If the drive previously wasn’t making this noise (as in it had been filled with data, been in use for days-weeks and wasn’t ever making this noise) and it doesn’t happen in response to data writes (even hours after the fact) then it might be a cause for concern that the drive could be dying.

In general it’s a good idea to have back-ups of any important data but I’d really ensure that’s the case here and assume it could imminently fail. In general the sound of hard drives changing (that is sounding different in either idle noises or active writing/reading noises) is a cause for concern for potential drive failure though it could be other things and as drives age they can sometimes change sound signatures as mechanical components age without necessarily failing (could go on working fine for years).

That said there are normal processes in drives that can make noise:

• Some sort of operation driven by your OS itself, I won’t begin to get into all of them but there could be something accessing things in the background, doing file table or journaling operations, writes, checks, etc on the file system itself, just low level maintenance stuff.

• SMR drives may continue to write and shuffle data for quite some time after being written to, especially if it was a large amount of data. Though this should still even in the case of multiple terabytes probably be resolved within 12 hours.

• Many drives, especially high capacity enterprise drives do make a -soft- clicking sound as a result of the arms sweeping the surface when idle but not off to if I recall correctly spread around lubricant or some sort of basic mechanical maintenance. It’s part of the normal drive operations. It’s possible it occurs more frequently in response to a massive amount of writes previously like filling a drive or may not be activated until a certain amount of data is written, I’m not really sure how that works as that would probably be proprietary information to the manufacturer.

Should I be worried about this? To my paranoid mind it feels like something is slowly reading my files with some exploit to bypass the indicator light to fly under the radar.

How would it do this? Is it installing hacked firmware to your enclosure too? I doubt you’re that valuable of a target.

If you’re worried about malware then back up your stuff, nuke the install and reinstall from scratch. I wouldn’t worry about it if this is the only thing you’re seeing and find it unlikely.

Your options if you wish to stick with Windows:

• Windows 10 LTSC (massgrave activators and has a guide for getting an ISO for it) which means a reinstallation (best option with Windows, least enshittification, still keep security updates but have to back up your stuff and reinstall everything) though this may not be a long-term plan if you play video games as I expect many places may drop Windows 10 support by 2028-29 end of ESU rather than 2032 end of LTSC support.

• Windows 11 but change to LTSC (massgrave can do this)

• Windows 11 but change to Enterprise license (massgrave can do this) and use Windows Group Policy settings to set target for updates to the current OS build version number which will delay feature updates for I believe up to 6-12 months but allow you immediate security updates. Bad news is you still get the new “features” but good news is they’re delayed significantly and maybe by the time you have to “upgrade” Microsoft has tweaked them to be moderately less bad and much less buggy.

Star Trek.

Everything after Voyager gets axed completely. 100% retconned. Doesn’t exist. You can’t even joke about happenings in it in any new works.

Voyager and DS9 themselves get trimmed down. DS9 loses 75% of its episodes, Dominion war erased, mundane space station stuff instead, no religious weirdness validated. Voyager gets better ending but retains most of its episodes.

ToS gets turned into legendary chronicles rather than full canon with the more absurd less science bits cut out or reduced to the fantasies of the chronicler. Main stories and characters retained with >=80% of it surviving. Movies from both ToS and TNG era retain full canon status.

It is established that alternative dimensions are extremely limited in number, you cannot do Marvel universe #69 stuff with it, the main one is the nega-universe with evil everything and a few other isolated pocket universes that are short-lived and unstable (often as a result of warp core implosion weirdness and such).

All existing writers and producers currently associated or associated since the end of the Voyager era are summarily fired with prejudice. New ones are hired and quizzed by me to ensure at least the main producers are communists like Roddenberry and do not want to turn my hopeful FALGSC property into grim-dark in space IP number 3. Prominent transgender characters are MANDATORY in the new series and other steps will be taken to drive every last reactionary out of what’s left of the fan-base.

It becomes studio policy to viciously copyright strike anyone uploading video of retconned parts of the IP to any platform as well as to bully journalist insiders with access into adopting the new line by excluding anyone who disagrees with it from access or favor.

Not sure.

Apple TV devices do offer a similar app for collating together all your streaming services and their offerings and Apple tends to be a tad better on privacy but for something like this I really suspect your data is being collected by Apple though what they do with it may be a little bit better than Google though I don’t really know.

These apps tend to have some sort of built-in recommendation stuff and to do that they need to profile you and your habits to be useful. Now true they could do that and not make it available to advertisers but the very idea is pretty fraught. I can tell you the streamers themselves in many cases are selling your habits and preferences.

