EmeraldFlame

If you haven't used it yet, you can get a 30 day free trial of newegg premier. It's kind of like amazon prime for newegg where you get free 2 day shipping, free returns, and a few other perks. As far as rebates go, it is not instant and is a long process normally taking 2-3 months if not more before you get your money back. This money doesn't come from newegg, but instead the item's manufacturer.

Any photo editing program can do that. Heck, with a steady hand you could do it with MS Paint. In photoshop/gimp: Find picture of wheel Make selection around wheel Cut selection and paste into new layer Delete old layer that still has background Insert new layer underneath layer with image of wheel Paint bucket that layer black Export to preferred file format.

Literally all it takes is a cheap computer, almost no power at all. There are some people who run servers off of a Raspberry Pi (although it's a bit of a pain because it's not officially supported). It's pretty much as simple as just running an .exe on whatever you have laying around for it. Keep in mind that the free version of Teamspeak server only supports 32 people connected to it at max. If you want more than that you need to get a license from them. Mumble is another alternative that many people prefer that is open source and allows unlimited connections, the only limiting factor is your internet and hardware.

It's available on desktops too, just depends on what settings you have.

It sounds like it was in hibernation, not sleep. In sleep mode things just go into a low power state. In hibernation it flushes everything currently stored in ram to the permanent storage and goes into an even lower power state. On bootup the RAM is restored from the disk backup and things continue as if your computer was never off.

As @kichilron said, it matters more about your expected traffic levels than anything and your host should be able to tell you approximately how much traffic that the service can handle if you ask them.

Hard to tell, I'm assuming you had good signal strength when you did your tests right? With ZFS, I would definitely recommend going the ECC route. When ZFS uses ram kind of like a cache for recent read/write operations. If it ever encounters an error, it's default is to recover from RAM, so you want that to be bullet-proof so it doesn't cause errors in data.

Now that is really odd, is there any other high-bandwidth devices on the 5GHz? If not, I would say you have some sort of issue somewhere. Your devices on the 2.4GHz won't cause interference or slowness on 5GHz, unless you just have poor signal strength you should be getting significant;y better speeds than that. Also are you using the ZFS file system on any of the drives. I know earlier you said you were basically RAID 1 and JBOD, if that's the case you really don't need ECC, it's only required on FreeNAS for the ZFS file system.

Wireless security cameras I'm assuming? If that's the case they can definitely eat up some bandwidth. Try connecting your computer to the 2.4GHz band instead and see if speeds improve. If the cameras are all on 5GHz and eating up the bandwidth and time there, then switching to 2.4 should give you a clearer channel with less traffic to deal with. Forgot to answer this too, but someone else said it too, yes it definitely can. It depends on the bitrate of the source mainly. A higher quality source is gonna take up more space in RAM for it to down-convert. I would try and watch your RAM usage while the encodes are going just to see, but my guess is a bump to 16 would be beneficial if you are running that many plex streams.

That is pretty low, but it all depends on your wireless network. It sounds like you need a serious upgrade to your access point. Do you now what standards your router is supporting? A/B/G/N/AC? Is it 2.4 or 5GHz? What kind of signal strength are you getting? Same thing can be said for the wireless card in your computer, what is it supporting? The AC wifi standard is really quite awesome to have and you may want to think about upgrading to it if the wireless file transfers are important to you.

All my workstation use Macrium Reflect to losslessly compress and backup to my home server once a week for on-site backup. Home Server is a 12TB (9TB usable) RAID 5 for on-site redundancy Server than encrypts and uploads all data to CrashPlan for emergency off-site backup

Oh... well in that case there really isn't any overhead. It sounds like this has been running for a while, so I am assuming that the raids have fully initialized? Has it always been this slow, or is this a new machine? May want to run a stress test to make sure the CPU isn't throttling for some odd reason. Running a memtest probably wouldn't be a bad idea either. If you have ram throwing errors and having to recover all the time that will definitely slow things down.

