Only if the old software happens to have drivers compatible with the new hardware, which it almost certainly doesn’t.

25% of millions of people is still many people, they didn’t say “a majority of people”.

You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been dd-ing /dev/random onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.

EDIT: I’ve now been doing 1.2GB/s onto an 8 drive RAID0 (8x 600GB 15k SAS Seagates) for over 10 minutes with no noticable slowdown. That comes out to 150MB/s per drive, and these drives are from 2014 or 2015. If you’re only getting 60MB/s on a modern non-SMR HDD, especially something as dense as an 18TB drive, you’ve either configured something wrong or your hardware is broken.

This is for very long sustained writes, like 40TiB at a time. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any slowdown, but I’ll keep a closer eye on it next time I do another huge copy. I’ve also never seen any kind of noticeable slowdown on my 4 8TB SATA WD golds, although they only get to about 150MB/s each.

EDIT: The effect would be obvious pretty fast at even moderate write speeds, I’ve never seen a drive with more than a GB of cache. My 16TB drives have 256MB, and the 8TB drives only 64MB of cache.

My 16TB ultrastars get upwards of 180MB/s sustained read and write, these will presumably be faster than that as the density is higher.

not sure what you’re on about, i have some cheap 500GB USB 3 drives from like 2016 lying around and even those can happily deal with sustained writes over 130MB/s.

I’ve spent the last year or so trying to get myself to not jump out of my pants every time I see one of these things. Then roughly a month ago, I get up at 2am to take a piss, and as I’m opening the door this little fucker falls down no more than 10cm away from my face, lands right on my foot and would have probably run up my pyjamas if I hadn’t managed to reflexively kick and launch it flying across the room. I think it must have been either sitting on top of the door or been trying to climb through the doorframe just as I opened it. Pretty sure I woke up everyone in the house, and probably the neighbors too.

Anyway, my phobia of these little shits is now 100 times worse than it was.

Paint.NET is the only Windows-only software I really miss. The closest replacement I’ve found is Pinta, but the interface is a lot clunkier and it hangs/breaks often.

It is the point, this is exactly what Broadcom does.

“Please insert your webcam.”

Yes