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[Pemalite]

JEMC said:

Guys, I've only noticed that Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is free at Steam... but only until today's refresh . So, if you read this in the next hour and a half or so hours, you may still be able to claim it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/544610/Battlestar_Galactica_Deadlock/

On another note, my PC is acting all weird. A couple weeks ago one of my drives died. It sucked major a**, but now I no longer need a motherboard with more than 4 SATA ports. Yay! (You have to keep a positive attitude, right?), but now the system acts weird. It takes a bit more time than usual to boot than before, Firefox stops working from time to time for no reason, and I have anotehr drive that keeps getting used at 100% capacity all the time which, after what happeend with the other drive, worries me.

The question is, I can't simply unplug that drive because I use frequently, but I have a "docking station" that I barely use. Is it dangerous to use a drive in one of those for long periods? I don't want to "save it" from the weirdest state my PC is only to kill it for using it the wrong way.

If it helps, the drives are vertical and the station looks like this:

The only issue it may introduce is extra vibrations as it's not actually secured, which is pretty much a non-issue in the modern era... It's not like we are running with Quantum Fireballs anymore in a massive RAID array.

For a period, drives used to come with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations even in desktop cases.

I do use one of these frequently when grabbing an old spinning rust drive and sourcing data from it... But to be honest, the best thing I ever did was buy an 18TB HDD on sale for $500 AUD a month ago, you get a better sense of data security as the drive has low operating hours.

Zippy6 said:

JEMC said:

Thanks for the answer. I'll do it tomorrow.

I hope Windows won't try to use the 100% of it connected through a USB port.

You shouldn't have any problems, it'll act exactly like a normal external HDD. Most externals are actually just normal 3.5" or 2.5" drives inside with Sata to usb adapters in them. I opened up an old WD MyBook 500gb usb HDD the other day and swapped in a 3TB to use it for rom storage.

It's actually a common practice to grab lower-priced external HDD's and "chuck" them, by removing them from the enclosure and installing them in a NAS or Desktop PC.

Unfortunately, some drives actually have the entire motherboard swapped out with a USB-only variant, Western Digital did that with some runs...