it’ll be covered on screen 73 of the ‘agreement’ required to use the device.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

ting hasn’t been the same since dish bought it from tucows.

on my arch-based systems, i use repos first, aur second. appimages third. i do also have a couple minor things (that are self-contained with no dependencies) that were just ‘unzipped’ into their own directories and links added to menus where appropriate. note that i don’t game on these systems. i don’t have a lot of aur packages installed, so updates and subsequent recompile time isn’t an issue.

i have yet to run into anything i want or need that isn’t available in those. so no flatpaks or snaps.

hard drives are going to be slow af copying data to itself, or moving data to a different partition on it.

then you’re also adding partition size manipulation to the mix, which will also be slow af when data has to be moved off the ‘end’ of partitions to ‘make room’ to enlarge or create another with a different fs.

your best option is to get another drive, even if it’s also a hard drive instead of ssd. use that to move (copy, really, to preserve the original as a backup for the time being) all the data to that you want to preserve.

upgrades have been working fine here, both linux and windows, for well over a decade.

only if a system is also being repurposed at the time of the ‘upgrade’, or if i’m changing the connection type of the boot drive (such as from sata to nvme, or switching an older system to ahci mode) do i install ‘from scratch’.

definitely keep windows on it to begin with. once you’re fully settled-in on linux and haven’t even looked at windows for at least a couple weeks, make one last backup… then nuke it or repurpose it.

patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

usb nvme adapters are not expensive and it likely won’t be the only time you need it. they are a handy accessory to have on hand if you have nvme storage.

don’t mess around with imaging to a file on the zfs, then restoring it. simply clone nvme -> nvme using a usb nvme adapter then replace the internal with the clone.

those sound highly addictive.

first boot: no i don’t want a 365 trial.

still first boot: no i don’t want 365 ‘basic’, either.

(you should know this msa already has a one-off office license on it, you fuckwits)

and yea, still in first boot: no i don’t want game pass trial.

then game pass notifications shortly after from the ‘store’.

this was this past weekend setting up a new desktop with 11 pro.

upgraded here. no problems. didn’t even notice the version increment until i went looking for it.

those were so long ago they’re small enough that windows would still be able to format them fat32 even with its built-in limitations on formatting that filesystem.

what would be completely useless is scrolling through a larger flash drive’ or card’s files, one or two at a time.

if you have to work all three shifts every three weeks, you can’t realistically hold-down a second job or attend regular classes, you’re exclusively at the disposal of your masters.

you’d be surprised at how many people look for lowest price and fail to read even part of the rest of the item’s page below the item title at the top.

kindle. check.

lowest price. check.

buy now.

click-click-done.

(oops. they just got a ‘trial’ to prime, too. that takes actual reading of pages to find and click-through the cancel process before the payments start)

you mean debian, right?

amazon still sells the ad-supported versions of kindles. and not just the fire tablets, but the readers, too.

they count clicks on a distro’s page on their site, not usage or anything else.

if they dared put hanna montana linux on there, it would be the perpetual #1 listing.