Two years after the last post in the old low content thread I thought it might be useful to have a thread in this forum for quick and simple low content questions.

So, ready for the post-rona world, here it is!

Nice! I'm curious to see where this goes with the general low volume in this sub.

@Josem: So how does LC look like when soccer season is interrupted and pubs are closed

Or maybe nerds just don't care about soccer and beer..

We will see

I keep pricing out building a NAS for home use but balking at the cost. If I do pull the trigger I may end up setting up a 10Gb segment to my home network too. Anybody else set up a DIY or commercial NAS in the 16+ TB range at home? I have 7x4TB drives I'm not using from earlier configs, but I've also seen 8TB SAS drives available used for around $100 each on ebay.

headtrauma,

I have a couple of drives (RAID 1) on my home NAS, just using a QNAP TS-451. It works for me, and I recently bought a large screen which I hope to (soon) figure out how to stream from the NAS to the large screen.

What're you going to use your setup for?

Hey Josem,
Mostly local backups, probably exchanging some offsite backup space with a couple friends. Probably some media storage but not likely to be running a transcoding Plex server. I might also run some homelab type VMs on it if the platform is suitable, but that's more of a nice to have than a driving factor.

My current desktop has a 480GB Optane boot drive and a mirrored, tiered Storage Spaces volume for game and raw photo storage (2x1TB SSD+2x8TB HDD, mirrored/RAID1 equivalent at each tier). I currently back up to a pair of 8TB USB 3 drives that I rotate weekly. Current backup time on these runs around 24 hours for a full backup and verification read with Macrium. I decided to mirror and backup my game files, despite them being redownloadable the last time I built a new PC. The time to migrate my (smaller at the time) Steam library was irritatingly long and with a 1TB cap from Comcast I decided redundancy was worth the spend. I use OneDrive to backup my raw photos and documents as my offsite copy.

I have 7x4TB accumulated from my old PC, USB DAS and cold spare that aren't in active use. I'd probably be looking at a 6-8 bay NAS and would prefer to have the option to add an SSD tier and possibly 10Gbe. 10Gb would be necessary to actually reduce backup times (my backups run at >125MB/s average which exceeds 1Gb ethernet speed). Probably looking at a double parity or mirrored+striped config because I don't trust RAID 5/single parity rebuild at that data size. Having enough spindles and software flexibility to have virtual disks of different redundancy levels would be a nice to have. I've read a bit on ZFS and its interesting, but I'm not all in on it yet.

So yeah.....I've done a fair bit of thinking on it, but my wants list for a NAS/homeserver device is long and leads to high price. That competes with other things I want to spend money on and since I'm reasonably ok with my current backup story, I don't end up pulling the trigger.

For your use, I think QNAP supports Plex, I'd look into if your TV or attached devices have a Plex client option, I know Xbox does, not sure on other options but I know they're out there. If you can hardwire your TV or streaming device that is preferable.

Yep; you have some pretty high-end requirements there! I think your needs are well beyond my experience as an ordinary consumer

any of you guys have experience with surge protection PDUs?
did about an hour of research, then got bored and just got this for 40$ https://www.apc.com/shop/hr/en/produ...y/P-PMF83VT-GR
fine for a couple of pcs and monitors?

That should be 100% fine, APC seems to make perfectly fine products. We used a lot of their network controlled PDUs at my previous job, but those don't really deal with surge protection in a lab/datacenter deployment.

Were there any specific questions you had about surge protectors? General advice is buy a decent brand and don't use a plain powerstrip instead of a surge protector in front of electronics you value.

Other than that its mostly picking an outlet count and form factor that work for you.

Not sure if it's applicable with German style plugs, but I keep a batch of 1 foot extension cords on hand I bought to use with bulky DC transformer plugs (wallwarts). Using one of those keeps the transformer from blocking neighboring outlets on the PDU.

that's a good idea, got a couple of wallwarts that need some love. thanks.

So ionutd's post got me thinking a bit. What are some of the cooler tech gadgets/impulse buys you guys have picked up lately?

I'm really liking the 7" touch monitor I picked up. Initial plan was to mount it inside my case window for Itunes control while my 2 main monitors are switched over to my work laptop during the workday. I ended up liking the touch functionality so I found a spot for it nestled under my primary monitor that works great. The HDMI and micro-USB cables it comes with are pretty short, so plan on replacing them if your PC is under the desk/more than a couple feet away. I also like the idea of making a "micro crashcart" with one of these, a USB hub, and a compact keyboard with trackpad for working on PCs that usually run headless or on the repair bench.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

mounting that thing inside the case window sounds deliciously nerdy

check out this amazingness
https://imgur.com/a/4yMC8

especially the lighter+cup holder one. wowza!

got this a couple of weeks ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUxT5DdlTU

found it for 5$ used with a 2 month warranty at a local shop, couldn't resist. the feeling of that trackpad is fantastic and the wrist rest portion is really comfy. being used as a rest for my main keyboard and occasional mouse for the plex server pc

Hue motion sensors for my hallway. The lights automatically tun on whenever anyone walks into the hallway, and cuts out when no one is in there.

