I’ll start. Did you know you can run a headless version of JD2 on a raspberry pi? It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but sometimes its nice to throw a bunch of links in there and go to sleep.
Did you know the contacts to the head, preamp and the motor on regular spinning disks are not soldered nowadays? That’s right, after some clever PLM engineering, companies decided NOT to do this. Why? It shortens the life span of the disk, thus, your disks die and you go and buy new ones.
Mitigation of this problem: Remove the controller board from the drive and solder (add solder) to all of the contacts that connect to something to the aluminium chassis of the disk.
Try what? Add some pointless solder to a disk and then what? Wait years to see how long it takes to die? How many do I need for a sample size? Do I need to test the same model? What about workloads the drives should be under?
This is pure untestable unverifiable snake oil.
DON’T DO THIS, at best it’ll do nothing and at worst (muuch more likely) you’ll short and kill your HDD.
The whole point of contacts is that they aren’t soldered, the transmit current by physical contact. There’s a matching pair on the HDD chassis:
They’re not soldered, as in soldered to pins on the aluminium chassis. Look at the image I posted, have I soldered anything from that board to the aluminium chassis? No. The’re solder cushions to act as pillows for the metal head/preamp pins, which leads to having wider contact surface and no oxidation, which in turn leads to better conductivity, no head fly-bys and no head crashes when the head looses contact with the control board.
BTW, they used to make them with solder cushions, but stopped after a while, cuz those disks could go through hell and back. Remove the boards from some old early 2000’s drives, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
The contacts are gold, which definitely doesn’t oxidize any more than solder considering it, y’know, doesn’t oxidize in air at all ever. The solder doesn’t really add any contact surface area, and even if it did, it makes no difference for digital signals. “Better conductivity” doesn’t improve digital sigs either. And why would the contacts ever disconnect?
I can’t confirm the last paragraph, but HDD manufacturers could just move the PCB closer to the chassis and/or make the contacts’ springs a bit stiffer to achieve the exact same thing, which is slightly more pressure between the contacts. That’s literally all you’re getting here.
Gold does not oxidize in atmosphere. You are spouting nonsense you do not understand.
Nothing would surprise me these days after seeing a Skyrim mod with an AI companion you can talk to.
