Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 02:52:

I haven't had a reason to go Gen4\Gen5 NVMe yet, but I have to say that it has been SO nice since I moved to all solid state in […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-25, 23:12:

Bought a 8Tb Sabrent Rocket drive, 7100/6600 speeds, wouldn't normally buy a NVME this big but it for sure made a hell of a difference, just from a data access speed view it was worth it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I can justify the cost of getting one for my personal PC 😁

Gaming is a perfectly good reason for a fast huge NVME . .right. (Actually might get a 2Tb one for the PS5, its main drive is such a paltry size ...)

I haven't had a reason to go Gen4\Gen5 NVMe yet, but I have to say that it has been SO nice since I moved to all solid state in my personal system. I've had an SSD+HDD setup since 2010, but last year I moved to all solid state, and then at some point one of my drives started having errors (a known problem with a certain batch of Samsung 870 EVO drives) so I used that as an excuse to swap some drives around and ended up with a 1TB SK Hynix P31 for my OS + games and a 2TB refurbished Samsung 970 EVO Plus for data.

I never have my system freeze while it waits for a drive to spin up. Everything is just "there".

Now, all my hard drives are just being used as redundant backups. I loaded one up with absolutely everything and gave it to a relative for safe keeping, so even if the data isn't absolutely current, I have one good offsite + offline backup of 25 years worth of my computing history. Hard drives still have a use. 😁

Oh yeah, I still have a big NAS box with spinning rust for onsite backups and cloud storage for critical data backups that I cant afford to lose, the NAS box is even located in a building separate from the main house so even in the event the house burns the data will still stand a good chance of being just fine. The 8Tb NVME was simply to help speed up local work flow and I can happily say it was worth the crazy cost but its not something I could recommend for your average home user if you cant write off the outlay as a business expense. Its simply to expensive to be worth it if its not going to return that money in some fashion, I feel the same way about halo GPUs honestly, that 4090 aint worth it if its not paying for itself.

The only issue I have is a full backup of the NAS itself, there really isn't any practical method to backup that much data other than to setup a backup NAS that mirrors the main one...something I'm considering as spinning rust is so cheap, once its mirrored the main NAS I just move it off site till I need to refresh the backup.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 05:31:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 02:52:

I haven't had a reason to go Gen4\Gen5 NVMe yet, but I have to say that it has been SO nice since I moved to all solid state in […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-25, 23:12:

Bought a 8Tb Sabrent Rocket drive, 7100/6600 speeds, wouldn't normally buy a NVME this big but it for sure made a hell of a difference, just from a data access speed view it was worth it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I can justify the cost of getting one for my personal PC 😁

Gaming is a perfectly good reason for a fast huge NVME . .right. (Actually might get a 2Tb one for the PS5, its main drive is such a paltry size ...)

I haven't had a reason to go Gen4\Gen5 NVMe yet, but I have to say that it has been SO nice since I moved to all solid state in my personal system. I've had an SSD+HDD setup since 2010, but last year I moved to all solid state, and then at some point one of my drives started having errors (a known problem with a certain batch of Samsung 870 EVO drives) so I used that as an excuse to swap some drives around and ended up with a 1TB SK Hynix P31 for my OS + games and a 2TB refurbished Samsung 970 EVO Plus for data.

I never have my system freeze while it waits for a drive to spin up. Everything is just "there".

Now, all my hard drives are just being used as redundant backups. I loaded one up with absolutely everything and gave it to a relative for safe keeping, so even if the data isn't absolutely current, I have one good offsite + offline backup of 25 years worth of my computing history. Hard drives still have a use. 😁

Oh yeah, I still have a big NAS box with spinning rust for onsite backups and cloud storage for critical data backups that I cant afford to lose, the NAS box is even located in a building separate from the main house so even in the event the house burns the data will still stand a good chance of being just fine. The 8Tb NVME was simply to help speed up local work flow and I can happily say it was worth the crazy cost but its not something I could recommend for your average home user if you cant write off the outlay as a business expense. Its simply to expensive to be worth it if its not going to return that money in some fashion, I feel the same way about halo GPUs honestly, that 4090 aint worth it if its not paying for itself.

