this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
216 points (99.5% liked)

Dull Men's Club

4204 readers
813 users here now

An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.

https://dullmensclub.com/

1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.

2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.

3. Avoid repetitive topics.

4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.

There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.

Some other communities to consider before posting:

5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.

6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.

7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.

.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I was too curious and broke the seal. Will actually try to use it, probably for the rare full /home backup every 2 or 3 years, since it needs external power and is probably not that fast. I'd date this artifact late 2000s? It might have USB 2, making it fast enough.

Weird though that I'd buy this and forget about it forever. It definitely cost enough to matter to me back then.

all 47 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

My personal experience with hard drives that have been sitting around for a long time and then pushed back into regular use is that they'll work for a bit then suddenly just quit.

So I wouldn't trust it for anything important, like being your only backup. As an additional backup (you can never have too many backups) it'll be fine.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 68 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Was wondering what the hell 750 GO is, until I noticed the rest of it was in French.

Obviously it stands for GigaOuis.

[–] HairyHarry@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Just in case you weren't kidding: Octetes

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 1 points 3 hours ago

Just octets

[–] kubica@fedia.io 33 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't bother, we've made our decision.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago

It has been written.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 23 hours ago (1 children)
[–] BlackVenom@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago

That's data rate unit not a unit of data. You're thinking of GigaOhHoHo.

[–] synapse1278@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

"Giga-Octets", pronounced Jigga-Oktey.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Indeed my jigga

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 11 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

750 GB isn't nothing. Even if slow just do the old school thing and go get something to drink while you back up. You could also crack it open and put it in a modern enclosure.

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 4 points 14 hours ago

This is the way. Just recently found a bunch of even smaller disks and still put them in my Frankenstein server, bundled together with mergerfs.

[–] T00l_shed@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

Bingo, crack it and give it a faster bus

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 17 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Crazy that we have microsd cards bigger, faster, and probably cheaper and more durable than this.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 13 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I always question the durable bit.

I’ve never had good luck with cards. I’ll always be suspicious of them. 😔

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah they’re definitely not the greatest on that front, but if you subjected an ancient hard drive to what a microsd card gets subjected to I’m sure the card would come out on top

[–] HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Yes the microSD card would better survive a hammer. But that drive if kept properly will outlast the microSD

Plus, if something happens to the hard drive you can still (at prohibitively high cost) recover the data. SD card not so much.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 3 points 21 hours ago

I meant more just being moved around while in use, but yeah

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

i found one last winter, new in box. a couple quick web searches for specs told me it was an early model 2tb cmr inside and that it could be taken out and used like a normal internal drive. cool. can always use those.

shuck it, get it hooked up, was all ready to go.... fails smart diagnostics.

[–] HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Old enough it's most likely a regular drive inside the shell, crack that slut open and harvest it. Going to be far more useful with proper sata hookups.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 6 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Don't you think it might have IDE? In any case, I use almost only SSDs internally, HDDs externally for backups.

[–] LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Nah, not in the era of USB 2.0. IDE was considered legacy at that point.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I don't think I even saw a hdd over 120gb with IDE. Last IDE drive I had was 60gb. This thing is for sure sata

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I remember seeing IDE drives all the way up to 1TB. Anything over 80GB was pretty uncommon though.

I had some 320GB IDE drives in my nForce2 chipset Socket A system, which thanks to the southbridge used on the motherboard, I had USB2.0 but no SATA support.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

You could have gotten a sata enclosure and had faster speeds over USB 2.0 lol but if I remember correctly, back then the first released sata enclosures were like $100.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

USB2.0 is considerably slower than an internal IDE drive. USB 2.0 is 480 megabit/s, and the final generation ATA 133 spec is 133 megabyte/s, which is around 1065 megabit/s, so over twice as fast. Ditto for things like latency. While the hard drives of the time physically couldn't saturate a PATA connection, the difference in speed was still easily noticed.

At the time, if you wanted a fast external drive you used Firewire, which I actually did. I had several drives that were Firewire 800 but also included USB2.0 to connect to computers that lacked Firewire. I don't recall if any of my motherboards that have Firewire built in can boot off of it but I kind of doubt it.

Later we had eSata for a brief period of time. I still miss it as it's not as fast as USB3.0 which is the only option even today on many new external drives.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Theoretically yes, but most sata drives were faster than ide drives. So it ends up being a wash really...USB 2.0 being the bottle neck and ide drive speed and it not being able to completely hit ATA133s transfer rate really. I still bet that while on paper the IDE looks faster, it'll be slower in real world.

[–] dai@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I have some 500gb IDE drives (maybe 320? its been a while) kicking around in some original xboxes in the shed. A few have 2tb sata installed with adaptors.

I too have some vague memories shucking 1tb IDE drives and installing those in customers xbox too but that's from 20+ years ago now 😶‍🌫️

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Holy crap, I didn't realize they kept making the drives large after sata came out. I jumped on that tech real quick once it showed up. IDE was such a pain in the ass for air flow and well making the PC look clean. I remember some people cutting the ide cable so you could roll them into a sleeve vs having a fat ribbon cable.

[–] HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 17 hours ago

Slim chance but I'd atleast crack it open and find out, and if you don't want to use it internally perhaps just a new case for it to utilize usb 3 or c. Normally I'd say preserve the whole thing but with drive prices I'd take the drive and use the case as an ashtray.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Or, conversely use the powered shell on a bigger drive (assuming it’s not IDE.)

[–] HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

With USB 2.0 idk if that's even worth it.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 points 37 minutes ago

When you need it, its worth it. When you don’t, it still might be.

[–] T00l_shed@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

Ide with 750 gigs though?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 12 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Weird though that I’d buy this and forget about it forever. It definitely cost enough to matter to me

I feel personally attacked.

[–] Edges@lemmy.zip 3 points 22 hours ago

A microSD? Bigger than 750gb? No way there is no way they are that big now...wow. I still remember being awestruck at a 32gb USB drive.

[–] the_tab_key@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

... Now I need to remember to snap a pic of my 56k modern still sealed in the plastic.

[–] b34k@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

How do they expect me to get 750,000 photos on a 750GB drive? Those things are like 35MB a piece! I’d need like a 28TB to store that much! What an inaccurate marketing blurb on the box…

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I had a EUR 99 digital camera back then which could fit about 15 photos at mediocre resolution. 1600x1200 used about 0.5 MB. I would think that many consumer devices took higher resolution photos in the late 2000s already, though.

[–] b34k@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

Yeah I think the issue is less resolution and is more that their estimated photo size (1 MB) corresponds with a JPEG… If I’m backing up photos to a big disk, I’m going to be backing up the RAWs, (and maybe a sidecar file for edits) which are significantly larger.

[–] gedfromgont@piefed.ca 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I gotta ask, whats the capacity? The box doesn't mention it or is that 750 GB? If so thats not too bad for an additional backup drive.

[–] wulrus@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

750 GB. That visible side advertises as "750,000 pictures" or something, but the other side clarifies that it's 750 GB.

[–] FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It says 750Go for some reason and also 1150 CDs so assuming it they calculated 1CD with 750MB its around 850gb. So I think its 1TB ?

[–] Link@rentadrunk.org 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It’s 750GB. GO is the French unit for GB.

[–] FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago

Ohhh learned something new thanks :)

[–] FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

Lass mich raten, ordentlicher Dienst?