circuitfarmer

Fallacious question. In real life there can be no good options. That doesn’t mean we should support one for being less bad.

Seems to be that way. I agree with your insinuation that “they aren’t trying to sell as many ads as Google and Facebook – yet”. I don’t see any special ethics beyond keeping their brand loyalty afloat.

Exactly. Not sure why it would be on me for refuting a statement.

Apple doesn’t rely on selling or advertising your data as a business segment.

That was a claim offered without evidence.

Hey there ya go! Providing a source for the argument you made first! Thanks.

So you don’t have a source either? ;)

Because Apple doesn’t rely on selling or advertising your data as a business segment.

I find this very hard to believe.

To my knowledge, that isn’t a consistent pattern (someone please correct if wrong).

Personally I have focused on fast SSD storage and utilized the vast, cheap, slow storage available with mechanical drives for backup.

At the end of the day, if an SSD fails, you’re effectively just screwed. If a mechanical drive fails, there is some possibility that the data is recoverable. But moreover, mechanical storage is so cheap by volume that you can just have redundant backup and never worry about it, really.

I investigated AV1 for a bit, which frankly does seem like the future because it can encode to significantly smaller file size vs. 264 and 265. I don’t have a hardware encoder for it (though they exist in the new Intel GPUs), and software encodes are relatively slow even on capable hardware (e.g. Ryzen 7000).

But it’s not worth it at all. The detriments of lossy to lossy + the sheer cost of time (and electricity) to make the change are not worth it. 2TB SSDs are cheaper than 1TB was a year ago, and 8TB mechanical drives for slow storage are even cheaper still. And it isn’t showing any signs of getting more expensive, nor should it.

Ugh. Constant corporate nickel and diming in every facet of life.

And before anyone comments “bUt thAt’s caPitaLism”, yes, we know. It sucks.

I pay about $80/mo and have a 1200 GB cap.

It used to be $50 a month with no cap. But “that plan is no longer available” in my area.

A single drive is always going to be a potential point of failure. Definitely make periodic backups to a different device if you don’t want to potentially lose everything on it without warning.

There are more complicated solutions available, such as a RAID array, but it sounds like you want to keep things relatively simple. In that case, I don’t think there will be a whole lot of difference between 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives – except that there are 3.5 inch drives designed for data center applications which may net you some extra reliability. You’d likely need to get such a drive and put it into your own external enclosure, though.

That said, there’s only so much you should expect to get out of a single drive connected via USB (relatively slower transfers, reliance on the bespoke external bay, potentially not getting warned if SMART status changes).