What password manager are you guys using? I've been using Dashlane for a long time, but recently upgraded it and after several problems and very poor customer service I'm moving on. Most of the online reviews I've read suggest 1password is the best, but in looking at LastPass I really think their free version would suit my needs just fine (1 laptop, 1 desktop, and 1 phone).

I use LastPass - at this stage, I'm basically committed to their ecology and do not imagine going through the effort of moving. Since I have a slightly higher-than-average profile in my local community, I pay the extra for the Premium version so I can use my security keys with it, but agree that the free version is adequate for most people (especially since I think you can add Authy app support to it for free anyway)

Keepass

SQL database is showing a whopping 120 gigs
anybody knows what's causing this?

pretty much a fresh W10 install with only solvers and HEM2
imported and played around with a 5M hand database, but that's only 8gb in size

It seems I can get a MSI GTX 980 TI Gaming for 150€.

Not a new card, but kind of a beast, comparable with the GTX 1070 and smacking around the RX580 I have.

Tempting ....

Vega 56 also cheap
got one for a friend a couple of months ago in the 175 eur range
similar to a 1080 in non nvidia sponsored titles

trying to install the cyberpunk 1.04 patch the other day, it decided there wasnt enough space on my C drive to do so with 22gb free. move all my blizzard stuff to the currently never used D drive (1tb hdd =o)

install commences and is... 580ish mb? whatever. but having not used a hard drive in at least 8 years, it is SLOW. terribly slow...

so decided to just get a 1tb nvme as a second drive and be set for the rest of this comp. gonna do a tiny bit of browsing before buying, but i assume its best to leave my windows alone on the C, take frequently used/big files over and just start saving stuff to it? comp was prebuilt so a reinstall of windows might be a pain, idk. would it be worth it to basically ONLY use the new drive? if it werent for cyberpunk my main would only be at 150gb used, so i really dont need more than a tb ever. torrent days are long gone

If you are installing an NVMe drive on your computer and abuse the speed of PCIE, you really ought to make it your main windows drive. Your computer and apps will start up much quicker.

What I would do is the following: Install EaseUs Backup (Free) on your computer. Switch off computer and put in the NVMe drive. Run EaseUs backup and select the Clone option (the icon is somewhere on the left-bottom). Clone you entire disk to your NVMe drive (which should not be smaller), make sure to tick the SSD option to optimize. Restart computer and make the NVMe drive your boot drive. If you start up successfully from your NVMe drive, you're done. Remove the OS from your old disk.

If after the clone, not your entire disk is used (unpartitioned free space), you should expand your main partition. Use minitool disk partioner if Windows doesn't do it for you (Windows will have problems if you have a recovery partition between your main partition and the unused space, minitool wll effortlessly move that recovery partition to the end).

I would not search too much for an NVMe drive. There are plenty of good ones on the market. You really don't need to dish out premium cash to get that Samsung 970 EVO Plus. Just get a reputable brand, not the chinese crap they sell on aliexpress. Samsung, Crucial, Adata, Kingston, Western Digitial are all pretty solid. Normal users will barely notice the difference between a good and a top NVMe SSD.

If you want to get long life out of your NVMe, move you static data to another drive. Movies, Music, Photos.

SSDs are smart and spread out the use of the disk. The more free space you have, the less intensive it will be used and the longer your drive will last at 100% capacity

As we learned in this thread cloning a disk drive is much much easier than people think it is.

thanks for the tips and thread, thinking more about it today it makes no sense not to do it, even if it were difficult. i plan on keeping this comp for a while and may as well use it as best i can.

i thought about it for maybe 5 minutes. $130 for 1tb crucial p5. seemed best mix of reviews/speed for the money and pretty much everyone said its better than the evo. not too worried about $10 here or there. saw it on shell shocker for $10 off, but free shipping was 2 weeks, arrive ~22nd was $9.... so i got it on amazon =x should be here and hopefully installed friday.

this included ssd was only 250gb, i have an older evo 500gb that i never bothered putting in. in any of my comps ive never come close to using 1tb even after i think 8 years of using the last one. movies/shows/music is all streamed now. photos basically all on the phone

games are getting huge these days
and if they're not big when they come out, they certainly get there over time with updates
I mean I look at ligther titles like Heartshtone, CS:GO or World of Warships that I dab into once in a while, they've grown a lot in size over the years
in my experience the difference between sata and nvme ssds is virtually non existent when running games off them, you might get half a second quicker loading screen here and there but that's about it

Crucial P5 has good reviews, so a fine choice.

I agree with ionutd btw. The speed impact of he NVMe is a bit overhyped.

For example, if your computer took 20 seconds to start up with a normal 7200RPM HD (200 MB/s), it will take 8 seconds to start up with an SSD (500 MB/s) and it will take 2 seconds to start up with a standard NVMe (2GB/s). Any cash you invest beyond that (RAID0, PCIE4, top of the bill NVMe) is barely gaining you anything.

