Amazingly niallbest.com has been online for 10 years as of today! While it doesn’t feel like such a huge achievement I’ll recognise it with this posting and a breif history review of top postings.
17th June 2010
The day it was live, my first post. Although that first Hello World was brief it lead to some better than expected and continually helpful posts.
With only 42 posts over the 10 years it’s hardly been prolific, but these articles below seem to have been the most popular yet.
3rd (joint)
https://niallbest.com/review-of-synology-ds1812-in-real-life/
https://niallbest.com/future-nas-favourite-western-digital-red-hard-disks/
With both 27 comments each it is only fitting that the review of my home NAS (Synology DS1812) and the subsequently fitted disks (Western Digital Red) share 3rd place
2nd
https://niallbest.com/dell-2950-strike-the-f1-key-to-continue/
Dell 2950 servers, remember those! Back when you cared for your hardware rather than renting a drone machine someplace. They had a really odd BIOS issue that seemingly affected a fair few of us to rack up 50 comments
1st
https://niallbest.com/seagate-2tb-st32000542as-cc35-firmware-upgrade/
My most helpful article by a long way is the Seagate 2TB CC35 Firmware upgrade issue. What a nightmare everyone had with this! The core of the post was some arcane command line parameters to force the new firmware onto your disk. Thankfully it was data safe.
I did not personally discover the line needed to make it work, I found the line of code as a well burred reply to an offshoot on a threaded discussion board about the reliability of the Seagate disks.
I put together a step process and finally had a purpose for my blog; to write down something I considered useful that might help another.
Given my blog runs from some modest shared hardware, the mini Slashdot effect I suffered as my blog got linked to from all sorts of hardware forums was interesting at times. Getting my bandwidth limits extended only to have them re-extended immediately was fun for a while!
127 comments later, some as recently as 2020 it’s good to know I could assist people in saving what Seagate eventually managed to make a reasonable disk.
I suspect that posts like that are now the exclusive of a Stackoverflow site, but I’ll continue to post articles that have helped me along and might help others too.
Thanks for 10 years of posting. I came across your article on making Hyper-V work with Wifi.
Appreciate the time taken to write an article. Many of us wish could, but never have the patience, time or dedicate to even get to article #1.
BTW the year is 2022 – We have yet to be directly contacted by aliens.