PianoPlayer88Key

As in, save groups of tabs, including remembering multiple windows per session, makes automatic backups, lets you see an at-a-glance scrollable list of your tabs & windows in each session, etc? I need to find some way of saving these tabs, first as one big session, then probably several windows at a time into categorized sessions, so I can start paring down and closing a bunch of them. (I think I've heard something about a FF port coming in the future, but seems like that could still be a few years before its development is even started, idk.) Also is there a setting that will make FF keep the page title in crashed tabs?

That's already better than I can do (in GIMP, there's not enough $ left in the budget for PS after hardware purchases) ... I still haven't learned how to properly do I guess perspective shifting, to put something on the wall like that. (I've tried a couple times in other circumstances but messed things up.) Another thing I still haven't gotten the hang of is selecting someone's long hair when, for example, they're laying on a similar-color shag carpet next to another person (or maybe a dog) with the same color hair.

It's probably a good thing I'm not in charge of the tier list, because ... If I caught a company changing components (like controllers, flash, DRAM, etc) in their SSDs without changing the marketing name (part number only isn't good enough) or marketing it as an entirely new line - even if it's only a small change like 7001 vs 6999 MB/s write speeds before cache runs out, or 600 vs 576 TBW endurance, or 100 vs 96 GB SLC cache ... I would likely at least demote that model, regardless of revision, all the way down to Tier E. (I would also put a note explaining the components had changed for the worst, and say that if you bought this model before X date (which would already be in the past then), it was actually tier whatever it had been, to appease those who had bought one much earlier and were afraid they had crap.) If the same maker did it again, even if it was multiple decades later (for example if Seagate had pulled a stunt like that with the ST-506, ST-412, ST-225, etc, then did it again when the smallest then-new SSDs are big enough to exceed the GPT or 64-bit limits), then that entire brand would go in the bottom tier. It could take new management, ownership, or even being acquired by another company with a better reputation, to have a chance at redemption. There's another thing I don't exactly love either, which is done by pretty much the entire storage industry in my limited observation. (Windows, for all the things it does wrong, actually gets this one right, imo, and turn of the tables, the Linux distros I've used get it wrong.) That sin is ... quoting / advertising capacities in decimal units, instead if binary units like RAM, I believe, is done. A 1TB SSD should have 1,099,511,627,776 bytes free after formatting, not ~1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Regardless of what you believe about the timing of the end of the world,

Ahh, I would have thought it would demote it to Tier E, or even a new Tier F (Scheiße), as it's currently showing in Tier D, colored as a TLC drive? I'd like to see someone take one of the QLC versions of the P2, and benchmark it against a couple same-capacity hard drives (probably one CMR, one SMR), in sustained writes. No, I don't mean just doing a quick run of CrystalDiskMark on them and calling it a day. They need to exceed any "fast cache" that may exist. I mean, start with completely empty, secure erased / DBANned / freshly-formatted drives, and copy large files (>10GB each, except for one or two smaller as needed to exactly match the capacity) onto them until the drive is completely full, as in: F:\>dir (Drive info, list of files) "0 Bytes Free" F:\> BTW some time ago when I was testing write speeds of a few blank hard drives, I used a Windows version of the Linux "dd" utility (ddrescue) to generate a single file that was the exact size in bytes of the space available after formatting (for example, for a "1TB" drive that should be "1,099,511,627,776 bytes", imo, not 1,000...), then used a DOS/cmd utility that has a time function (either "timethis" downloaded from an older Windows version toolkit iirc, or maybe robocopy does it too?) to copy the file to the drive under test. I'm on my phone right now so can't easily (if at all, if I've even uploaded it anywhere), but an 8.4GB PATA drive I tested took about 11 or 12 minutes to write its entire capacity.

So how does this affect the tier position for the Crucial P2? https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-flash-swap-downgrade

Totally agree, and I think I played too much back in the day, it held me back in some ways. I remember seeing a few people on Steam that had like 150 or 200 hours Like... how?! Also my gaming kind-of has gone in ebbs and flows ... I might be gaming quite a bit for a few years, then not at all for a couple years, then playing too much for a few, not at all for a few (usually with a bit of a transition in between phases), etc. A lot of that in the past has been because my dad has a habit of going a long time between upgrades, so the PC would be hopelessly outclassed for playing anything... and even then when it was new, would most likely have had nothing better than a GT 710's market position anyway, or maybe a GeForce 210 or 8400 GS. (I'm comparing what his PCs had then, to what it would be like if you bought those GPUs today.) Several years ago when I had my own PC, I had to take a break from gaming cause my PC died and I didn't have the $ to replace it. (Yeah, I did play FarmVille on my dad's laptop quite a bit, but that's not quite the same.) Currently, I've kind-of lost interest in it somewhat. My iGPU could run the games I play just fine, but I don't play all that much, and am not really that much interested in many recent games for reasons I outlined earlier. When I upgrade my PC (I need to, just torn between waiting for 2022-2024 so I can get a long-upgrade-life motherboard, so I can replace 2 or 3 SeaSonic Prime PSUs that are DOOA ("Dead Of Old Age" - dying within the warranty is "infant mortality" btw -- or another way to put it, be able to, until I've passed away of old age, upgrade the PC one part at a time, and not have to reset my OS) before replacing the mobo, vs upgrading now cause I'd like to shave tasks that takes months or days into minutes or seconds), I'm hoping to not get back into my past habits with gaming too much. So I'd probably end up with like an x10 or x30 class GPU or an APU ... or maybe a Quadro or Radeon Pro based on the same silicon as an x60(0) Ti/XT to x80(0), if those would help with video encoding, or enable me to split up the resources (VRAM, cores, etc) to run multiple VMs off the same GPU.