The only issue I have is a full backup of the NAS itself, there really isn't any practical method to backup that much data other than to setup a backup NAS that mirrors the main one...something I'm considering as spinning rust is so cheap, once its mirrored the main NAS I just move it off site till I need to refresh the backup.

You know, talking about all of this now has reminded me how I felt the last time I did a bunch of full backups after going all-SSD. I was like... "uhh... what's taking it so long... oh right... I'm copying to a hard drive." and I immediately checked on the prices of the cheapest 2TB TLC SSDs. 🤣

Once you've gotten used to ~500MB per second transfer rates, and then moved up to even Gen3 NVMe transfer rates... SATA hard drive transfer rates are noticeably low. I use an internal SATA dock\bay too, so I don't have to worry about USB bottlenecks or quirks.

SATA SSD prices are not quite to the point that I feel I need to have SSDs for my regular backups, but maybe in a couple years. Doing backups in one third of the time is mighty tempting.

If a good method existed to hook up NVMe drives externally without USB, I would skip right to that. 🤤 As soon as someone puts out an affordable and reliable external m.2 NVMe dock I will probably get one. Imagine copying 1TB of data to an external drive in a matter of minutes. @_@

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 07:31:

You know, talking about all of this now has reminded me how I felt the last time I did a bunch of full backups after going all-S […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 05:31:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 02:52:

I haven't had a reason to go Gen4\Gen5 NVMe yet, but I have to say that it has been SO nice since I moved to all solid state in my personal system. I've had an SSD+HDD setup since 2010, but last year I moved to all solid state, and then at some point one of my drives started having errors (a known problem with a certain batch of Samsung 870 EVO drives) so I used that as an excuse to swap some drives around and ended up with a 1TB SK Hynix P31 for my OS + games and a 2TB refurbished Samsung 970 EVO Plus for data.

I never have my system freeze while it waits for a drive to spin up. Everything is just "there".

Now, all my hard drives are just being used as redundant backups. I loaded one up with absolutely everything and gave it to a relative for safe keeping, so even if the data isn't absolutely current, I have one good offsite + offline backup of 25 years worth of my computing history. Hard drives still have a use. 😁

Oh yeah, I still have a big NAS box with spinning rust for onsite backups and cloud storage for critical data backups that I cant afford to lose, the NAS box is even located in a building separate from the main house so even in the event the house burns the data will still stand a good chance of being just fine. The 8Tb NVME was simply to help speed up local work flow and I can happily say it was worth the crazy cost but its not something I could recommend for your average home user if you cant write off the outlay as a business expense. Its simply to expensive to be worth it if its not going to return that money in some fashion, I feel the same way about halo GPUs honestly, that 4090 aint worth it if its not paying for itself.

The only issue I have is a full backup of the NAS itself, there really isn't any practical method to backup that much data other than to setup a backup NAS that mirrors the main one...something I'm considering as spinning rust is so cheap, once its mirrored the main NAS I just move it off site till I need to refresh the backup.

You know, talking about all of this now has reminded me how I felt the last time I did a bunch of full backups after going all-SSD. I was like... "uhh... what's taking it so long... oh right... I'm copying to a hard drive." and I immediately checked on the prices of the cheapest 2TB TLC SSDs. 🤣

Once you've gotten used to ~500MB per second transfer rates, and then moved up to even Gen3 NVMe transfer rates... SATA hard drive transfer rates are noticeably low. I use an internal SATA dock\bay too, so I don't have to worry about USB bottlenecks or quirks.

SATA SSD prices are not quite to the point that I feel I need to have SSDs for my regular backups, but maybe in a couple years. Doing backups in one third of the time is mighty tempting.

