They told me I needed "purple surveillance"

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@mcc @RogerBW @ireneista ohh, you mean shingled disks.

really slow, don't touch unless you're going to almost never actually use it.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@dysfun @RogerBW @ireneista I don't understand this post. You're saying I should avoid using the Purple drives for purposes *other* than the surveillance camera usecase?

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@mcc @RogerBW @ireneista yes. they employ a technology called shingling to get capacities up. and the downside is performance is terrible. that's why they market them for surveillance because they just need a relatively low rate of write and maybe even to be read again sometime.

[kasperd@westergaard.social]

Once an external USB hard drive I had bought stopped working. I started disassembling it to see if I might be able to repair it myself. What I found inside was an internal SATA hard drive and some electronics to "convert" that into USB. I moved that hard drive to a different enclosure and then it worked again.

So the lesson to learn from that is that sometimes when buying an external hard drive it really is just an internal hard drive in an enclosure.

This is post is just an observation and not really a recommendation of any sort.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@kasperd @ireneista @RogerBW to me an internal hard drive in an enclosure is a win because it is in a nice plastic case and it won't get banged up in a move or something

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

@mcc is this a british military codename

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@kasperd @RogerBW @mcc out of curiosity, have you ever had this not be the case? it's been how every external drive we've ever disassembled works

[nyanpasu64@donotsta.re]

@ireneista@irenes.space @kasperd@westergaard.social @RogerBW@discordian.social @mcc@mastodon.social

• I've heard stories of external hard drives that integrate the USB adapter on the same PCB, so you need to solder to use it internally or recover data
• my USB 2 hard drive is a SATA adapter. You can transfer data twice as fast by connecting it to a USB 3 adapter. One minute later (if not connected to the original adapter) it locks up and starts ignoring all IO commands. Sigh...

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@nyanpasu64 @RogerBW @mcc @kasperd oh wow

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun isn't that what @mcc wants though? The original spec was "back up to it and throw it in a drawer". Not surveillance, but not terribly different requirements.

@RogerBW @ireneista

[kasperd@westergaard.social]

I have had one with a very different form factor that was unlikely to contain a regular internal hard drive. I never took that one apart though.