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You wouldn't believe the amount of A/V equipment that is still controllable over a serial cable. It works over long distances under harsh condition, I guess, especially if you can do a 232 -> 422/485 -> 232 conversion. That differential serial runs over great distances.
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3-4 years ago, I ran into a need for hooking up some old RS-232 equipment to my PC. Problem was that I couldn't find the socket. Not here, not there. I finally dug out the handbook that came with the motherboard: It claimed that it had RS-232 support. I found the header on the motherboard, too, and and old bracket with a 9-pin socket that fit. So I did succeed.
Yet, I was truly surprised: The PC was more than two years old at the time. For more than two years, I never noticed that it didn't have an RS-232 socket. If you had asked me during that period, I would have answered "Of course I have an RS-232 socket!" When I discovered the truth, I made the obvious conclusion: RS-232 is dead. Maybe not for special purpose use (like the 8051 CPU, which is still used for special purposes - those two fall in the same category), but for ordinary home/office PCs, it is dead.
On the other hand: To me, CDs are not dead. I still buy music on CD. One of the record companies in Norway obtained the rights to a lot of old recordings, and released a new label called "Norwegian Album Classics", publishing a lot of old vinyl albums, never before available in a digital format. Half of the "Album Classics" I buy, I already have on vinyl, but the record was so worn out that when I digitized it myself, the sound quality was just terrible. Now I have lots of the music from my younger years in better quality than ever on a vinyl record.
For those saying "Why not use streaming services?": First, most of this music was never available on streaming services. Second: When I pick music from my own record collection, I do not reveal any information about my listening habits. Not using streaming services is one of my principles for protecting my privacy.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Do not forget to make an *.iso of that CD, this way you won't run in the same problem again (at least not with that software / drivers)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A long time ago, I wanted to download some software bad had thought I needed to burn it on a CD or DVD. My boss looked at me (he was a good boss, and still is) with that look and held up an 8GB USB drive. Enter the stupid zone.
Nevertheless, I have no lock on stupid, but I was the local consultant. I had no patience for wasting time, especially on stupid or IT. So, I had this collection of CD and DVD external drives in my drawer. You had to have the ejectables so the stupid small discs could be mounted. Years later, I have about 1/2 dozen of these things floating around.
I'm cleaning out my office - if you are interested, all you have to do is pay shipping 
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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I have one of those flying around. For ages after CDs stopped, I used to MP3 all the CDs I bought. Which sold a few portable hard drives back in the day
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I bought a USB CD drive for exactly that reason a couple of years ago; needed to load something ancient. More recently, I bought a USB 3 1/2" drive, too, for a similar reason.
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Someone came to me yesterday saying their Seagate drive wasn't working. I explained that the problem was right on the label: "Seagate" and that the safest thing is to take a hammer to the unit before throwing it in the bin and buying a western digital. He tried using it some more, and the whole system crashed. I hate being right.
That same day a dear friend of mine and I were on the phone and he got the windows error "Unable to enumerate objects in {folder}"
I told *him* his drive was bad. Ran CrystalDiskInfo on it and sure enough, SMART was critical.
A day or two before that a friend came to me reporting a BSOD in windows in their gpu driver. I told them a BSOD on a modern windows box like that points to a hardware issue. "But there are no lines on the screen or other artifacts". Me: "Doesn't matter. You overheated your GPU running AI messes on it because your thermals weren't set up properly from the factory (it was a laptop) and now you've cooked it." Poured over the event log, tried different driver versions, and even linux before he decided to call in his warranty.
On one hand, I've saved these people potentially hours of frustration and trouble.
On the other hand, after all that I'd be the last person I'd want to talk to about my computer, because I'd jinx it: "Your hardware is bad" 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I've had the same experience. Several years ago we bought an external RAID array populated with 4 Seagate hard drives. Over the next 1-½ years each of the Seagate drives failed and were replaced with Western Digital drives we had on hand. The RAID array ran with the WD drives until the array controller died.
