as a person who works in that industry pretty much. the only people buying singles are people who do it internally else its sold on bulk because the money gets split between the ecycler and the company who originally owns the product.

outside of having less processing to deal with per order, a company buying things in bulk is less critical about the condition of a product than an individual end user.

black friday died when it became a normie holiday for sales. part of the reason why black friday worked before hand was that buyers are 100% aware of the product theyre buying and how much it is valued. anythings a “sale” if you’re selling it to an audience that doesn’t know what it was normally priced.

to be fair, the drive in question is a NAS drive, which is not a backup drive by its intended default usecase, unless you slapped it in a nas thats stored as a cloud storage in an offsite location.

its just a matter of people understanding that data redundancy is not a backup, just a level of data safeguard, as it only partially covers some of the forms of data loss and not all of them (e.g not immune to physical methods of data loss like fires, floods and stuff)

if you have a garage, design a method to basically ensure your garage door is closed without you needing to go back to check.

of course if you trust yourself with never making that mistake.

last thing you want to feel is if you remembered to close the door or not and youre already far off

confidential cpus are typically engineering samples, usually given to motherboard companies to work on bioses for the cpu generation and meant to be returned to the company after done. engeering sample cpus can be missing features, lower clocks and such that the retail varient may have.

as for geneeation of cpu, its easier to find out via what motherboard socket it is

on thecontext of finding second hand, i wouldnt say its common, but can happen. some chinese companies sell dirt cheap ES cpus for basic computing.

the ilm says lga 115x, so its either 1156(1st gen), 1155(2nd or 3rd gen), 1150(4th and 5th gen) or 1151(6th to 8th gen)

pia is terrible for privacies for government (five eyes country host), but its a fine budget option for privacy against business (piracy).

its an okay vpn as long as you are fully aware on what youre paying for

its actually the sole reason why i ended up paying for plex myself. its not because on ME that i ended up using plex, its moreso everyone else that I want to give my server access to with the least amount of hurdles that made me ultimately go that route.

not liking something enough that you will on bias remove things. In this case, it was anime, but it could basically be applied to any viewpoints said admin would have then if they were that quick to react to just anime. It’s the action and how it was handled and less the topic.

im not doubting the possibility, but not to even provide evidence to the servers admins is a red flag on pushing the ml dev/admins agendas without being transparent about it.

without a level of transparency, the same reason can be used to unjustfully ban anything.

ani social was anime related, but the admins banned it because they dont really like anime and just tag reasons for censorship as loli, without evidence of it. I dont even actively contribute to the anime community, but was the driving reason why i moved from ml to zip. didnt want to have to deal with unsubstantial censorship with an actual valid reason.

i wouldnt say im an expert at it as ive only had my media server for a month now, but how i approached making it user friendly was buying a domain name, and using a cloudflare tunnel to link your ip addresses/port to a subdomain.domain combination.

e.g i have overseer accessible by overseerr.domainname.extention and have it linked to the servers ipadress and port number. if i wanted to add another one, i would for example add a new subdomain and do the same (e.g plex.domainname.extention and point it to the correct ip/port combo)

although this has the cost of owning a domain, it doesnt require you to open a port so its better for security reasons

buying tech products by brand allows brands to sell you a shitty product at premium price points. companies will always shit out bad eggs at times, and its your job to know which product line are bad and not let brand loyalty bypass that.

at the bare minimum, if you are buying by brand, buy it solely based on customer support, as some companies are significantly better at that than others, which is an objective trait.

its more so the convenience factor. this also doesnt consider the hard drive mounting mechanism that youd spend time on as well, which limits case choice. with an m.2 drive, the drive can be installed outside of the case trivially

sata would be used more for secondary storage or for systems setup as network attached storage. the nvme m. 2 formfactor for ssds is more convenient for users as its both smaller and does not require the user to wire 2 cables to use it.