I’ve got 12 years and 5 months on a Western Digital WD20EARX HDD. It’s starting to get some bad sectors.
I’ve got a similar runtime on a SAMSUNG SpinPoint F2 and it still seems to be healthy. There’s nothing important on either of them, I just want to see how long they will last.
A UPS can keep the modem and phone running for a couple of hours. If you have satellite internet, it will work for as long as you can power it. Cable or DSL will go out when the battery dies in the ISP’s equipment.
Landlines have gotten a lot less reliable in a lot of areas because the phone companies don’t want to maintain them. Mine would go out as soon as the power did when I cancelled it.
MoCa adapters are a decent option if running new cable is difficult, but 10 gig adapters still aren’t available.
If you want 10 gig, run fiber, not CAT6. Twisted pair uses a lot of power. Fiber uses less than a watt per port and is future proof.
MTP is really buggy and unreliable. It doesn’t matter if it’s on Linux or windows. If you need to transfer a lot of data, I would suggest using the android debug bridge.
Hopefully we will see a lot less of it with the cost of AI going up. Eventually it will just be the big companies that can afford it.
Of course they are. That slop is unmaintainable.
Have you tried using a different SATA cable. I had one go bad and the drive started throwing all kinds of errors.
RAID isn’t an alternative to a backup. If a second drive fails while rebuilding the RAID-5 array, all of the data will be lost.
Mint does come with a lot of preinstalled software, but I wouldn’t consider it bloated. It’s stuff that most people will use. The MATE and Xfce versions are fairly light.
With Linux, you can get 15+ years out of a PC if you got decent hardware.
It still shows up because the windows boot partition is still there.
If you’re using grub, you can add GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true to /etc/default/grub and run update-grub. That will remove other operating systems from the grub boot menu.
If you install a few Flatpak packages, it will fill it up quickly. You could also make a games directory.
If the computer has a serial port, you can use SLIP to get an internet connection. Then you could host a simple website from it. It will run at dial-up speeds and you may have to write your own software though.
I would delete the first two partitions and put a new partition there to use as /home. Then expand / where /home was.
It’s easy to expand a partition towards the end of the disk. I would not recommend expanding one towards the start of the disk. That would have to move all of the data. It’s slow and much more likely to cause problems.
I wouldn’t suggest messing with a boot partition unless you are comfortable using a live boot disk to reinstall the bootloader if something goes wrong.
If you’re buying a PC for OPNsense or pfSense, look for one with Intel NICs. Realtek NICs tend to be unreliable.
Cloudflare won’t even allow you to use your own nameserver. Avoid them like the plague.
If the RAM was cheap and performed well, I would buy it. I wouldn’t trust a no name hard drive though.
That’s just a cell phone packed in a laptop case. It only has 8GB of non upgradable RAM.
There is a workaround to run Waydroid on X11, so you can still run it even if Wayland doesn’t support your window manager.
Many routers support more than one SSID per radio.