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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • non-moving home devices

    There still is a use case - not that common in America but very common in (not only Europe’s) metropolitan areas:

    If the devices are located in a dense urban residential area (say Berlin Gropiusstadt in the 11th of 20 floors) you have a lot of neighbors with wifi, and - at least on 2.5GHz - roughly a third of their wifis will use the same or overlapping frequency range. In the evening, when everyone and her dog streams the newest Season of Bridgerton those will send relatively short bursts for buffering the next five-ish(?) minutes.

    This of course interferes with your measurement if you happen to measure at exactly the same time, so having multiple samples instead and providing an aggregated value is - for this scenario - more helpful.

    OTOH: it all depends on the use case of those appliances - if you don’t have competitive gamers who wonder why they sometimes lag in your valued customer list, that’s a non issue (and if they actual were competitive gamers, they should use an ethernet/fiber cable instead of wifi, obviously).

    And you probably did not get that much time allocated to add the delay, so going with another variant could get you in trouble if it’s taking too long.








  • wipe or fake SMART data

    My guess would be that it’s stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD’s firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.

    I haven’t seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.


  • First thing to do is check SMART data to see if there are any fails. Then looking at usage hours, spin ups, pre-fails / old-age to get a general idea how worn the drive is and for how long you could make use of it depending on risk acceptance.

    If there are already several clusters relocated and multiple spin up fails, I’d probably return the drive.

    Apart from all the reliability stuff: I’d check the content of the drive (with a safe machine) - if it wasn’t wiped you might want to notify the previous owner, so she can change her passwords or notify customers about the leak (in compliance to local regulations) etc. - even if you don’t exploit that data, the merchants/dealers in the chain might already have.