Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive… But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).

Yeah, the tinkering is part of the fun. Right now I’m still perfecting my OMV NAS/Homelab but after that I might look into custom routers. I’m still hoping to get fibre in the foreseeable future, but right now it’s not looking too good in my area…

That’s the problem with my router… I can’t. I’ve seen it done with OpenWRT but I chose the wrong model for that…

I wanted to do that as well, but I can’t redirect outgoing traffic on my router, just block it entirely. Sadly it was the only device of that series not supporting OpenWRT (sigh)… Next one will either have to support that or be a DIY project… Have been starting to self host my stuff already and I’m not planning to stop there!

Doesn’t help if the device has a baked in DNS address and just ignores your settings tho. Amazon and Google devices seem prone to that. After blocking everything on the common DNS ports except the PiHole, some of my devices have been acting kinda sluggish.

Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn’t bother with warranty… wasn’t fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).

Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn’t condensation a problem with that trick?

You might want to look at snapraid. I’ve recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.

The only one that didn’t die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.