2026-09-16T00:00:00Z https://closet-lab.pages.dev/ Vinny 2026-09-16T00:00:00Z https://closet-lab.pages.dev/posts/2026-09-16-smart/ <p><code>smartctl</code> reports <code>Raw_Read_Error_Rate</code> of 218,766,136 on a four-day-old drive. That looks like a disk about to die. It is not, and working out why taught me how to read a SMART table properly.</p> <h2 id="the-column-everyone-reads-is-the-wrong-one" tabindex="-1">The column everyone reads is the wrong one</h2> <h2 id="pre-fail-versus-old-age" tabindex="-1">Pre-fail versus old-age</h2> 2026-09-09T00:00:00Z https://closet-lab.pages.dev/posts/2026-09-09-hello/ <p>There is a computer in the closet. It runs all the time, it has a name and a static address, and it does about a dozen jobs I rely on every day. I built it — sort of. Mostly I described what I wanted and typed what came back.</p> <h2 id="what-is-actually-in-there" tabindex="-1">What is actually in there</h2> <p>An i5-12400 with 32 GB of RAM, a 2 TB NVMe, a 26 TB drive for media, and a GPU that does the transcoding. It runs Plex, a Discord bot, a Minecraft server and five separate ingestors, and until recently I could not have told you what most of them did.</p> <h2 id="why-write-it-down" tabindex="-1">Why write it down</h2> <p>Because &quot;ask the assistant again&quot; is not a plan when the assistant is what got me here. The plan is to take it apart one layer at a time — power first, then boot, then the operating system — and write down what I find in the words I would have needed a year ago.</p>