Basically though when it comes to streaming you have only these choices of ‘platforms’:

• Google / Android TV: Run by Google, you know the deal, comes with lots of smartvs, various devices exist running it from Walmart (Onn) to Google themselves, to Xiaomi, and so on.

• Apple TV: By Apple, comes in two flavors, with and without ethernet, typical Apple experience in that it’s locked down, so no side-loading but no ads on the homescreen either and less data collection than most other offerings by Apple themselves (note: the streaming company apps often do their own data collection and will do so on any platform). Very direct competitor to Google TV by a company wealthy enough to be able to stand toe to toe and not fret too much about profits from one small device line like this, also used to get people into their streaming service AppleTV+ as the devices come free with a few months of it.

• Roku: Probably about the worst for privacy, very aggressive anti-privacy practices, data collection, profiling your local network devices and of course the service itself is ad supported.

• Fire TV by Amazon: Not great, better than Roku probably, not a lot of hands on experience with this myself but it runs a modified version of Android and in future probably a modified version of Linux. Used to be sideloading friendly but they’re now cracking down hard because of piracy.

• Roll your own device, use a mini-PC, raspberry pi, old laptop, etc: Disadvantages include all commercial streaming services will not go above 1080p (no 4k), many are locked to 720p because it’s not a certified device with lock-down against video capture, experience isn’t as natively smooth as a dedicated streaming device designed with that in mind. Hack-y solutions like using air-mouses as remote controls that can be good or bad. Things can break and you’re on your own to support yourself. Upsides include no homescreen ads, minimal data collection, complete control of the device, ability in some cases to do limited adblocking but at the cost as I said of no 4k, often no full 1080p with most streaming services. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you do a lot of served from home media streaming via Jellyfin, Plex, directplay off your movie rips hard drive, etc as this is where it really shines.

• Dune-HD: If you’re looking for something with high-end support that allows 4k streaming from streaming services plus stuff like Plex there are Dune-HD devices. They run certified Android alongside a custom linux build inside a privacy container isolated from Android. They offer a lot of devices that are in the roll your own category but a bit more polished (though still often locked to 720 or 1080p by streaming services), but they also offer a few devices that are dual-os as mentioned so straddle the AndroidTV and roll your own divide kind of offering the best of both.

MKVToolNix.

An excellent tool for working with video files as long as you’re okay with your files being in MKV containers (you should be they’re superior to mp4). From within it you can add and remove tracks such as audio and subtitle, change flags (flag subs as forced, default, etc), rename tracks for clarity, adjust track timing with positive and negative delays to fix sync issues. You can do batch scripting against it to iterate through whole folders of video files. For anyone who has a home media server it’s a must. For anyone who works with videos regularly it’s at least useful.

It’s not really cheaper for those who matter (the bourgeoisie).

The reason being it’s a labor discipline tool. If no one is at risk of poverty you get more uppity workers who unionize and/or demand more pay, more benefits, etc which ends up costing the ruling class more at the end of that spiral. That’s what studies like this don’t take into account, the actual utility of poverty, homelessness, etc to the ruling class in aiding their theft of worker value.

The poor traditionally are kept around in some amount as a reserve labor force as well. To be called in to strike break or to pull into the lowest rungs of the most exploited industries to replace those who are uppity and most likely to be uppity due to being most exploited. Their existence allows poor pay and conditions in the worst industries which allows higher profit margins. They also serve as a way of funneling government money into private pockets (if the poor were killed off then there goes the money the grocers, the food companies, the farmers, etc get via them redeeming food stamps and so on) with a veneer of social charity.

Cheaper for government isn’t the point that drives policy. It would also be cheaper for government to not pour hundreds of billions into weapons and wars but that serves a function of moving money into the pockets of arms-maker corporations and the ruling capitalist class as well.

Difficult I would say. A lot of them require Chinese phone numbers, emails, etc. Some of them you can probably sign up for with just a wechat or QQ account or similar though paying (if you want large amounts of storage for instance) may be an issue without jumping through some hoops.

You can search up cloud storage providers in China. Baidu, Tencent, and several others have a presence.

If you’re looking for an MS Office replacement there is WPS office as paid software but I’m not sure how much better than libreoffice it is.

I would say there are not any worth recommending and that best practices are avoiding running random scripts you don’t understand, keeping software up to date with package managers, and using virtualization tools. Also look into Portmaster perhaps which is an interactive firewall.

Audio is pretty tough.

For bluray releases you’d want untouched disc images which generally means private trackers or paying for usenet.