We bought a new and larger version of the RAID array. Interestingly, it's populated with Western Digital drives  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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honey the codewitch wrote: the problem was right on the label: "Seagate"
Your mileage may vary. I have only Seagate in my NAS and two of them have over 50000 hours (5.75 years). I switched to Seagate from WD after a couple of bad experiences. Later on I found out that it goes by model: both companies have had "duds" at different moments. My advice is to search reviews by HDD model.
Mircea
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I tend to ask around, especially after I end up with multiple bad drives from a manufacturer, as I have Seagate.
I encourage you to as well. You'll find so many more horror stories when it comes to Seagate.
I mean, I haven't done any kind of study, so it's anecdotal, but it's enough that I won't use a Seagate, even if it's given to me.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, in my case the proof is in the pudding 
Mircea
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Don't get me wrong, I'm glad your experience has been better than mine.
But mine is such that I won't touch them.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Hmm.
I had (and still have, in boxes) 6 Seagate drives of exactly that model in a ZFS RAIDZ2 array. One started reporting errors so I replaced them all. They were all at about 34000 power on hours (nearly 4 years). Maybe I should have continued to use the other 5? 
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It's not surprising for a HDD to fail after 4 years. Average lifespan is 3 to 4, so yours was just OK. What I don't know is why you stopped using the other 5. HDDs and batteries always fail, it's just a fact of life. Having them in an array means your data is safe and you just replace the failed unit.
Edit: My post was not meant to say that Seagates are better than brands; just that they are not worse. As I said above, all drives will fail and I was just a bit lucky to have mine fail latter than usual.
Mircea
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I have had a similar experience with Seagate drives. went through a couple before I bailed on them. My only working Seagate SSD is external, not heavily used. Have Acer SSD, Helix SSD, Sandisk SSD. I have a draw full of old drives SATA USB, USB adapters, a portable USB 3.5 floppy disk drive,....
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I keep saying I try hard to leave my personal bias out of it, but I've personally experienced so many failures, and keep hearing the same from so many people, I can't come up with a better conclusion that Seagate drives are just disproportionately SO much worse, I've sworn them off even if they were half the price of any other competitor. I was even given a system with multiple Seagate drives in it that were either already dead, or proved to be unreliable.
I've said this before here in the lounge, right now, all the Seagate drives I've ever owned are dead - not a single exception. Of all the WD drives I own, there's maybe one or two if I start looking hard enough in the oldest pile; of all the drives I no longer use, it's not because they died, it's because they're now so small they're no longer worth using. In each case, on the day I decided to stop using a drive, it was still spinning and I could still read data off of it. I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but I have the pile of drives to prove it if someone wanted to pick them all up and start examining them one by one.
Seagate must have some good drives, otherwise how could they be so consistently bad, and yet the company remain in business. They must have some big, BIG government contracts that keeps them afloat. Which by itself isn't very reassuring, but that's another story...
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It could be that their commercial drives are reasonable.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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The consumer drives I see on Amazon are comparable in price/capacity with their competitors.
How different can "commercial" drives be? Are they so much more expensive to produce they couldn't compete (use those for the consumer market)? How do others manage, then?
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I don't know. I was just spitballing. I'm not even sure if they have a commercial line, though I remember back in the day their scsi drives used to cost a mint.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, WD has different "color" drives to identify their intended use...green/blue being consumer, then I know there's red, gold, black and I think I saw some purple. RAID, NAS, 24/7, whatever purposes. I never looked into the details.
For years now I just purchased their external drives (the "My Book" series), then take them out of the enclosure if that's not how I want to use them. A few years ago those had the green labels, but lately they've been blue.
So I only buy the "cheap" drives, yet they outlive the "equivalent" consumer Seagate drives...that's all I know and that's all I can say. My own observations speak for themselves so that's what I'm sticking with.
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cool, thanks!
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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In the '90s, IBM released its DeskStar series (aka DeathStar). Thinking that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM", I bought two for my computer. Both failed irrecoverably within months.
This was not an isolated incident (see the nickname above).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Cassandra - always right, never beleived 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I replaced it with a SATA SSD and spent the next couple of days rebuilding the data from backups. (there was some permanent data loss and a lesson learned) In short, consider me jaded...I'll never buy another Seagate drive.