Has anyone had experience involving the police in matters like this?
I reached out to the German news source that first reported on this issue, but they couldn’t help. The writer of the article mentioned that "The dealer will probably hide behind the supplier."
Here's the response I received today from Böttcher AG, where I purchased the hard drives, after sending them the FARM logs and photos of the drives (translated from German):
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"Dear Sir or Madam,
Attached you will find the manufacturer's feedback regarding your complaint:
Please send the hard drives back. You will receive a credit immediately upon receipt.
We are currently unable to provide a statement, as we need to first examine the hard drive and the situation. Therefore, please ask the customer to hand over the hard drive to you.
You will promptly receive a refund of the purchase price and the shipping costs. As soon as we have a statement from our supplier, we will inform you immediately."
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Given this, I am wondering if anyone has dealt with a situation like this and whether it's worth involving the police to ensure compensation for the damages or if this process should be handled through other legal channels. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
I think in many countries you’d be better off reaching out to a consumer protection-specific agency or tribunal, making sure to cc the vendor or manufacturer. For instance, in the United States, you could contact the Federal Trade Commission or your state’s attorney general, or potentially file a case in small claims court if the matter isn’t quickly resolved.
You might get a better response from regulators if you wait until you do have issues getting a refund, but that probably also between jurisdictions. Good luck!
You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using
smartctl -l farm /dev/sd<n>
They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART stats.
(My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)
how are they "more trustworthy"? after all, it's data on a flash on the drive board.
is it lack of tooling, as demonstrated by needing the last smartmontools version to even read them, or some protection in the firmware to prevent resetting them (hey, no legit business resetting the power-on hours to zero...).
I checked the recertified ironwolf 12TB drives I bought, and both SMART and FARM report times in line with when I installed them in my nas. Of course, since they're recertified by seagate themselves, they may very well have a backdoor to reset FARM.
It's not wild for people who choose to use a stable distribution that last released prior to smartmontools 7.4. It's exactly what they want and choose.
(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)
But I don't see how to gain access to the whatever logs are buried in the drive's memory. The instructions for the utility don't provide any guidance on this. How does one actually extract logs from the drive?
Thanks for the suggestion. I wiped my orphaned 2014 iMac and installed Mint on it, so I guess I should be good to go. I just didn't want to go under my desk to unplug my toaster dock and move it unless necessary.
If you have an ARM Mac and a USB enclosure for the drive, I had some success with smartmontools running in ARM Linux under VmWare. I also tried UTM (pretty much QEMU), but UTM's USB passthrough was not good enough.
Interesting. Thanks for that. I have the drive hooked up to a Mint computer running the openSeaChest utility, but that utility appears to only parse the logs. I can't find any way to extract the logs from the drive's memory. This is undocumented by the utility as far as I can tell.
@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
Lethality of electricity is multi-dimensional, trying to reduce it to a single quantity does not really work (exposure time and electrical frequency are very important).
Sounds a bit like fuse wire (except the frequency dependence)... There's both a current and a time component. High overloads can be tolerated for a very short time without blowing the fuse, while low overloads can be sustained for longer before the fuse reaches its maximum temperature and breaks.
> You might think such a system would involve a thermostat, a microcontroller, and an actuator, but this design [...] has bimetallic arms with steel on the outer surface and copper on the inner surface. As the filament heats up, the arms warm up, causing the copper to expand faster than the steel. This expansion pushes the arms open, releasing the lighter. The coil spring then causes the handle to pop out, signaling that the lighter is ready.
Maybe I am in a picky mood, but for me the intro made it sound like all three items (thermostat, microcontroller, actuator) would not be necessary, though of course only the microprocessor is missing from the design (thermostat -> bimetallic arms, actuator -> spring).
Mandatory link to another marvel in the same problem space (I found the 19min video worth the time):
"An Antique Toaster That's Better Than Today’s [video]"
> "[...] When I fly a roll and hold a glass of water in my hand, not a drop falls out.”
I assumed this was hyperbole, but it seems possible [0], [1] - although they both seem to fly a barrel roll [2]. Would this be possible with just a roll in a fighter jet?
Even Newton knew that party trick. The centrifugal force has to at least equal gravity when the glass is upside down, so F/m=w^2r=g. If r (the distance from the axis of revolution is about a metre, then w (the angular velocity) is roughly sqrt(10)/second. In more familiar terms that's about 30 rpm. Anything rotating that fast will be able to keep all its water in the glass.
some roll rates I found (not very good sources, though): F/A-18E Super Hornet 120 deg/s [0], F-16 240 deg/s [0], Eurofighter 250 deg/s [0]. For the Starfighter I found up to 720 deg/s in some discussions, though I go with 360 deg/s [1].
Min. distance (r) from the glass of water to the roll axis to achieve 1g:
120 deg/s (20rpm): 245cm (you'd have to put that glass on the landing gear)
The classic example of this was Bob Hoover, who poured iced tea in his Rockwell Shrike Commander twin-engine propeller airplane while completing a barrel roll with both engines shut down (gliding).
Posted 3 days ago (12 points, 1 comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44339903