SMURG

As others have already said, the 1700X is overkill even for multi-streaming. I run my plex server on a 10W 4-core Celeron J1900 with 8GB of RAM and it handles everything I throw at it. Remember, plex only needs to transcode if there are bandwidth limitations (not an issue for local playback) or if the client doesn't support the codec. Also remember that when it is transcoding the overhead is proportional to the difference in bitrate, so assuming your media collection isn't entirely made up of 20mbps 4k h.265 files the overhead isn't massive. As for the 10gbps connections, how are you planning to utilise this? At the moment the issue for home users is that the disks you want for their high capacity aren't able to deliver the speeds to justify the cost of 10gbps, and the SSDs that could justify it are cost prohibitive in terms of capacity. I suppose it you have a big enough SSD cache on either side it might be worth it, but even then whats the benefit? Are you routinely moving hundreds of GB at a time between devices?

I shortstroked a 1TB 10,000rpm velociraptor for my brother's PC and noticed an improvement in boot/game load times, so take that as you will. Wasn't massive but I remember an appreciable difference in boot times at least. I think it's worth doing it for the OS at least anyway in some cases since the partitioning means you can wipe and reinstall the OS without touching the rest of the data if you need to.

Ah okay, well that's easy enough to sort out because I don't need much space for the OS itself. The swap could be pretty big in that case and I wouldn't need to change the mount point. Doing some further reading in the ZFS documentation it talks about using L2ARC read cache as well so I was wondering if that might be a better idea? Like you say, I've never really had too much issue with RAM before when using ZFS but yeah the CPU really is limited to 8GB, and as a side-note it's really fussy about what RAM it will take as well lol. I have managed to make systems lock up before when not using enough but you have to overdo it quite a lot. As you say I'm pretty sure I'd be fine with 8GB now but it's just a thought for the future. Thanks for the info though, if I'm sticking with Ubuntu I'll probably just increase the swap size on the boot device since I have loads spare anyway. If I go to unRAID I'll probably just use the mSATA as L2ARC since the documentation seems to suggest that helps.

So a few years ago I built a file server/NAS based on a SoC board from Supermicro (http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/celeron/x10/x10sba.cfm) using ZFS under Ubuntu, and now want to add another 4 x 3TB of storage to it. The board is pretty perfect for this sort of application, the CPU is passively cooled and has a TDP of 10W yet does everything I need it to (including plex transcoding) and it has 6 native SATA ports plus the 2 I'm drawing from mini-PCIe and an mSATA on top for 9 total of which I'm currently only using 5 (OS and 4 x 1TB in Z1). The only snag with this board is that it only supports 8GB of RAM, which isn't really going to be enough for the storage I'm going to have after I add more drives (the rule of thumb ofc being 1GB per TB of storage with ZFS). My question therefore is will ZFS use swap space to alleviate RAM issues? I can easily install an SSD for this purpose and then just run the OS using the internal USB type A (I've been thinking of moving to unRAID anyway), but obviously if it's not going to help ZFS then there's no point. Either way I'm probably going to take the 4 x 1TB array out of ZFS and just run them separately after I've moved their 3TB contents to the new 9TB volume, but at some point I'll want to replace them with bigger drives and I won't be able to upgrade the RAM any further. 8GB for 12/9TB of storage isn't going to cause much of a problem but I'm conscious that it might if I later dump another 12/9TB on top and I don't want to replace the board if I don't have to when it's perfectly suitable aside from RAM limitations. I've been using ZFS for years now on multiple machines so I'm pretty familiar with it at this point, I just don't know how or if it makes use of the swap space and whether I'd benefit from adding more in lieu of RAM. Hopefully somebody else on here has more experience with this than I do, any help is appreciated

No worries, I too suffer from the "oh the WAN show has started but Twitch needs refreshing" problem lol

On the WAN show, he just explained how autohost works etc. and said "as of now, our autohost is now off". He's moved on now so idk whether he means like permanently or 'pending adjustment' in some way

So Linus just said they're turning autohost off lol?

Honestly I was still trying to work out what her channel is actually about when it suddenly stopped. Like she was trying to cover Linus' material or something from what I could tell but she was basically just being a moron for spectator sport? Is that a thing now?

