embix

Better yet: Fuck’em without breaking the contract.

I don’t want to build car hell yet again

this, so much

tunefind when I hear something I like while binge watching, and occasionally to see what others seem to enjoy these days (although that only matches in say 10-15% of the cases).

wekan

When atlassian acquired trello, I exported some of my boards to see if wekan could import them - to my surprise, it could (at least for the kinds of features I used).

And while you’re at it, could you bring some wine and cake to GeoCities?

wipe or fake SMART data

My guess would be that it's stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD's firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.

I haven't seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.

First thing to do is check SMART data to see if there are any fails. Then looking at usage hours, spin ups, pre-fails / old-age to get a general idea how worn the drive is and for how long you could make use of it depending on risk acceptance.

If there are already several clusters relocated and multiple spin up fails, I'd probably return the drive.

Apart from all the reliability stuff: I'd check the content of the drive (with a safe machine) - if it wasn't wiped you might want to notify the previous owner, so she can change her passwords or notify customers about the leak (in compliance to local regulations) etc. - even if you don't exploit that data, the merchants/dealers in the chain might already have.