Amazon has largely become AliExpress with faster shipping. You have to be very careful to make sure that’s not what you’re getting in the first place.

Amazon also encourages counterfeits and fraud through their policy of “commingling” all sellers, even if it’s a trustworthy and reputable product. If any of those third party sellers are scammers, the entire product is tainted.

Christians are the only ones that believe in Satan.

No, satanists do not believe in Satan.

Are you able to physically replace the HDD (preferably with an SSD)? If so, you can use the (Win10) Media Creation Tool to create a USB installer.

When it prompts for a key, just skip it. If you have an OEM mass activation laptop (i.e. anything from a major brand), it’ll activate automatically after. If, for whatever reason it still doesn’t activate, you’ll have a nag screen telling you to activate. It won’t significantly limit what you do.

It’s nearly certain. OEM activation has been stored on the motherboard since XP. XP-7 required a matching OEM cert (easily found online), while 8+ have a unique license in the BIOS. For these, you just reinstall the OS, skip the key during setup, and let it connect afterwards for all of the updates and whatnot.

Now, licenses to other apps, such as Word, are not so simple.

Without exception, every single time someone is looking for “free speech”, this applies:

https://m.xkcd.com/1357/

EDIT: autocorrect

Kind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.

But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.

As for the fan, just about anything will do. The chip/heatsink gets hot, but is limited to the ~75 watts provided by the PCIe bus. I just have an old 80 or 90mm fan pointing at it.

The one I had would frequently drop the drives, wreaking havoc on my (software) RAID5. I later found out that it was splitting 2 ports into 4 in a way that completely broke spec.

I don’t want to speak to your specific use case, as it’s outside of my wheelhouse. My main point was that SATA cards are a problem.

As for LSi SAS cards, there’s a lot of details that probably don’t (but could) matter to you. PCIe generation, connectors, lanes, etc. There are threads on various other homelab forums, truenas, unraid, etc. Some models (like the 9212-4i4e, meaning it has 4 internal and 4 external lanes) have native SATA ports that are convenient, but most will have a SAS connector or two. You’d need a matching (forward) breakout cable to connect to SATA. Note that there are several common connectors, with internal and external versions of each.

You can use the external connectors (e.g. SFF-8088) as long as you have a matching (e.g. SFF-8088 SAS-SATA) breakout cable, and are willing to route the cable accordingly. Internal connectors are simpler, but might be in lower supply.

If you just need a simple controller card to handle a few drives without major speed concerns, and it will not be the boot drive, here are the things you need to watch for:

• MUST be LSi, but it can be rebranded LSi. This includes certain cards from Dell and IBM, but not all.
• Must support Initiator Target (IT) mode. The alternative is Initiator RAID (IR) mode. This is nearly all, since most can be flashed to IT mode regardless
• Watch for counterfeits! There are a bunch of these out there. My best advice is to find IT recyclers on eBay. These cards are a dime a dozen in old, decommissioned servers. They’re eager to sell them to whomever wants them.

Also, make sure you can point a fan at it. They’re designed for rackmount server chassis, so desktop-style cases don’t usually have the airflow needed.

To anyone reading, do NOT get a PCIe SATA card. Everything on the market is absolute crap that will make your life miserable.

Instead, get a used PCIe SAS card, preferably based on LSi. These should run about $50, and you may (depending on the model) need a $20 cable to connect it to SATA devices.

Manhattan Special Espresso Soda. Diet option is available.

They want my name and email, and someone will get back to me to find a retailer? Hard pass.

TIL that was part of it as well

I did this back in the days of Smoothwall, ~20 years ago. I used an old, dedicated PC, with 2 PCI NICs.

It was complicated, and took a long time to setup properly. It was loud and used a lot of power, and didn’t give me much beyond the standard $50 routers of the day (and is easily eclipsed by the standard $80 routers of today). But it ran reliably for a number of years without any interaction.

I also didn’t learn anything useful that I could ever apply to something else, so ended up just being a waste of time. 2/10, spend your time on something more useful.

Related: JC Penney very publicly stopped pretending everything was always on sale, and just set everything to the “sale” price.

Despite the publicity of the move, sales tanked. Just a few months later, everyone involved was sacked, and they went back to pretending everything was always on sale.

This isn’t the first time a company has used this approach. Apple users will always pay (be charged) more. I suspect the same is true for mobile users vs desktop.

But with AI being applied, there will be a TON of variables, just like your car insurance. You probably won’t even be able to identify most of them. For instance, which ISP are you using? What time of the day are you shopping?

What else does your browser fingerprint say about you? What about when they link it to Facebook, even without your knowledge or consent? Will gay people (or women, or Mexicans, or any other group) pay more?

The issue here isn’t about charity for the less fortunate. Many of the people begging make a decent living (from begging), and moreso than those working shitty service jobs. I don’t want to give money to someone that dresses homeless and puts on an act. I would happily give money to anyone that genuinely doesn’t know where they will sleep next week, or where their next meal is coming from.

The problem is that I’m not in a position to evaluate that. As such, I would rather give money to food banks and the like, since they are in a better position for that.

Searching through the trash means they genuinely need the money, and are willing to work for it. That’s worth something.

Kroger owns a bunch of other brands. Do you have one of them in your market, and it’s just a branding difference?

It’s cringe pretending to be humor.

Call his fucking bluff. The only way anything would close is if it isn’t profitable (enough). And if they can’t turn a profit, well then they need to be better at business! (/s).

The change is regarding “permanent” installations, which the article also infers to mean directly hardwired. Those of us who go the route of a NEMA 14-50 outlet are likely unaffected.

That said, I wish they’d ban the cheap, shitty outlets that can’t actually provide continuous power. These are the very popular $10 outlets, vs the $50 ones that also can’t fit in a standard box.