Loud Mean Well LRS-350-24 fan

Recently I bought a Mean Well LRS-350-24 AC/DC power supply to drive a decent length of LED strips. It turns out the fan in this power supply is kind of loud - it has only kicked in twice but both occasions I was astonished about the loudness of the fan. A quick Google showed that I'm not alone in this.

How to erase your SSD / HDD using hdparm

I recently had to ship some (used) drives back to the manufacturer. And even though I'm pretty sure the drives will be erased first thing and even though the drives were used in a RAID (actually SHR2) set with an encrypted volume and it would be hard, if not impossible, to recover anything from them without my help I'm still never too keen to keep my bits and bytes on drives that are out of my hands. Selling my laptop? Erase drive. Recycling an old workstation? Erase drive. Then use a hammer to whack a screwdriver through the drive or "drop" (rather: throw) the drive on the ground a few times. You never know where a drive ends up and in who's hands.

WD Red NAS drives use SMR and I'm not happy about it - understatement of the year

If you're into NAS drives then you may have heard that recently word got around that Western Digital's NAS drives, the WD Reds specifically, apparently use SMR - Shingled Magnetic Recording. There's been a lot of fuss about it and I'm not about to repeat it all so that's why I'll provide some links to other sources I came across myself. What this blogpost is about, though, is me documenting what happened after I contacted WD from a customer perspective. Your experience may vary, but what you're about to read is mine.