u/AshleyAshes1984

I've been looking into an LTO drive for cold storage to expand upon my current workflow that uses BDXL discs. I've looked into what I can but I've found messy information that makes it hard to figure out what to buy.

Namely, a number of LTO drives seem to only work inside a an entire branded ecosystem and not stand alone. Or some 'work' but only with software that the OEM will not give Joe Rando a license too and it's too obscure for pirate copies to even exist.

My goal is to get something in the LTO-5 or LTO-6 range. I'm more than willing to assemble a dedicated PC in my network rack to support the LTO hardware and software. So I could have a dedicated hardware with it's OS configured only to do the job of reading or writing LTO tapes while having a 10G link to the main network and storage server.

So what doesn't paint me into a corner or trap me in vendor lockout/lockin hell?

Are there 5.25" bay options that'll interact with SAS or some other card I'll install?

What software should I be looking at to do the reading or writing.

While I understand that the tapes are absolutely not designed or 'Random Access', can they be incrementally written to? Write 300GB once, come back a month later and add another 300GB to the same tape?

Can the tapes do selective deletes? Say 200GB of something I archived no longer needs to be archived (Probably because a better quality version became available) Could i just erase that 200GB on the tape and write something else to that freed up space? Or is it an 'Erase entire tape, rewrite' like with Re-Writeable optical discs?

Asking on behalf of a friend who's faced with this situation.

They've lived in their rent controlled rental for one year come tomorrow. The corporate landlord approached them asking if they would like to renew their lease for 12 months rather than going month to month. The reps for the landlord said they did *not* want to increase their rent at this time and that the renewal would 'lock in' their rent, the same they paid as of 12 months age, for another 12 months. They've gone so far as to offer a gift card or six month gym membership as an incentive for the renewal. The loss of being able to leave with 'only 60 days notice' is irrelevant to my friend. They'll live their for a decade if they can.

We're unclear on our understanding if this actually 'locks in' their unincreased rent for another 12 months. A lot in the RTA guarantees this right to a landlord the right to increase every 12 months minimum since the last increase or start of the original lease. I've found some stuff that says this doesn't protect them from increases for 12 months, but at the same time the corporate landlord is literally trying to incentivize them into it.

Edit: As an update, it seems my friend was given an N1 with an increase of $0. So then I guess the question is 'Does an N1 for $0 count as a valid increase?'

Though if so, it still leaves the Landlord in a position where they already can't increase the rent for 12 months ALREADY.

My spouse has on and off expressed some interest in getting her PAL and we're the kinda no kids, middle class adults who are hard to shop for, cause we tend to preorder the cool things we want with own money. So I thought about helping her get her PAL for her birthday since she's mentioned it on and off a few times.

Though the main thing is, due to work, she'd need to be able to redeem it at a time of her convivence. But this is not the kinda thing one can normally buy a gift card for like a 737 simulator or something, ha ha. So I'm looking for some place/someone who can do the course in a 'I pay you now, she contacts you later and figures out the timing to do the course' kinda thing.

Any ideas?

Thankfully I've avoided a drive failure for a year so far. My system has 16TB parity drives and a mix of array drives in 16, 10, 8 and even a few 4TB drives. My main method of 'expansion' has been attrition. An older smaller drive dies, it gets replaced with a 16TB. Of course now 16TB drives cause more than 100% than they did a year ago.

While browsing drives to have an idea on what the next replacement will cost me, I noticed some new 24TB drives managing to be slightly cheaper than 16TB drives.

I obviously know what happens if I replace a bad drive with a 24TB drive when the parity drives are 16TB only. I'll only get 16TB of usage out of it.

My question is, if I did that, and later also upgraded the parity drives to 24TB (Or larger) then what happens? Is my 24TB array drive still limited till 16TB? Or will will the newly expanded parity enable it to use all 24TB without extra steps?

I was trying to sort out a CEC issue with an Insignia NS-32D220NA20. Namely, when it 'timed out' with no input after 5mins or was told to go to Stand By with CEC, it'd keep the connection alive, but the power button on the TV or the remote would cause it to drop the CEC connection.

Anyway, I went into the service menu and I was messing around. Yes I know it's stupid and that means I'm stupid. I'm pretty sure what I did was 'change' the 'factory channel'. I didn't enter a value just one arrow key to the left and that was it, blank screen. That's it.

It powers on and off with remote or the physical button but it only shows a black screen. The backlight is illuminated but that's it. Other than power there's no response, no OSD, no anything, no attempts to return to the service menu or anything else works.

So far I've tried holding the power button while it's plugged in but no change.

This was just a cheap unremarkable TV I picked up on Facebook to do some very casual basement viewing and signage display for LAN Parties. I got it cheap and I can afford another one, but I feel pretty stupid and I hate the idea that I turned a perfectly good TV into ewaste because of my hubris.

Any ideas?