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Disassembling an HP Ultrium 460 tape drive head

Two weeks after buying a used (and untested) device, and declaring it DOA, I went and found another SCSI drive, as at that point I had the proper HBA and cables. I was lucky enough to stumble upon ...

Buying a used tape drive: what you need to know

Tape drives are sexy I’ve been curious about tape drives since a few years, as I find somehow fascinating the apparently weird combo of magnetic tape from the analog era storing digital data wit...

Assessing hard drive healthiness through read speed

Introduction At home I have a bunch of hard drives scattered through a bunch of machines. Most of them are monitored through SMART, with weekly short SMART self-tests and monthly long SMART self-t...

Installing proprietary AMD Catalyst Driver under Fedora 22

Installing the proprietary ATI AMD Catalyst driver is a bit tricky under Fedora 22 because the currently available driver, identified as revision 15.5 on their website, but actually versioned 15.10...

How OCZ Vertex 2 and OCZ Petrol SSD successfully killed my data. Twice.

Short story of my Vertex 2’s short life Several months ago, I wanted to give a little speedup to my aging laptop. It also seemed a perfect time to give a first try to the SSDs everybody had been t...