This is likely to become less and less the case for games now that Xbox and Playstation are shipping all new consoles with NVME and hyping load speed as a feature. MS has already said the same tech is being ported to Windows and game engines are likely to start expecting/optimizing for fast storage in the next year or two.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/direc...-coming-to-pc/

I picked an SK Hynix P31 1TB for a gift system I'm building and have been impressed so far. I hope they offer more (and larger) sizes when they rev the product line.
When I'm finally able to build a Ryzen 5xxx system, I'm probably going to make the spend for 4-8TB of NVME storage as well.

it's not just boot up times, cause really, how often do you power up your pc every day?
ppl who work with large files in particular will benefit substantially from nvme speeds in day to day use tho
video editors, CAD designers, data analysts etc
for example I have 10gb+ solver files that take 20-30s to open on an nvme and 3 min on a cheap WD Green sata. Wouldn't even bother on a hdd.
same with hand histories, it's hell importing a couple million hands in HEM/PT on a hdd

Sure there will be power users that really benefit from NVMe. How many exactly? 5%? The rest of us does gaming, internet and office.

I'd say you can feel a little bit of a difference in office work too, thing is the price point gap narrowed down so much that it's not really a luxury item anymore

I had to buy a 500gb ssd this BF and the difference between a solid mid tier nvme and the cheapest sata was 10 eur. If you're buying 2Tb drives, then ye sure, it's going to sting a bit. I'm an advocate for nvme as the OS drive and sata for storage, at least until prices drop some more. i.e. if I was an avid gamer, I'd get a 2Tb sata ssd for my gaming library.

well i mostly didnt bother looking at ssd cause i figure why not make use of whats available. if its never noticeably faster, i wont be let down. if it saves a bit here or there, great. just that after trying to use a normal hdd TWICE, i couldnt take it. if i ever have a bunch of large files again, its still there for that, otherwise i plan on it going back to unused, like it has been.

im fairly certain i could have done a thorough cleaning of my 250gb drive and been set for quite a while, but this is much easier

https://www.skhynix.com/eolproducts....k=20&rc=module

I saw 2*16GB 1333MHz for sale for 30€ shipped, which sounded like a steal and it seemed I was the first one to even see the ad, so I grabbed it as an investment.

Seems like server memory. Since DDR3 still sees a bunch of use, I kinda expect to be selling it with profit. But what exactly can one do with ecc RAM? Will it be compatible with any normal PC motherboard?

not much...works with xeons and I think Intel X series cpus

I remember some ppl made ram drives back in the day when nvme wasn't around but obv that had multiple limitations, like data loss when you power off the pc and just the fact that you can only squeeze so much ram on your board. performance wise I think it was similar to a top tier nvme drive these days in reads, the rest of the parameters not so good.

the chinese still make brand new X79 boards that can take ddr3 ECC and 1 or 2x LGA2011 Xeons, still not a cheap platform compared to smth like a Ryzen 9 build and the dual xeons will perform worse in most applications if you're spending the same money.

I feel sh or refurbished dual cpu workstations are still viable today for smth like a solver or a VM machine with a ton of ram, but the price has to be right, it's can't just be a little bit cheaper than a R9 or a Threadripper, cause it's old, it's loud, it's heavy, will prob run into driver issues with W10

I needed a SATA modular cable for my Corsair TX550M and managed to buy one that came from a HX model, only to find out they had a different connection schema and were incompatible.

It cost me blood sweat and tears to disassemble the cables from the connector and put them back in the right configuration.

Why would they even change the schema? Just to **** up their customers?

sata 2 and 3 are identical
I'm guessing that was an eSATA cable, which is meant to sit at the back on a bracket

well luckily i didnt need paulys help to clone... for some reason bios wont open by any of the keys on start, i tried at LEAST 20 times. had to google a way, restart through recovery, boot to bios. it looks like it auto assigned the new drive as priority to boot from? seems strange.

still need to remove the partition as it seems to have copied over a 250gb block, including the open space.

also dont have a retaining screw to keep it tucked back on the motherboard, so for now its just hanging like a loose tooth.. not ideal but i dont ever move my comp so for now it'll do

don't, it puts strain on the connector
little piece of scotch tape at the back end, give it a bit of give so that it sits straight

In addition to that, consumer m.2 drives (pretty much anything other than a 22.110 enterprise beast that won't even fit in most boards) lack power protection and have DRAM caches so they can lose data if the connection is disrupted.

i thought about tape but i wasnt sure if the heat from it would be an issue? i'll try to get it in a good spot next time i'm in there.

losing connection was basically my only worry of leaving it loose. it seems fairly seated but no nice click/lock like ram has.. seems like that would have been an easier way to seat it. or a little hinge like cpus