For streaming rips that’s an even bigger problem as the scene, cabal, etc pretty much exclusively rip in English or whatever the show’s original language is.

Your best hope for streaming is probably finding some sort of specialized Norwegian or pan-European private tracker that specializes in ripping things with multiple audio track dubs available.

Subtitles are a bit easier.

For bluray releases some of the better p2p groups like QxR often include all the languages in their releases. Many remuxes even include all subtitles though some remuxers are worse at this and you still may have to go with full disc rips untouched.

For streaming the better private tracker groups like TAoE, Hone, etc tend to always include all the subs available in their releases but on the public side of things it would be difficult.

So basically you need to either pay for usenet or work your way into some good private trackers and keep an eye specifically out for anything specialized for that region.

No. They’ve tried several times with car bombs but the Russians have scanners and search vehicles traveling it.

It’s also incredibly annoying for file hashing and trying to verify the integrity and that the file wasn’t tampered with or replaced in transit because often every single one of these stub online installers has a different hash because they’re embedding time or some other variable about you in installer.

Perhaps contained evidence against the former PM who tried to do a military coup and this is the way of getting rid of it? Perhaps protecting co-conspirators if not the top guy.

DVDs use the MPEG-2 video codec

correct.

and have a file size of 9 GB typically

Incorrect.

Though there exist dual layer or DVD9 commercial releases they were usually either double features like 2 movies on a disk or 4 TV episodes or uncommonly long films (Lord of the Rings for example).

MOST commercially released DVDs were DVD5 or about 4.7GB in size. And this is based on oh 20 years of sample size.

On DVD encoding: Things get tricky in comparisons because AVC introduced a lot of tricks to get lower bitrates while maintaining a certain psycho-visual level of passing image quality that MPEG2/4 simply didn’t have. It may not pass detailed frame by frame study of corner elements but for most people without perceptible quality loss you can knock the bitrate down meaningfully beyond the pure compression efficiency improvements of the follow-on codecs.

“Now I’m sure you’ve all heard of timeshares, but we have something newer and better called Trump-shares. Now to show your loyalty to America we recommend you all buy in right now at the ground floor and for the next 5 hours we’re going to explain the benefits and I know what you’re thinking ‘can I go home early if I buy in after the first hour’ and the answer is yes!”

I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it’ll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we’re on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it’s going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

You can I believe sign up with a wechat account as well. So you’d create that first, then use it to sign-in.

Disclaimer: I’ve not used that exact machine but have worked with similar Lenovo/Dell stuff.

On HP’s spec sheet it says the max HDD size is 2TB. Do I need to do anything to the BIOS to allow bigger drives?

Set mode to UEFI and/or GPT possibly. Some very old BIOS may simply refuse to boot off a drive that big while some may work as long as the boot stuff is in the first 2TB.

I’ve heard it’s possible to add a third 3.5in HDD in the DVD drive bay. Can anyone confirm? Do you need a bay adapter or whatever?

Often these form factors have a SATA plug for a DVD drive. Be aware that this one is usually only SATA 2 at best so slower than SATA 3 (only 3Gbps vs 6Gbps) and often only SATA 1 (1.5GBps) in fact given DVDs need significantly less than that. Not technically a huge limiting factor in anything but bursts and saturating the cache as mechanical hard drives are going to tend to struggle to get much above 300Mbps sustained write anyways but a consideration. I wouldn’t put a RAID drive on it if possible as RAID drives should be on SATA adapters of matching speeds.

You can use a bay adapter and you can set the drive directly bare on the surface but it may induce vibrations and in theory for mechanical drives could shorten the life of the drive in addition to being annoyingly noisy. An SSD located there wouldn’t have this problem as it’s safe to set the SATA ones on a bare surface. Though if the SSD is getting heavy regular use you might consider still investing in some sort of heat solution like an aluminum dock for 2.5" drive to place it in and set that there.

As far as if you really want to set a 3.5" spinning disk HDD there without paying for a dock, at least put rubber between it and the metal of the case. Either little rubber standoffs or a flat rubber pad. This may induce heat issues but should solve the vibration one at least.

You can of course buy a PCIe SATA or SCSI card and connect to that to get higher speeds.

The other questions I’ll leave to other people. Technically hardware RAID tends to come with lots of problems for home lab setups and software at the host OS tends to be more recommended as easier to recover with and less prone to various problems.

A Chinese social media app. A ton of US tiktokers fled to it when it seemed a ban was imminent.

In 1984 authoritarian country they gestures.