It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

(Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)

Yeah, I would think memory as well due to the screen artifacts in that low res mode. (That depends on how x86 memory is mapped these days, I suppose.)

Yeah, like many other people, I browse /all. Dudes post flooded my feed, basically.

Also, that account should be tagged as a bot. While some people may post this stuff manually, it seems kinda stupid to do so. I have no issues with bots unless they aren’t tagged as such. (I tickles my OCD a little, I suppose.)

Meh, I just blocked OP and all is well.

Throttle your posts, for fucks sake.

It’s even more cyclical. I usually can’t remember the reasons why I made the change to begin with.

No worries! I am generally very open about it. (Your comment was recognizable to me, actually.) There is a very specific non-malicious bluntness that comes with the condition, actually.

But yeah, you have been practicing dealing with it your entire life. Treatment just helps a ton.

I do. Also, I am old(ish) so I have had many years to come to terms with what I can do well and where I struggle.

In this case, I didn’t want to use it as a crutch or an excuse. After reading the number of awesome replies this morning, I realized I should have probably framed my comment differently.

People here put some real time and effort into giving some solid advice and I didn’t expect that.

Edit: As a pure example, this is the third or fourth edit of this comment. Words are challenging, and programming is very similar in that regard.

Doesn’t anyone think of hotel chain profits these days??

Some people, like me, are not built to be developers. I can sculpt code in any language I need for whatever problem I need to solve, but maintaining code over a long period of time, with others, is not my thing.

The drive to do additional changes is just too high and the tendency for typos or obvious logic errors is too common. (There is one little improvement. It’s right there. One line up. Just change it now while you are in there…)

I am not stupid and regard myself as a decent engineer but my brain is just wired in a more chaotic way. For some things that is ok. For developing code on a team, not so much.

Security is the field I am most comfortable with because it allows for creative chaos. Rule breaking is encouraged. “Scripting” is much more applicable and temporary.

Sorry, my points were mixed unintentionally.

I agree, I stay away from JVMs because they are a pain in the ass to administer and like you said, are usually coded by the lowest bidder.

In a well maintained environment, I have nothing against JVMs actually.

I was just bitching about the spring framework family. While security updates are frequent, Java apps tend to not age well and commonly suffer from version lock-in. (I am going through a round of that at my current job with spring auth stuffs being the offender.)

Pshh. They just steal all of their ideas from the CEO of Bitcoin.

localhost is an injection attack of some kind so you obviously have a MTM that is located somewhere in Botswana. localhost malware was first used by the Kremlin in the 1940’s, but they traded it away for their first nukes. It usually doesn’t cause too many problems, but it is likely the cause of your browser history being loaded down with furry porn urls.

Just to be sure, format your drive, wipe your phone and also be sure to tell your neighbors to do the same since it can piggyback the ULF spectrum on your WiFi so it’s virtually undetectable to anyone within about a 10 mile radius.

That’ll be $199.99 for the tech support, please.

I can agree with that. There isn’t anything wrong with diversity as long as the entire ecosystem benefits from it. There are pros and cons, but not really worth going into that here.

At the end of the day, this is the fediverse. If someone wants to write instance code in COBOL to run on a toaster, you go right ahead! (It doesn’t mean I am going to support that effort, but my own personal opinion is insignificant in the whole scheme of things.)

https://sublinks.org/

My reaction on this is: Whatever.

I have heard strange things about Lemmy development in general, so it makes sense that something else would pop up eventually. Java though? I avoid JVMs like the plague and the security track record for spring* is spotty at best.

Still, if some people prefer it that way, whatever.

Cool. Now go post this in the community where they are re-writting Lemmy in Java.