If a good method existed to hook up NVMe drives externally without USB, I would skip right to that. 🤤 As soon as someone puts out an affordable and reliable external m.2 NVMe dock I will probably get one. Imagine copying 1TB of data to an external drive in a matter of minutes. @_@

SSDs will never likely reach the same level of mass storage as spinning rust does, I cant ever see the cost to make the Nand being as cheap as glass platters are, there is also the fact that unless you use specialized Nand SSDs can only retain data with high integrity for a decade* or so before they start suffering bit loss due to cell discharge. These two details alone make me believe that spinning rust will never go away as a long term reliable storage format, even more so with the new recording methods coming out that make 50Tb+ drives possible.

So as much as I want 16Tb SSD drives in my NAS ...I know that will never happen at any kind of reasonable price 🤣.

A dock though .. that does sound really nice but you know what sounds just as nice ...the new HDD standard that runs via NVME and allows newer HDDs to utilize the NVME bus. IIRC I read somewhere they wanted to move both SSDs and HDDs to a unified bus that is essentially NVME based, I cant see any reason why HDDs need to be limited to Sata bus speeds, spinning rust shouldnt have any issue running at much higher transfer speeds than it does currently.

I could be wrong here but im almost 100% sure they have plans for this.

*There are so many factors affecting this but Nand makes for a pretty terrible form of long term storage, same applies to optical media which can degrade even faster unless kept in controlled storage conditions.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 07:43:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 07:31:

You know, talking about all of this now has reminded me how I felt the last time I did a bunch of full backups after going all-S […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 05:31:

Oh yeah, I still have a big NAS box with spinning rust for onsite backups and cloud storage for critical data backups that I cant afford to lose, the NAS box is even located in a building separate from the main house so even in the event the house burns the data will still stand a good chance of being just fine. The 8Tb NVME was simply to help speed up local work flow and I can happily say it was worth the crazy cost but its not something I could recommend for your average home user if you cant write off the outlay as a business expense. Its simply to expensive to be worth it if its not going to return that money in some fashion, I feel the same way about halo GPUs honestly, that 4090 aint worth it if its not paying for itself.

The only issue I have is a full backup of the NAS itself, there really isn't any practical method to backup that much data other than to setup a backup NAS that mirrors the main one...something I'm considering as spinning rust is so cheap, once its mirrored the main NAS I just move it off site till I need to refresh the backup.

You know, talking about all of this now has reminded me how I felt the last time I did a bunch of full backups after going all-SSD. I was like... "uhh... what's taking it so long... oh right... I'm copying to a hard drive." and I immediately checked on the prices of the cheapest 2TB TLC SSDs. 🤣

Once you've gotten used to ~500MB per second transfer rates, and then moved up to even Gen3 NVMe transfer rates... SATA hard drive transfer rates are noticeably low. I use an internal SATA dock\bay too, so I don't have to worry about USB bottlenecks or quirks.

SATA SSD prices are not quite to the point that I feel I need to have SSDs for my regular backups, but maybe in a couple years. Doing backups in one third of the time is mighty tempting.

If a good method existed to hook up NVMe drives externally without USB, I would skip right to that. 🤤 As soon as someone puts out an affordable and reliable external m.2 NVMe dock I will probably get one. Imagine copying 1TB of data to an external drive in a matter of minutes. @_@

SSDs will never likely reach the same level of mass storage as spinning rust does, I cant ever see the cost to make the Nand being as cheap as glass platters are, there is also the fact that unless you use specialized Nand SSDs can only retain data with high integrity for a decade or so before they start suffering bit loss due to cell discharge. These two details alone make me believe that spinning rust will never go away as a long term reliable storage format, even more so with the new recording methods coming out that make 50Tb+ drives possible.

So as much as I want 16Tb SSD drives in ym NAS ...I know that will never happen at any kind of reasonable price 🤣.

