~$2500USD/ea, for anyone else as curious as me

Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with medium? (Serious question)

Fred joins the game and teleports to square 3,3. He has a red aura around him. Nobody’s quite sure what it does, but it probably isn’t good.

It kinda looks like a marigold to me. If the leaves are crunchy, it’s underwatered. There’s a chance that some of it is still alive so you may see some small growth start to pop up - but usually, everything that’s crunchy is totally dead. If it’s mushy or limp, it’s underwatered - which unfortunately is probably worse.

I’d personally be super surprised if they were outsourcing their firmware engineering - but I do suppose it’s technically possible.

Ahh, yeah. Neither would I. I would expect my USB sticks to last longer than that, lol.

That aside - here’s a fun fact. We sell the NAND from scrapped SSDs that we no longer need for development to a third-party vendor that actually desolders it and uses it for flash drives. So… you never really know what kinda flash storage you get on your flash drives! (Or… we did do this, until the program recently got shuttered because NAND is so damn cheap now)

I do agree with the plastic brick part - but there is actually reasoning behind that second part - the read-only mode. That happens when the flash is down to a very low amount of life left (usually predetermined by the manufacturer). It is by design because the flash will degrade further if you continue to write to it, so by forcing it to read-only mode, users can still recover their data in a failing/aging SSD. Not to say it isn’t a huge pain in the ass when that happens though, lol

These failures don’t have to do with where they’re manufactured - it seems like this is some sort of firmware bug. NAND doesn’t really just choose to wipe itself at random. Actual NAND chip failures are few and far-between, so this is very likely much more than a hardware issue.

That said, I personally have done a lot of testing with WD-manufactured NAND, compared other companies’ NAND - and the WD NAND is pretty crap. I can’t really go into further details than that, though.

Source - I’m an SSD firmware engineer.

I can’t see the SMART data. May be something in there that gives me more information. Seems odd to me that an SSD would just go bad out of the blue - but if you’ve not turned on the drive or laptop in a while, that could be why. But honestly, it may just be fine after a full drive write - couldn’t hurt to try zeroing it w/ dd.

SSDs don’t like being left unpowered for more than a few months. All flash storage, actually. If you take out an SSD and stick it on a shelf for a few years, it’s unlikely that it’ll lose data - but it’s absolutely technically possible, and many companies won’t cover such data losses by warranty after a specified period of time.

You may be able to find scrapping places around you (e.g. metal scrappers) - my local scrapping place also takes circuit boards. Which gets me ~$1/lb or so. But they also just take misc. electronics for like $0.10/lb, phones are like $5/lb, etc. there’s prices for it all. Best part is, this way you can actually get paid for your trash, instead of doing it the other way around.

“Oh no, my wifi is down. Guess I can’t boot up my freaking computer any more”. I’m so fed up with Microsoft and the steaming pile of crap that it calls Windows… the only reason my main PC uses it is because I’m too lazy to switch it to Ubuntu. All of my other newer machines run Ubuntu.

Minecraft. I’ve gotten sucked in all over again, lol. Happens every other year at this point