An LS-120 mechanism (see "SuperDisk"), being designed for much higher density, can sometimes read the data.

Unobtainium.

There's several listings on eBay. The listings for laptops are in a range I'd consider...

The tricky bit is usually there's a proprietary connector for the specific laptop, but I recall taking a laptop cd drive for another project and it was basically a drive with standard 44 pin mobile ide connector plus a little board to go to the proprietary connector wrapped in a line specific case. I'd guess the ls-120 drives are the same deal.

Back in the day when I had an ls-120 drive, it was much superior to a regular floppy drive for reading floppy disks. So I'd definitely try to get that going as a first step.

Canned fish are tiny now compared to 5 years ago. They shrank to bait size.

I don't think they're any smaller now than they were before. You may be comparing different species of fish that are all called "sardines".

Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product.

Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.

I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.

That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.

Consumer NASes should take advantage of physical presence. There should be better functionality for a user that is standing next to the thing.

This is one place I think the 00s did a disservice to security.

It should have been apparent to anyone by that time that "someone malicious physically standing next to the box" is an order of magnitude rarer security risk than "someone connecting from a network" and aligned UX to that.