What Raid/ZFS level are you using? Raid 5/6 and it's ZFS equivalents are going to see lower write performance because of parity calculation.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a technology that lets your computer interact with 2 or more physical storage mediums and treat it as a single storage device (so instead of seeing a C and D drive in windows, you would just see C). This can have various benefits depending on it's configuration. RAID 0: This takes all the data you have and breaks it up into little chunks. It then spreads those chunks around on all the drives in the RAID as evenly as possible. This gives you a huge speed increase in both reads and writes because each drive only has to do half the work. However, this is somewhat of a risky setup. Since each drive only has half of every file, if one drive dies, then half of every file is gone, which means all your data will be corrupted and you lose everything. There is no penalty to storage space. RAID 1: This mode has one drive do a constant exact copy of the other drive. There are no speed benefits, however if one of the drives fails then the computer will continue to function normally with no data lose, it just starts using the other drive and will give you a warning to replace the bad drive. This exact duplication takes up half of your storage space. Example 2x1TB drives would give you 1TB of usable space. RAID 5: This mode is a bit more complicated. Like a RAID 0 it breaks up data into chunks to increase performance. However, when you write to the drive and also calculates what is called 'parity data'. This data can be used to restore a drives information in the instance of a failure. But unlike RAID 1, it isn't an exact copy of the data. You can think of it as really good lossless compression. This data is also spread across the drives. This mode requires a minimum of 3 drives to operate and it's parity data will allow 1 drive to die without any data loss. However if you lose a second drive before the first one has been rebuilt all data is lost because it no longer has enough parity data to rebuild. When using this mode you essentially lose 1 drive worth of storage because of the need to store the parity data. Example: 3x1TB drives would give you 2TB of usable space, or 4x1TB would give you 3TB of space. Typically this mode has fast reads but slow to average writes because of the time it takes to calculate parity. When a drive fails the computer will continue to run uninterrupted, but it will be extremely slowly since it has to process the parity data for some information. A warning will be shown to replace the drive, and once it rebuilds itself performance will return to normal. RAID 6: Similar to RAID 5, but it requires 4 drives and is able to withstand 2 drive failures instead of just 1. This is achieved by storing the parity data twice to 2 separate drives. However, if you lose 3 of the 4 drives, all data would be irrecoverable. With this mode you lose essentially 2 drives worth of space because it needs space to store the parity. Example 4x1TB drives would give you 2TB of usable space. Or 5x1TB would give you 3TB of space. RAID 10 or RAID 01 or RAID 1+0: This RAID mode also requires 4 drives. It is literally a combination of RAIDs 0 and 1. This combines the great speed given by RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1. How this works is you would take your 4 drives and put 2 into a RAID 0, then make another RAID 0 with the other two. Then you make a RAID 1 out of the two RAID 0's. With this setup you lose half of your storage space. So 4x1TB drives would give you 2TB of usable space. Unlike RAID 5/6 there is no performance degradation when a drive fails. Drives always have to be added in pair for this one so you can't have like a 5x1TB setup, it would need to be 4 or 6. There are also some more uncommon levels of raid, but you don't really need to worry about those for home use.

Over time pretty much any flexible plastic is going to release some of it's plasticizer, especially when dealing with the thermal loads of computers, and that can gunk up you loop and it can make the tubing slightly more brittle, but that's literally any flexible tubing in any color. But it won't melt. Even with that said, it's pretty rare to run into plasticizer issues in the normal lifespan of a computer unless you have a really hot running loop.

You can likely run 6 fans off your motherboard headers and use its built in fan control. How many fan headers and what type of fans are you using?

I would add the caveat the Intel chipset raid 5, and 6 (for the ones that are capable of it) are pretty crap though. I mean, they do it, but it's parity calculation is horribly slow. But yeah their raid 0, 1, and 10 performance is pretty solid and ubiquitous at this point. Sometimes you have problems going from one chipset to another, but even that is starting to get rare these days on intel raid.

Because that is exactly what RAID is designed to do. It makes multiple drives show up as 1 drive in various different ways to increase reliability, performance, or both, depending on the RAID level. Honestly, since you didn't know that, you may want to rethink using RAID, especially RAID 0 until you research a little more and understand the implications better. RAID 0 can be especially volatile and isn't recommended unless you are taking regular backups to another storage medium as it multiplies your chances of failure.

By 'drop out of the array' I didn't mean fail. I mean that with a normal drive if response time is slower than the controller thinks it should be then it will assume the drive is failed and kick it from the array making all that data inaccessible and requires a reboot for the controller to find it again. When the drives drop out of the array like this they also have a very serious chance of corrupting data when they do so. Drives that are optimized for RAID and have TLER enabled can essentially tell the controller 'hey i'm taking longer than normal, but I got this, give me a sec' and it will keep them in the array instead of dropping them. A home user would absolutely notice these issues when they are having to reboot their nas all the time and their data is getting corrupted left and right. Like I said if your nas is just a JBOD, it doesn't matter because there is no array to be kicked out of. But RAID should be using RAID optimized drives.

It depends. If you're NAS is just JBOD any drive will work. If you're drive is using a RAID you will want drives optimized for that, which the WD Red's are. RAID optimized drives have some additional firmware tricks (TLER) that make them much more suited to the task. Without those firmware tweaks drives can have a tendency to randomly drop out of the array.

Not only can you, but you absolutely should, and you should do it ASAP. RAID 5 is designed to deal with this specifically, it can handle 1 drive being lost and rebuild it without any data loss. However, if you lose a second drive, all data is gone and irrecoverable. I'm not exactly sure what the process is for your software, so you will have to read into it, but definitely get it replaced.

Probably better off with Linux/FreeNAS/etc. The biggest advantages to using a windows server based NAS would be it's ability to run Active Directory with it which allows better and easier control over who can access what. I run an AD in my own home, but for 99.9% of people it's completely unnecessary.

Doesn't look like I kept the email. From the way the explained it when I had asked, the PPC fans use a significantly more powerful motor, but one of the downsides of that motor is increased noise at all RPM ranges. Me putting this in car terms: a V8 engine at 1500RPM is going to be louder than a flat-4 at 1500RPM.

Take a look at EK's Vardar fans. They are on the same tier as the Noctua's as far as quality goes, and available in more colors. They have a few models of each size with different Min/Max RPM's to fit what you need. They do to a point, it really depends on the thickness and fin density of the rad.

The PPC fans are significantly louder then the regular series fans even if you throttle them both back to the same speeds. I don't have exact numbers for you, but I have contacted Noctua about this before and they confirmed themselves that they would be significantly louder.