chaddesch

Hello all. Feeling kind of stupid here and could use some advice. I just built a computer using some parts I got from a very generous friend of mine and some stuff I found inexpensively and had lying around. 13400f Msi z690-a ddr4 wifi an old gtx 1650 a couple of decent, new seasonic 6tb drives for parity/redundancy (these I purchased new) 500gb m.2 nvme for boot I know some of this is overkill The purpose of the build was to setup an on-prem cloud server for my family - mainly for our photos and videos, though I suppose docs and stuff may be nice to have on there too. I plan on running our Plex server off of the 6tb drives as well. The HDDs are the same so I had planned on running them mirrored - either RAID 1 or just using storage spaces to set up a pool. I’ve read that some people seem to prefer just running off of one drive and using whatever software to create a backup on the second. Not sure why that would be preferable. I can run windows or Linux. I don’t really care at this point. Z690 supports raid so I could use that or something else. I could go to the hassle of setting up nextcloud or something else. Mostly, I’m just not sure what would be best at this point. I’m not too concerned about performance and speed. This is not going to be a daily driver, though I would like to use it to play media on occasion so I don’t want it to be headless. My main concern is redundancy/file preservation and ease of use. My wife will not bother using any of this if I can’t fully automate it for her and make it as easy to use as possible. I also want to be able to pretty seamlessly replace or upgrade drives as needed without data loss. Whatever solution can have an upfront cost but no subscription cost. Thanks in advance for your recommendations and suggestions. Cheers

Hi all, I just got my Northern Lights desk pad and love it. I basically bought this thing to give my elbows something cushy to rest on, and it delivers that in style. I did have a quick question for others who have bought the pad. The pad is still off gassing that new-pad-from-the-factory smell and it's a bit bothersome. I want to be clear that I'm not complaining here. This is totally normal behavior from just about any new product. I'm just wondering if anyone else noticed about how much time it took for their pad to stop off gassing. Thanks!

New Razor Blade 14! Very want! So yes!

I would love one of these! I don't think I'll ever be able to afford one; so winning it would be the only way.

Make me a believer in mechanical keyboards. I'll take the Excalibur v2, please. Plus, that's a sweet name.

I really like the size of this machine. That's what generates my primary interest in it, and I love the fact that it's able to run a full desktop GPU fairly efficiently and effectively. I hope I win!

Hi @megatronends I noticed yesterday that the z97 series mobos only offer two lanes for the m.2 card so make sure you don't spring for the xp941 or sm951 like I did. Like @FuzzyYellow said, some m.2 are sata and some are pcie. If you go for the m.2 pcie card, expect to get capped around 780 read and 650 write or so with most mobos that support m.2 cards since the four lane variety isn't really mainstream yet. I've read that those mobos that do offer four lanes like asrock's don't natively support using the m.2 as your boot drive and require some pain-in-the-butt tinkering. That being said, the speed is still better than sata, but imo the premium for the m.2 isn't quite worth it right now. The sata m.2 cards are still more expensive than their 2.5mm counterparts; so those clearly aren't worth it. That being said, if you can find an m.2 sata card that's selling for around the same price as it's 2.5mm, I'd go for it just to save the space and for no cable management. Alternatively, you can spring for a pcie adapter to get the m.2 card running on one of your pcie slots, but that option seemed silly to me, so I'm just going to return my SM951. You could also spring for an Intel 750 if you want that kind of speed. Those things are BA. Also like @Mighty_Miro_WD said, heat dissipation can be an issue with the SM951s. They have no way of dealing with it, so they can end up throttling. I found this review helpful: http://techreport.com/review/28446/samsung-sm951-pcie-ssd-reviewed Cheers, Chad

Hey, thanks for posting this. I have an Asus z97m, and I just put in an 128GB Samsung SM951. It's great and I'm only using about 50GB of it without having loaded any games yet. My plan was to run it as my boot drive, which I'm now doing, and get a WD black 1TB as my secondary drive. I'm using an old, noisy Toshiba as my current secondary drive. When I first started looking at 1TB drives I saw that I could just get a 512gb SSD pretty easily for $150, and I'm leaning in that direction now. Now I'm wondering if the $110 I paid for the SM951 is really worth it if I'm just going to pair it up with another SSD. Yeah, the SM951 is more than twice as fast, but I wonder if I'd really notice the difference or care when I get 4 times the storage for only $40 more. Thoughts?

I've never really used a gaming mouse before; so I have no idea how or if it would benefit me. It'd be kind of cool to win a good mouse to see what how it would improve my experience.