earlier or whatever but, statistically, they’re more or less equally likely to happen to the drives so I didn’t really bother with factoring in those scenarios.

    And, frankly, at 8 years it’s time to yank the drives and replace them anyways because you’re so far down the bathtub curve it’s more like a slip n’ slide of death at that point.


  • My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’

    Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.

    I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.


  • Hard disagree.

    A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.

    We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

    That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

    Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.