It sounds like you dont own the machine and are trying to get around your school or workplace’s network security. Don’t do that.

If you do own the machine, and don’t have admin credentials, you’re looking at a wipe and reinstall.

That’s definitely wrong. Its likely setup as RAID0 or JBOD

If you’re looking for data stability, look at how business does it. You can never guarantee reliability, so opt for redundancy instead.

Rather than just a single disk, Get 2 in RAID1 and replace a disk whenever it fails.

RAID sounds complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple to set up. Most modern motherboards have support for it nowadays, you just add the 2 new disks in the BIOS and it will pool them together.

I’m not aware of a self-hosted option, but Slack is pretty great as an office IM tool.

Email could also fit this case if you configure it the right way

So starting off, HDD lifetime is really difficult to gauge, but this drive is already ~2000 hours past the average expected life for an HDD.

I would expect it to fail sometime within the next 12 months.

Don’t store anything on there that you aren’t willing to lose.

You absolutely could do that. That’s actually how my network looks save for an access point

Your Internet might only be gigabit, but if you have devices within your network that need to communicate, like a NAS for example then having 2.5 or 10 Gbps could be attractive.

And while you’re making a wired network, if you ever do want WiFi in the future then you’re also going to need access points

This is highly dependent on your use case.

Do you want a decent plug and play consumer router and switch that you don’t need to finagle much or do you want something more enterprise grade?

Do you just want gigabit speeds for your LAN or do you want 2.5 or 10?

For a good consumer router with gigabit ports you’re looking at ~$200*. For something more enterprise with 2.5Gbps ports it’ll be closer to $800.

For a good PoE switch you’re looking at ~$150 at gigabit and ~$250 for 2.5Gbps. if you want a managed switch then that will also be closer to $300. Access points are similarly priced.

*Prices in CAD

It honestly depends on what the data means to you. Is it the show itself, or the specific files that are important to you?

Getting a higher quality version means having a higher quality version to revisit, which is better in terms of preservation.

If thats too much effort, you could just pick up an external DVD drive and keep it with the DVDs. That would be basically zero effort and still let you access the discs whenever you want.

Every step of the travel needs to be 2.5GbE or higher if you want to get the full speeds out of it. That includes the switch and anything else that is between the 2 devices

Id recommend a TEG-S380 assuming 8 ports is sufficient.

OPNSense is far more willing to add “experimental” features and as a result you get a firewall that has more features out of the box, but is less stable.

pfSense is very slow to add new functionality, but the platform is rock solid as a result.

It all comes down to what you want. Do you want to play around with an appliance that has all the knobs, but also some eccentricities, or do you want an appliance that may not have bleeding edge features, but is far less prone to error.

They’re always a gamble.

Sometimes you have another decade of life in them and sometimes they fail within a month. I wouldn’t bother unless I was getting an insanely good deal (like over 50% off retail) as I’m likely to replace it within the year.

I also wouldn’t trust them outside of a mirrored or pairity RAID just in case the data on that disk proves to be important

The blue slot is PCIe x16 and the black slot is PCIe x4

And you can install basically anything you want into them. This includes GPUs, network cards, sound cards, extra USB ports, or even a RAID controller if you want.

For a NAS, I would set it up like this:

2 disks: RAID1

4 disks: RAID5

More than 4 disks: RAID6

So if you wanted all the disks in one massive array, you should do RAID 6. But you could also split it up into 2x 4disk RAID 5s or some other combination. It all really depends on what you want, as there are tradeoffs with any setup.

With one massive RAID6 array, you’ll have 36 TB with a tolerance for 2 disk failures. The downside is that writes are slower, but I don’t think it’ll be noticeable if you’re just using it for file storage.

I would also like an answer to this.

My solution so far has been to just purchase full 1y certs and then it’s a problem that I only need to look at once a year