I haven't voted because I'm conflicted. On the one hand it was pretty hilarious tonight, but I'm unsure whether it would get really old really fast.. I normally like having the tab black and silent until the WAN starts because it means I can leave it on another monitor whilst I play games or whatever waiting for it to start.

Yeah, mine was glorified data entry essentially. I have no respect whatsoever for formal IT education, even at university level - I judge people's abilities on a case by case basis, and that certainly seems to be how it is in the wider world too. I never see posts advertised where a degree in computer science or whatever is required and from what my friends who work in game design and software development tell me, a portfolio of work you've done is much more helpful in securing a job.

Those are fine for local or network playback - in fact they're better because they can import the metadata based on file names. However, for actual live TV they just can't compete with WMC's ease of setup and use. What I do is use WMC on my desktop to watch some TV and record shows to a watchfolder, then Handbrake encodes them to a file that XBMC can interpret, then I use XBMC as the frontend on the TV. Things I have to download because they aren't available here go through the same pipeline using flexget and an RSS feed, as do blu-ray rips - all with very little input from me

Well firstly, Windows 7 Ultimate is essentially the same as Professional unless you specifically need all the language packs for some reason. Secondly, the dealbreaker for me with Windows 10 is that you lose WMC - which is the only decent (and free) software I'm aware of for watching TV with a TV tuner. If it weren't for that I'd upgrade, but seeing as Microsoft decided that the Xbox is everything you could possibly want for a media center I'm stuck on 7 for the foreseeable future. On a laptop that probably doesn't bother you too much, but it's something to bear in mind for future reference.

I'm from the UK so we do too, but we still use miles per gallon when calculating efficiency. Liters and gallons are different, just as gigabytes and gibibytes are different. Your drive IS a 1000GB drive, it's just that Windows thinks in gibibytes.

No... It's like buying your fuel in liters and then complaining that your cars miles per gallon figure didn't work out in liters. The drive is sold to you in Gigabytes, but Windows reports it in Gibibytes. If you'd prefer, the companies could sell it to you as 931GiB if you like, but the price per GiB or GB would be exactly the same, so you're not getting screwed out of capacity.

Why? I reckon I could make it work if I wanted to. If you could get the Intel SATA controller to pick up the drives as a SATA device with some driver kerjiggery you could get Windows on there. Or if you kerjiggered ZFS on Ubuntu you might manage it that way... Frankly though, you might as well just put the OS on a normal SSD (RAID 0, if u must) and use these insane drives for whatever it is you need to be that fast.

oh yeah, it's obviously a terrible idea - but you know someone somewhere is gonna do it.

Whilst you're not wrong, you can still RAID 0 the drives with a software solution like ZFS. It would then essentially be a nested RAID 0, RAID00 if you will.

Last gaming notebook I bought was an Alienware M11x, was great for sixth form since it meant I could spend my free periods playing L4D2.

Surely you can replace the piece of crap they provided with your own one? The second option is obviously better but I'd be surprised if you truly cannot replace the router they gave you.

Solar panels on a boat are great, because the alternative is to bring a generator with you/run outlets off the engine which is noisy and requires fuel. However, solar panels on land make very little sense when there is a cheap and convenient alternative.

I have already demonstrated to you, complete with references to scientific literature, that these things are true and proven as fact. By denying them now, you are the epitome of wrong. We can create a synthetic genome. Fact. We can create a synthetic ribosome. Fact. All you need for classical life is a genome and something (i.e. a ribosome) to manufacture the proteins it codes for. Fact. We can demonstrate that all of these things could have arisen from conditions present during the early Earth. Fact. All of these things have been fully explained in explicit detail to you on multiple occasions now, with peer-reviewed literature to back them up. What exactly is it that you are still pretending isn't true?

Do you even understand what that means? They didn't make a "modified" organism, they created an entirely new genome from scratch. Granted, they they used it with existing cellular machinery but as I linked with my other source, we can make artificial ribosomes ourselves so all you'd need to do was combine the two. The only reason they didn't in those experiments is because our artificial ribosomes are significantly slower and so the experiment would have taken ages to complete - and also because people like you would probably kick off about it.