I agree that spinning magnetic disks will always have a place for archival and mass storage... but for enthusiasts that can easily get by with only a few TB of space, I think that normal short\mid term backups will easily be moving to SSDs in the next 4-5 years. I only have about 1.6TB of my ~2.7TB in my main system used, and I do a ton of stuff with this thing. I don't really play any of latest AAA games, so that has a rather large impact on my storage "needs", but I could see 4TB being plenty for most enthusiasts that don't download\horde movies and TV shows over the next few years. If 2TB drives are already hanging around $100-$130 on sale, that's a great start.

Now, affordable 16TB SSDs? Yeah, it's unlikely that we'll see those any time soon, but these things can move surprisingly fast if there ends up being demand for them. 13 years ago I spent $150 on a "cutting edge" 64GB Crucial C300 SSD (the first SATA III 6gb/sec drive I believe). Now I can buy a near top of the line 2TB SK Hynix P41 Platinum for just a hair more than that on sale. That's a 32x increase in capacity for the money. Things have leveled off since then, for sure, but you never know... we could have 8TB high end SSDs for $150 within the next 5-10 years.

Actually... I just googled it and found this nifty chart. Lets keep a copy here and see how accurate it ends up being. 😁

(Though... honestly, their historical numbers seem way off. I have had a 1TB MX500 for several years and I don't believe I spent anywhere near what their chart says.)

With how things are heading in the world you might have to put that affordable Nand dream on hold, right now I can only see tech hardware getting more expensive. The supply shortages are still hitting tech hard and the instability in the world right now isn't helping much.

But if they can pull their heads of out their asses and stop being dicks to each other perhaps we can get the dream back on track !.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 08:12:

With how things are heading in the world you might have to put that affordable Nand dream on hold, right now I can only see tech hardware getting more expensive. The supply shortages are still hitting tech hard and the instability in the world right now isn't helping much.

Of course. In terms of just technological progression, it will happen... but as you said, the world is changing and not for the better, so all bets are off.

... I'm going to go make another backup. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-02-26, 08:19:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-26, 08:12:

With how things are heading in the world you might have to put that affordable Nand dream on hold, right now I can only see tech hardware getting more expensive. The supply shortages are still hitting tech hard and the instability in the world right now isn't helping much.

Of course. In terms of just technological progression, it will happen... but as you said, the world is changing and not for the better, so all bets are off.

... I'm going to go make another backup. 😮

They don't want your data .. they already have it. 🤣

IDK how modern or retro a part this will end up playing, but couldn't resist picking up a backup backup spare PSU when it was ~$10 USD at a thrift, Corsair CX500 .. doesn't seem toooooo weak on 3.3 and 5v really for P3, early AXP, but alright single 12V grunt too for moderner things. Clean inside, no bulgies, don't smell burnt.

Corsair, sayyyy it can run on 90-264V, auto, so pondering whether I might actually give it a good test then build it into the TV snarfer, since then it might keep going through "brown power" which is a reduced supply that happens when some of the grid or generating capacity has a problem. Though I should also look up if anything else I've got says it goes as low as 90 too.

I also bought a big SSD. It's a 4TB Crucial X8 external drive.

Unfortunately, I just learned that the USB C port on my desktop is only 5Gbps. I thought it was 10Gbps, but this is the first 10Gbps capable device I've ever had. On 5Gbps USB, it's actually slightly slower than one of my flash drives (a 128GB Transcend JetFlash 910 - yeah, I blow my money on fast storage and lots of RAM). I guess I could try to see if my motherboard can handle a USB card since I've had expansion card compatibility problems with this motherboard (Gigabyte H370 HD3) and the PCIe slots have an abnormally low insertion cycle count before they become loose (they're "unlocked ZIF socket" loose on the third card insertion).

Ick that's bad, those slots... I'd probably be trying to fluff them up with a dental pick or something.