Nice! I love my Hue lights. My apartment is too small to need motion sensors but I like the idea for a house.
@ionutd: that scrolling trackpad is crazy. Reminds me of something from the 90s that a Unix nerd would have owned with pride.

FWIW, my apartment is 918sq ft. I just use it in the hallway.

Building a new pc for running preflop and 3way solves. Wanted to buy an older workstation but limited choice where I live and turns out the decent deals fly off within the day they're posted and shops are taking advantage by inflating the prices.

Decided for AM4 platform, as threadrippers and xeons are damn expensive for what they offer in comparison. Kind of limited to 64gb ram with AM4 but that will have to do. Some mobos support 128gb but the list of compatible ram is short and unavailable here.

Managed to order everything, new in box, either from retailers or ads, final price ~650 $. We celebrate Easter this Sunday-Tuesday so gonna have to wait several more days til deliveries continue and I can start building.

Ryzen 7 2700x
X470 Asus mobo
64gb kit of Corsair 2666 Mhz
R7 240 gpu for basic needs
Riotoro case and psu, proper quality for cheaps
some Arctic case fans and a wifi card
already had an m.2 and a WD Black HDD laying around

might have to get a proper cpu cooler too, the 2700x is pretty smart when it comes to OC-ing itself, but it works within the thermal headroom. stock cooler is not bad by any means but it's a small-ish, downwards blower style cooler and pretty noisy I might add. proper tower cooler shaves off 5-6c and that's enough for the chip to boost itself by another 150-200 Mhz. the 2700x doesn't like going above 80c at all.

hopefully this X470 mobo has proper power delivery, last B450 budget mobo I used with a 2700x build was having real problems with pushing power, mosfets around the cpu would get really toasty at 110c+. had to stick some copper heatsinks and some 40mm fans on top of those to get the temps under control.

Hey Team,

I've got a i3-8350K processor in my home desktop from a little over two years ago
It looks like the 10th Gen Core processors are launching in the next few weeks, which will have a different chipset and no longer be compatible with my Z370 motherboard

So, I'm looking at buying one of the 9th gen processors because I imagine they'll fall in price when the new ones are released, they'll be a performance boost over my current processor, and the 9th gen CPUs will fit into my existing motherboard.

Does anyone have any particular views on whether there is a sweetspot for price/performance? I do not imagine overclocking, although I've just learned that I can do that with my current processor (I haven't). I do play games occasionally, but also do a chunk of video/audio editing from time to time.

are you doing anything cpu intensive , multi-threaded work? otherwise you won't notice any difference in normal desktop use between 8th and 9th gen, even if you step up to an i5.

edit:
not familiar with audio/video editing software and how these leverage threads, as far as games are concerned, few use more than 4 cores and it's single core performance that makes the difference. you could get a 10-15% speed boost with a very conservative overclock, wouldn't take more than half an hour to watch a couple of vids and perform a few clicks in the bios. you have a proper mobo too, sad to see an expensive board and a K cpu go to waste. stock cooler would have to go tho.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

guessing your system is pre-built and they put in a tower cooler in for that cpu right?

I bought it from pcspecialist.co.uk

Case PCS GENESIS G1B CASE + SD CARD READER
Processor (CPU) Intel® CoreTMi3 Quad Core Processor i3-8350K (4.00GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard Gigabyte Z370 HD3: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM) 8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)
1st M.2 SSD Drive 120GB KINGSTON SSDNow M.2 2280 G2, SATA 6Gb/s (550MB/R, 200MB/W)
Power Supply CORSAIR 650W TXm SERIESTM SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling PCS FrostFlow 100 Series High Performance CPU Cooler


I then added in RAM separately, and a R9 390 graphics card

If I'm not mistaken, Frostflow is an AIO liquid cooler and prob rated for 150-200w TDP, while your cpu can't be more than 90w, so there's little to no chance it won't be adequate for even serious overclocks.

that psu is really nice too

looking forward to see how the tweaking goes, you can run Blender to compare the difference in render speed

I've bumped it up to 4.4ghz very easily. I regret not doing this years ago. The cooler is air only, not liquid, just to be clear.