r00ty

I think it had its uses in the past, specifically if it had the memory backup to prevent full array rebuilds and cached data loss on power failure.

Also at the height of raid controller use (I would say 90s and 2000s) there probably was some compute savings by shifting the work to a dedicated controller.

In modern day, completely agree.

I'm sure I've seen paid software that will detect and read data from several popular hardware controllers. Maybe there's something free that can do the same.

For the future, I'd say that with modern copy on write filesystems, so long as you don't mind the long rebuild on power failures, software raid is fine for most people.

I found this, which seems to be someone trying to do something similar with a drive array built with an Intel raid controller

https://blog.bramp.net/post/2021/09/12/recovering-a-raid-5-intel-storage-matrix-on-linux-without-the-hardware/

Note, they are using drive images, you should be too.

The OP made clear it was a controller failure or entire system (I read hardware here) failure. Which does complicate things somewhat.

When I made a new linux install I chose Arch. I think for me the reasoning is thus. While I have a LOT of experience with unborking server linux installs, with desktop it's just a pain to deal with. I previously used Manjaro which, while very easy to install, does obfuscate a lot of what happens behind the scenes. When it goes wrong, personally I found it harder to fix.

With Arch, beyond enough to give me a terminal and basic gnu tools, I've chosen what I install from then on. I think that means when things go wrong there's a much higher chance I'll know what it is and how to solve it.

Time will tell if this plan works out or not though :P

I mean, if they knew where you usually shop online, probably not. I generally get the popup when either:

1: Shopping somewhere for the first time
2: Certain businesses (presumably those that are more often targeted for fraud I guess?)

I bet if they tried to use a different delivery address (and the shop passed that on) it should (I think at least) trigger a security check.

In shops especially with contactless it's very unlikely to be stopped though. But I think the bank needs to eat the contactless losses if I remember right. I do recall there's a maximum number of contactless payments you can make in a given time before it forces chip and pin though.

Yeah, I was going to say. Not pension, but I put money into two different blended portfolios (I didn't choose the contents, just the two choices from a list). I started it in Feb 2021 and the overall gain has been over 35%. I have no idea what the pension fund put their money into there, but it seems like some bad choices.

OP should check the options they have.

I would very much agree here. I've (admittedly mostly server side) been using linux for around 30 years now. But I'm still dual booting on my desktop. There's just a few things that will still only work in Linux, and also if I break things I can go to windows if I need to do something "right now"

Dual boot gives you the option of, if you have the time trying to make something work in linux. But, if you don't have the time, just boot to windows and do it.

How I do things, is I have drives that are shared between both OS (I use btrfs since there is a windows driver and, so far (around 3 years) I've had no corruption problems. But you can share ntfs too and a boot drive for both. But, it's not a requirement.

Also yes, it is quite easy to break a linux install. It's not really because Linux is bad. It's just because you have so much choice in which drivers to use, which desktop environment (and even the components that make it up) that it's easy to accidentally select some combination that doesn't work and you end up with only a console to fix things from.

I like that the OP is choosing Mint. I've not used Mint, but from all I've seen it looks a real good option for someone starting into Linux from no experience.

/mnt/shared/Development or E:\Development depending on which operating system is running.

Not in home mainly because I use the same directory in windows and Linux.

Yeah, but that's just because "nobody wants to work"

I recently made a new linux install (to replace my constantly breaking, likely due to my own doing Manjaro install). I went with Cinnamon initially, but in order to try out Wayland, I moved to KDE plasma.

I'm on NVidia, with two different resolution screens. Which causes occasional problems. But overall it's fine.

That dystopian "future". It's the present, isn't it.

Yeah, I'm quite sure it's a deliberate activity to dissuade against private email servers. Keep everyone's email "in the club". Once you've got this much working you need a whole suite of tools to deal with the HUGE amount of spam you need to filter. It can be a hell of a lot.