To my knowledge the first suggestion (that didn’t work) for me, is to export using the export option of the vault. This is disabled for business users.

WTF. Why? This would make me want to switch even more and I would make sure to never be their customer again.

Are you also using Powerline? This can cause all kinds of wanky issues.

The Seagate Ironwolfs 18TB have a Workload Rate Limit (WRL) of 300TB/year, as do some WD models. Unlike SSDs this WRL includes not only writes but reads as well. (page 2, end) If you do a monthly scrub you already have 216TB of reads so it can be safely assumed that a lot of customers blow well past these numbers. This limit is in use since the 2TB drive area and simply does not fit 9x larger drives. ServeTheHome talked about this years ago.

They most definitely can read triple layer discs as they are commonly used for 4K Blu-rays. And when a drive can read TL-Blurays it most likely also can read QL-Blu-rays just fine. However, those are rare so I would suspect a 2x TL release.

A single Quad layer Bluray could fit the entire game, but not a ton of PC users have an optical drive, much less a Bluray capable one. A microSD card or USB drive might be more viable these days. A 128GB costs less than $10. When you want to stick to DVDs you would need either 27 (DVD-5), 15 (DVD-9) or 8 (DVD-18). Multi-DVD releases are definitely a thing. Star Wars Battlefront comes on 4 discs. I suspect they would opt for a DVD-9 release as this allows you to print artwork on one of the sites and you likely need a few extra discs as you cannot use all of the storage for data. So we talk about a 16-18 disc release. ~22mm (7/8 inch) of DVD goodness.

It actually does. Blurays go up to 128GB and the game needs 125GB.

I will just paste my standard procedure when I onboard any new (or used) drive: Everybody has their own skin care HDD check routine. This is mine:

I first check the SMART status with CrystalDisk, after this a short smart test, full surface check with Macrorit, full h2testw run, CrystalDiskMark, and then I check with CrystalDisk once again if anything besides power on hours did change.

Will take some days for a large drive but in terms of work hours we talk about less than 5 minutes and it covers pretty much anything without being too excessive.

Removing CPUs and RAM will also decrease its compute power. Disabling features also will likely remove some of the enterprise features like IPMI. You might end up getting the worst of both worlds - Not a ton of PCIe, few cores and RAM - but loud, and still pretty power hungry.

These days though, there really isn’t any reason not to use TLS, it’s just so easy. Exactly. If someone can be bothered to do some minimal maintenance every few years you can assume the website is already compromised, outdated, or kinda shitty.

Yes but also expect to pay more. IIRC they will honor google’s pricing for the first year but afterward you more likely than not have to pay more. And you might lose some features you use.

NZ and USA are the only countries in the world to allow it.

No, a ton of others also allow it but there might be more more (or fewer) restrictions. But yes, advertising pharma products is pretty weird. Your doctor should proscribe your meds and you should not ask for something specific because an ad told you so. And many of those proscription free cold medicines are not really necessary or effective anyway.

Once you write ~400TB or whatever it’s rated for on a consumer SSD it dies.

Not really. Tests and my experience show this is just a pure warranty number. Meaning the manufacturer guarantees that the drive will do at least this many writes without failing and it reaching it also voids your warranty. However, you can usually expect 2x as many writes, although 10x and more is also not unheard of.

HDDs can take a lot more writes before dying.

They are actually often not rated for a ton of reads and writes. But once again this is more of a warranty thing and HDDs are usually unmetered so…

Keep in mind that this is a 3.0 enclosure. Fine for a JBOD setup but for any kind of RAID the throughput can severely limit your rebuild speed.

I highly doubt these systems are suitable for your needs. Dual socket servers are not great in terms of power efficiency and the 1u form factor means you cannot even use some of the benefits like the high number of PCIe lanes. On top of that consumer CPUs got a lot faster in recent years so even if you need a fair bit of CPU power (normally not necessary for a NAS) you are better off getting something more modern. Your best bet is to sell off the servers and get something more suited to your needs.

I think there are other factors at play. The community here is much smaller and the few people that are here are likely more dedicated and knowledgeable.

Just get an 18-22TB external drive. Cheap easy and can be reused once you outgrow it. Yes, a NAS is pretty cool but unless you need the uptime etc RAID can offer you are just better of getting a single, large drive.