A thought to have one for testing, use a "mining riser" on it, then you keep the bottom end plugged and wear out the extension end ???

Bought a MSI X370 Gaming PRO board, sold as dead.
Ok, I wanted to use it to repair the same board I got in another deal.

Discovered that board n.1 had a dead mosfet, but it was only when removing it that I discovered it had fused with deeper layers and other mosfets were dead as well. I abandoned the idea of repairing it.
Board n.2 had a tampered socket, blown ASM1480 and a corrupted BIOS. Won't power on with a cpu on, but will issue a missing CPU error with lit LED (red light 😀) without.
I desoldered and reflashed the BIOS; desoldered the dead ASM1480. I'll buy an Athlon 950 as I don't want to risk the only other AM4 cpu I have, a R5 2600.

Tha AMS1480 is a multiplexer, used for PCIe. I think that the dead ones short the cpu when connected and will prevent the power on. I had that before with other dead components.
It'll take some time before finding out if I have 2 dead boards.

Repairs are a "win some, lose some" business. Not distressed, hope I'm right 😀

Bought a Ryzen 7 5700x CPU to replace my 2600x. I often buy used, but this one was new.

It was 200 EUR, which I find quite expensive, but it came with a code for Company of Heroes 3, a game I wanted to buy anyhow (big fan of CoH), worth 60 EUR. I then sold my old CPU for 40 EUR, since I had no other AM4 system. So I pretty much got a new CPU for 100 EUR 😀

Hezus wrote on 2023-03-03, 07:47:

Bought a Ryzen 7 5700x CPU to replace my 2600x. I often buy used, but this one was new.

It was 200 EUR, which I find quite expensive, but it came with a code for Company of Heroes 3, a game I wanted to buy anyhow (big fan of CoH), worth 60 EUR. I then sold my old CPU for 40 EUR, since I had no other AM4 system. So I pretty much got a new CPU for 100 EUR 😀

Just curious - how much of a real world effect, and any other benefits, did this new CPU make, in games ?
I am considering a similar swap, but not sure it would matter much, for slightly older games at least (2017 and back).
Currently having a X470 mobo + 2700X Ryzen.

bestemor wrote on 2023-03-03, 15:46:

Just curious - how much of a real world effect, and any other benefits, did this new CPU make, in games ? I am considering a s […]
Show full quote

Hezus wrote on 2023-03-03, 07:47:

Bought a Ryzen 7 5700x CPU to replace my 2600x. I often buy used, but this one was new.

It was 200 EUR, which I find quite expensive, but it came with a code for Company of Heroes 3, a game I wanted to buy anyhow (big fan of CoH), worth 60 EUR. I then sold my old CPU for 40 EUR, since I had no other AM4 system. So I pretty much got a new CPU for 100 EUR 😀

Just curious - how much of a real world effect, and any other benefits, did this new CPU make, in games ?
I am considering a similar swap, but not sure it would matter much, for slightly older games at least (2017 and back).
Currently having a X470 mobo + 2700X Ryzen.

2700x surely is enough for older games, and even new ones tbh. You already have 8 cores (my 2600x had 6), so you're ahead of what most games and applications demand.

I haven't done any testing with games before and after the swap. In day to day stuff I feel that the 5700x is slightly faster but it's not a huge difference. I mostly feel the extra speed in more demanding tasks. The compile times for my Half-Life maps have gone down considerably, for instance. Probably due to those extra cores doing the lifting but probably also the higher overall boost speed.

If I had to spend the full 200 EUR for this I probably wouldn't have done so. But 100 EUR seemed like a good tradeoff to me. Personally, I'd pick the 5700x over the 5800x as the latter is only marginally faster but costs 50 EUR more.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-02, 04:04:

Ick that's bad, those slots... I'd probably be trying to fluff them up with a dental pick or something.

A thought to have one for testing, use a "mining riser" on it, then you keep the bottom end plugged and wear out the extension end ???

