Something that stood out to me from Legal Eagle pt1 was that everyone involved - everyone - should’ve talked to a lawyer sooner than they did (if they even did). This is especially true for Reckless Ben, and what he did in Utah (covered by Legal Eagle pt2). He really, really needs to find a lawyer, and listen to their advice. I get that he’s trying to create content, but this isn’t the way.

This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.

However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.

I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.

It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.

The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.

There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.

If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.

You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.

I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.

If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.

Presented without comment, SanDisk’s MSRP for that drive is $579.99 CAD.

https://shop.sandisk.com/en-ca/products/ssd/internal-ssd/wd-blue-sn5100-nvme-ssd.html?sku=WDS200T5B0E-00CPE0

I’ve seen it, too. No idea what’s behind it, but it tries to download a .ts file.

There is a ratio, which may be a new experience if you’ve only used public trackers. It’s not really a big deal if you have some patience, though.

TL (as do most ratio trackers) gives you bonus points for your time seeding, even if you have done nothing more than make it available. You don’t have to upload even a single byte unless someone wants it, and you’ll still get points. These points can be used to buy upload credit.

If you simply keep seeding everything you download, and buy credits as needed, you’ll quickly have more ratio than you could ever hope to burn. No need to spend money or anything.

As for limited content, it’s a general tracker. You probably have niche interests, so you would be better suited on a more specific tracker. I’ve almost never had issues finding anything mainstream, although quality can be a crapshoot. That’s the main reason I usually use other trackers.

Opentrackers.org posts open signups. TorrentLeech is at least as good as the public ones, and it has open signups a few times per year.

Otherwise, you can apply/interview for RED and a few others, work your way up through the ranks, and use the invite forums. This is how you get to the really big and really good trackers. But it’s also a lot of time and effort, which most people don’t want to do.

You might get lucky on the open signups. Every top-tier tracker was once a tiny site with no users. If you join and contribute, they could be the next big thing, and you joined with minimal effort.

Not just owned by, but used by and for the organization. The fact that his wife has one too makes that very suspicious.

During US prohibition, there were “grape bricks” with warnings not to dissolve in water and place in a cupboard for 20 days, because then it would turn into wine.

A simple negation probably won’t cut it legally (the bricks had a significant legal purpose), but you could probably word it in a similar way. For instance, “While VPNs are effective at anonymizing yourself during piracy, they can also protect your privacy from data mining ad companies”.

At some point, you’ll have to conspicuously avoid the topic and let people infer. Remember when high-speed connections were advertised as being great to “download movie trailers”?

Yes, but that’s only an issue if you are interested in those other communities. In this case, the instance is dedicated to anime, so it’s only an issue if you want to browse those other anime communities.

Just FYI, those are almost all on the same instance, and you can block that instance as a whole. It’s dedicated to anime, so there’s not a ton of collateral damage.

That’s where the “cheap bastard” part kicks in. The desire to spend less money outweighs things like social acceptance.

I have a problem with their methodology, although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

I’ve known a number of right-wing people that own and love their Prius. They are the “cheap bastard” type, and it’s hard to argue with the value (albeit not the styling nor associations) of a Prius.

Are you able to physically replace the HDD (preferably with an SSD)? If so, you can use the (Win10) Media Creation Tool to create a USB installer.

When it prompts for a key, just skip it. If you have an OEM mass activation laptop (i.e. anything from a major brand), it’ll activate automatically after. If, for whatever reason it still doesn’t activate, you’ll have a nag screen telling you to activate. It won’t significantly limit what you do.

It’s nearly certain. OEM activation has been stored on the motherboard since XP. XP-7 required a matching OEM cert (easily found online), while 8+ have a unique license in the BIOS. For these, you just reinstall the OS, skip the key during setup, and let it connect afterwards for all of the updates and whatnot.

Now, licenses to other apps, such as Word, are not so simple.

Kind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.

But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.

As for the fan, just about anything will do. The chip/heatsink gets hot, but is limited to the ~75 watts provided by the PCIe bus. I just have an old 80 or 90mm fan pointing at it.

The one I had would frequently drop the drives, wreaking havoc on my (software) RAID5. I later found out that it was splitting 2 ports into 4 in a way that completely broke spec.

I don’t want to speak to your specific use case, as it’s outside of my wheelhouse. My main point was that SATA cards are a problem.

As for LSi SAS cards, there’s a lot of details that probably don’t (but could) matter to you. PCIe generation, connectors, lanes, etc. There are threads on various other homelab forums, truenas, unraid, etc. Some models (like the 9212-4i4e, meaning it has 4 internal and 4 external lanes) have native SATA ports that are convenient, but most will have a SAS connector or two. You’d need a matching (forward) breakout cable to connect to SATA. Note that there are several common connectors, with internal and external versions of each.

You can use the external connectors (e.g. SFF-8088) as long as you have a matching (e.g. SFF-8088 SAS-SATA) breakout cable, and are willing to route the cable accordingly. Internal connectors are simpler, but might be in lower supply.

If you just need a simple controller card to handle a few drives without major speed concerns, and it will not be the boot drive, here are the things you need to watch for:

• MUST be LSi, but it can be rebranded LSi. This includes certain cards from Dell and IBM, but not all.
• Must support Initiator Target (IT) mode. The alternative is Initiator RAID (IR) mode. This is nearly all, since most can be flashed to IT mode regardless
• Watch for counterfeits! There are a bunch of these out there. My best advice is to find IT recyclers on eBay. These cards are a dime a dozen in old, decommissioned servers. They’re eager to sell them to whomever wants them.

Also, make sure you can point a fan at it. They’re designed for rackmount server chassis, so desktop-style cases don’t usually have the airflow needed.