Month: March 2024

MicroSD speed comparison – genuine cards and a Chinese fake (WHL #96)

Since I don’t want to become the BigClive of the text blogging world, I pretty much have to stop rambling about fake flash drives (NVMe, SATA SSD, USB drives and SD cards) from China. Clive himself knows that too much ozone content makes his audience yawn ;)

So, as Easter (read: the couple holidays around it) is a great opportunity to run some backups and digitally clean up the place, here’s a quick speed test comparison on the history of MicroSD cards. It all started with my troublesome RPi4 having high iostat values all the time, leading to a new card for my laptop backup drive, which in return handed down his MicroSD to the Pi. […]


Brand New Portable SSD 1TB 2TB External Hard Drive Type-C USB 3.0 High-Speed External Storage Hard Disks For Laptops/Desktop/Mac (WHL #95)

AliExpress and their stupid game rules finally made me (inadvertently) buy* something that I heard about at least 13 years ago…a full-sized USB hard disk that only houses a tiny USB stick!

*Ackchyually, that is not quite correct. Like with the NVMe drive of WHL #92 that took me a long time to get refunded (and it only happened via PayPal, since AE to this day strongly believes in returns to fake warehouses in Afghanistan), this one also ended in a dispute and now I get to return it in exchange for a full refund. This time, though, to a warehouse in Germany, so I unfortunately cannot keep it, but now that I know how to find these…

But first things first, this is the fake USB drive that I remember seeing all over the interwebs:

Funny back then, but it probably consisted of a fully working USB drive, just a very small one compared to the expected HDD. […]


The Ender 5 PlusPlus and some toasty PETG (#E21F5)

Time flies…

Six months and I think 3 spools of matte PLA later, the Ender 5 Plus is now pretty close to shape I want it to be. There’s a fully custom panelized and gridded bottom section now that carries all electronics above and the 230V input below the 80×40/40×40 extrusion layer. There’s an optimized holder system around (left, right, back) for the 60cm LED panels. There’s stiffening triangles on every corner now, except for the front top extrusion that is moved down a couple centimeters so the bed/nozzle is visible during setup. […]