I'm afraid that the contacts will break completely if they distorted that much already. I was moving a card around to see if there was one slot it worked in. It worked in the x16 slot, so now I have a really stupid-looking setup with a WiFi card in the x16 slot (I'm using integrated graphics). The original F1 BIOS worked fine, but the compatibility problems started after updating the BIOS for the Spectre/Meltdown patches. That update even broke the diagnostic LEDs, so the CPU error LED would light up after Windows booted.

Anyway, I get 630MB/s through the 10Gbps USB A port and the included adapter. The only 10Gbps cards I found use Asmedia chips, which I don't like. I still remember the old Asmedia USB 3.0 controllers that were basically incompatible with everything. Then I would want to get a front drive bay panel with a USB C port, and I haven't even looked for those. I'm using a Corsair 200R case, so I have the drive bays.

My laptop has 10Gbps USB C ports, but I "only" get 550MB/s through them. That's still better than the external hard drive that I filled up.

Got myself a new monitor - 2560x1080 curved ultrawide, VA panel, 100Hz, FreeSync.

Far from the top-end stuff, but still miles ahead of the basic screens I had before.

Been collecting parts and monitoring deals for a "theseus" rebuild (keeping some parts and replacing others)

i5 13600k, Asus TUF z690, 32 gb of DDR5, 2 tb P41

I have a New Computer.
HP z440 with Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads )

Specs:
HP z440 - $120
Xeon 1660v4 CPU upgrade - $50
64gb , 2133p ECC , DDR4 Memory upgrade - $50
SSD - Intel 670p , 2tb with PCIe adapter ( $80 )
LSI HBA controller ( $50 )
( 3.5-inch Sata Hard drives additional )

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-04-10, 14:31:

I have a New Computer. HP z440 with Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads ) […]
Show full quote

I have a New Computer.
HP z440 with Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads )

Specs:
HP z440 - $130
Xeon 1660v4 CPU upgrade - $50
64gb DDR4 Memory upgrade - $50

Total - $230

Nice!
Windows 11 not supported on this just in case you need to know that. But great way to learn about windows 11.

How many memory modules you have in this computer? Need to be four, but maximum performance comes about if filled all the memory slots, eight of them.
Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-10, 16:01:

Nice! Windows 11 not supported on this just in case you need to know that. But great way to learn about windows 11. […]
Show full quote

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-04-10, 14:31:

I have a New Computer. HP z440 with Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads ) […]
Show full quote

I have a New Computer.
HP z440 with Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads )

Specs:
HP z440 - $130
Xeon 1660v4 CPU upgrade - $50
64gb DDR4 Memory upgrade - $50

Total - $230

Nice!
Windows 11 not supported on this just in case you need to know that. But great way to learn about windows 11.

How many memory modules you have in this computer? Need to be four, but maximum performance comes about if filled all the memory slots, eight of them.
Cheers,

Yes, Win-11-Pro installed with no problems did not even ask me for a license key.
There are a few drivers missing but for the most part the computer runs fine.
Maybe some one can build a Win-11 drivers package for these computers?
It’s just hardware raid drivers but I am not going to use hardware raid anyways.
Sata drives work just fine. And it supports Nvme too.
I have 4x16gb memory sticks of ECC Registered Ram.
Thats Okay because Win-10 is supported. I just wanted to try out Win-11.
I really don’t like Win-11. Too Much bloatware.
To much Microsoft / Hollywood Celebrities social media and cloud storage plugins built—in.

Win-10 is much lighter and basic. Easy to work with and more customizable.
Win-10 appears to be better suited for work without distractions.

I put an LSI HBA host bus adapter card in this computer and it worked with the HP bios so I could add 8 more drives to this computer if I wanted and use it as a server or just have lots of drives.
For a total of 14 drives.

Link to HP z440 drivers:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfserv … station/6978828