As I already stated, the Miller-Urey experiments, Joan Oro experiments and James Ferris experiments together demonstrate how life could arise from the early Earth. Furthermore, we can create artificial ribosomes ourselves that assemble peptides - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609622/. These are peer-reviewed scientific literature - unlike the Bible no faith is involved at all. The only reason I don't link them more often is because I frankly doubt your ability to understand them, but nonetheless you asked me to point to an example of scientists creating 'life' so that's what I've done. Since we can also create cells with a synthetic genome (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10132762, a source which is perhaps a bit more accessible. This one: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703559004575256470152341984 even quotes Christian theologians as applauding it), we can now literally create life in the lab since all that is required for a classical cell is a genome and ribosomes to make the proteins it encodes for. Believing in the theories I've mentioned requires no faith whatsoever, for they have proof that the Bible lacks altogether. That's what makes them theories.

This discussion is only pointless because you refuse to let go of your ignorance and accept that the 3 things you listed have been empirically proved. There is no getting around those facts - it is not "frivolous" to speak the truth as revealed to us through the scientific method. These things are known and proven truths, just like the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around - as is implied in the Bible and was believed by Christians for thousands of years. God is not necessary for life. I have demonstrated this to you in explicit detail. To deny it now is to be willfully ignorant. The Earth is (approximately) 4.5 billion years old - we can prove this with carbon dating and observation of material which can only form through processes which take millions or billions of years. Incidentally, this includes fossil fuels and I'm sure you don't have the audacity to deny their existence. Life did originate in water. There is literally no other way for it to have happened because water is the universal solvent for all life that we see, and would have been required in the processes I outlined in explaining the first part to you. If life did not evolve in water, it would not be so heavily reliant upon it now that it walks around on land; rather it would consist almost entirely of solid, rather than liquid, material. We also find much older fossils in water than anywhere else, so if life originated on land then why are all the land fossils so much younger? As I said before, you are not staying consistent with scientific fact by adhering to the Bible. The two are mutually exclusive. You can believe in God, but if you follow the Bible in any literal sense you are categorically wrong.

I will accept a stance that God created matter. I don't believe it, but neither can I demonstrate a robust alternative that eliminates it - that would be the place of a physicist which I am not. My point this entire time has purely been that God is demonstrably not necessary for life, insofar as he could not have created life as we see it now in the beginning. It must have evolved from something else and so forth until you reach that priomordial soup where the first self-replicating RNA molecule was formed - something which did not require God's intervention for he need only have made the matter in the beginning if that's what you want to believe. The issue then arises over Genesis in the Bible, which claims that God made the world in 7 days, and that by the 7th all the species we see today were already around. This allows for 2 potential interpretations as I see it: firstly, a literal interpretation that the Earth and all life was created in a grand total of 1 week, making the Earth only a few thousand years old and leaving no time for evolution to happen. This is clearly completely false, since the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and life arose some 1 billion years after it was formed. The second interpretation is that God's "days" were each several hundred million years long, but this creates a whole other set of new problems. 4.5 billion divided by 7 = 642 million, so each of God's "days" would then be nearly 650 million years long. Given that God created plants on day 3 and the sun on day 4, how precisely do you propose that the plants would survive for 642 million years with no sunlight? It is clearly an impossibility, probably arising from the fact that the story is intended to be taken literally by people who lived in the middle ages and had no knowledge of the Earth's age. Furthermore, we can categorically prove that life originated in water, yet Genesis claims God didn't make underwater life until day 4, or 1.2 billion years after the plants on land, despite us knowing full well that plants came much later. These problems with Genesis mean that whilst it is possible to claim God made matter and the universe without being in conflict with scientific fact, it remains impossible to adhere to the teachings of the Bible in any real sense, unless you start omitting vast swathes which rather defeats the point in my opinion. For that reason, you cannot simultaneously accept scientific fact, believe in God and follow the Bible's teachings - the latter of the three must be sacrificed in order to allow the former two or, as you appear to prefer, the former can be sacrificed to allow the latter two.