First world problems 2021

I just threw out about $1,000 worth of colour laser printer toner and an imaging drum - this is from an old HP Colour LaserJet 2500 that nobody owns anymore.

I bought them because back then I was doing a lot of printing and so needed the spares on hand - printer doesn't work at all if only one of the toners runs out - so you need to keep all of them available.

But then my printer died and I bought a different brand to replace it.

This was mid-2007, I know this because there is a picking sticker on the boxes from when they were delivered.

So the toner and imaging drum has been sitting on the top of a bookshelf in my office for the past 13 or so years.

I delayed a bit too long in trying to sell them and then couldn't even give them away because nobody still had a working printer of that model.

Finally making an effort to tidy up the office and some cupboards - just threw out a bunch of old computer gear that I will never use again either - it's all IDE ribbon cables (pre-SATA) and case parts for cases I have long since thrown out.

 

I think there's a stack of them down in the basement waiting for me to dispose of them.

Funnily enough, I've just build a new media server and resurrected a bunch of old drives which were just sitting around in my cupboard for the last few years.

My new machine (running Unraid) has 14 data drives - all 2TB Samsung drives between 9 and 11 years old, plus 2 dedicated drives for the TV tuner cards to record onto which are both 14 year old 500GB Seagate Barracudas and are still running strong

All SATA II though - no IDE drives still in operation fortunately.

I was even able to repurpose some old SATA SSD drives to use as cache drives for the media server - not as fast as newer NVMe drives, but good enough.

None of my 1.5TB WD Green drives purchased in 2010 have survived - the last of them was permanently retired a few months ago after having outlived all its siblings by about 5 years and I only have three of the eight 500GB Barracudas I purchased in 2007 still operating.

My main file server now runs a mixture of 4TB and 8TB WD Red drives - the oldest of which will be 8 years old this year, while the newest 8TB drive was purchased 2 weeks ago and is sitting on the shelf as a spare.

And yes, I do daily backups on the expectation that these old drives will likely die at any time.

Also, yes, I do have a spreadsheet with the age and location of every hard drive I've purchased in the last 14 years - when I have over 50 drives deployed across all my machines, it gets tricky to keep track of them all.

 

*sigh*

 

I've found you can see the scans the next day, but the reports are held back for maybe two weeks, assuming you don't read them before seeing your specialist. They do end up being on the portal, but not straight away.