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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I tried this myself, but it’s hard for a few reasons:

    • Messaging actually takes more time (defeats some of the purpose)
    • No banking apps (inconvenient)
    • No proprietary 2FA (nonstarter for work reasons)
    • No “let me Google that real quick” moments (comparison shopping when in store, looking up a phone number for a restaurant, etc.).
    • Their cameras universally suck

    Some “dumb” phones still have a web browser and such, so you’re not completely out of luck, but it’s painful.







  • The first two died within 30 days, the second one took about 4 months I think. Not a huge sample size, but it kind of matches the typical hard drive failure bathtub curve.

    I just double checked, and mine were actually from a similar seller on Amazon - they all seem to be from the same supplier though - the warranty card and packaging are identical. So ymmv?

    Warranty was easy, I emailed the email address included in the warranty slip, gave details on order number + drive serial number, and they sent me a mailing slip within 1 business day. Print that out, put the drive back in the box it shipped with (I always save these), tape it up and drop it off for shipping. In my case, it was a refund of the purchase pretty much as soon as it was delivered to the seller.


  • I currently have 6x10TB of these drives running in a gluster array. I’ve had to return 2 so far, with a 3rd waiting to send in for warranty also (click of death for all three). That’s a higher failure rate than I’d like, but the process has been painless outside of the inconvenience of sending it in. All my media is replaceable, but I have redundancy and haven’t lost data (yet).

    Supporting hardware costs and power costs depending, you may find larger drive sizes to be a better investment in the long term. Namely, if you plan on seeing the drives through to their 5 year warranty, 18TB drives are pretty good value.

    For my hardware and power costs, this is the breakdown for cumulative $/TB (y axis) over years of service (x axis):