My current main PC (a 2015 Clevo laptop with 64GB RAM, i7-6700K, booting from 1TB 2.5" WD Blue 3D SATA SSD) often can take about 45 seconds or so to POST! My dad's old 2008 Dell laptop (Core 2 Duo T7250, 2GB RAM, booting from 240GB 2.5" Crucial BX300 SSD) will post, boot, and get to the Windows 10 desktop (having just entered the login info, if I'm quick enough) about the time my laptop is just showing the FIRST screen after hitting the power button. Also getting INTO windows takes a while, and opening up programs, apps I had running from the previous time, etc. Just loading Chrome or FireFox can take a good 10-30 minutes or so, I think (I haven't precisely timed it though), part of that is because I have it set to remember my previous session, and I have a probably-not-the-best habit of getting burned out on working on some things, and starting other projects before finishing the first, not closing things, forgetting where tabs were, opening new ones, etc. This is more a topic for a different post / forum, but... I'm probably due for a PC upgrade. (I wanted to hold off until late 2022 or 2024, for multiple reasons, some related to longevity of my next system.) To summarize the upgrade I'll looking for -- there are things that have taken me several months to do (and I got burned out from) that I'd like to be able to have done in maybe a week, encoding 4 minutes of max-quality HEVC 4K video can take 4 days on my 4790K (I'd like the new one to be as fast as encoding 320kbps mp3 is on the 4790K - 2 minutes to encode 2 hours of audio), and for smaller tasks, I'd like to be able to take tasks that take several hours or so, and get a couple of those done every minute or something like that. (Of course how quick the computer user is with doing things would be a factor, too, and would probably drag the speed down a bit... but if I could have several dozen or hundred things going simultaneously, at least as much as my brain could handle which may not be that much....)

I haven't voted on the poll yet, cause none of the options fit me.... Yes -- Not true, because I still game now and then. (I actually have Team Fortress Classic (HL1/GoldSrc engine) running right now, connected to a server with the NeoTF mod, owning some bots with multiguns.) No -- Don't feel this one fits me either, because I'm not really into much of the modern AAA titles. Most games I play are older (like TFC mentioned earlier) or are casual games. I was never into PC gaming -- The fact that I played dozens or hundreds of shareware games through much of the 1990s (some dating back to the 1980s) would be quite vocal with "LIES!" if I selected this option. I'm not currently gaming as much as I used to. My Steam profile currently says I've played 16.8 hours the last 2 weeks ... I remember several years ago (back in the early 2010s or so, I think) it was frequently above 40 hours, and I may have hit 60 or 80, idk. I still play a little now and then, but, as I mentioned earlier, they are older or casual games. My desktop's Intel HD Graphics 4600 would run them just fine, for the most part. I've been interested some in trying a few newer games ... but the learning curve would be a bit much for me (especially since I'm more used to the gameplay (both brain power and muscle memory, etc) of the older games I play, I don't want to get involved with games that require dozens or hundreds of hours to progress through (I usually prefer 10 or 15 minute quickies, maybe sometimes an hour or so like I was just doing in TFC), (One example... I got GTA V, cause I wanted to do some of the races I've seen people do on Twitch streams, and I wanted to be able to drive around the maps and explore in free explore mode or whatever ... but the game was trying to make me play through the story, do heists, thefts, or whatever, etc, which I have no interest in doing, so I fizzled out from trying that. Also I'm guessing if I did get to the races, the gameplay would have been quite different from the last racing games I was used to - like Whiplash (from Apogee or whoever owns that name now), the original Need For Speed Hot Pursuit from the 1990s, etc.) And I'm to the point where I really have other things I need to do with my life. (I'm 40, have had trouble finding & keeping work, etc .... and while I don't think my past & current gaming is the main cause of that, I think it hasn't helped.)

So I'm guessing it was something like this? ... https://photos.app.goo.gl/UeTevtL1k2S59XtA6 I thought my GPU was loud on startup (see the video linked above, from google photos) (Also semi off topic but I'm looking at moving soon, but I'm hoping to find something fully detached so I don't have to worry about noise, piano playing, raging at the top of my lungs in my back yard after being owned in a game at 3am, etc bothering my neigbhbors.) mine occasionally would start at max speed as soon as you hit the power button, then slowly ramp down to more normal. idk why that is though...

I actually *USE* the capslock key in a game I play. (wow I guess it might almost be considered a retro game now, as it came out in 1999 .. but I guess i'm showing my age in that I mostly consider games retro if they're from the 1980s or older, I was born in 1981) Team Fortress Classic (on the GoldSrc engine that Half Life 1 used) ... some servers have a grappling hook mod enabled, I have capslock bound to +hook. (There's one server that uses a +rope instead that works a bit differently, so when I go to that server I have to rebind the key.)

I don't currently have a backup GPU, but I've thought about it a bit. My desktop has integrated graphics on the CPU (i7-4790K); also I have a 1060 3GB (EVGA SC) that's not currently installed. My laptop has a GTX 970M in an MXM slot so it is swappable. That particular laptop (Clevo P750DM-G) is set up so that even though my CPU (i7-6700K) has an iGPU, the dGPU is required. Getting a spare MXM GPU would be crazy expensive though, last I checked. If I go with an HEDT or server platform with my next build (thinking Q4 2022 to 2024 timeframe or so, to replace my desktop), then I might want to have a backup GPU. Although, I think I've heard a couple rumors about some HEDT platforms having an iGPU / APU setup. Also, while I know that servers have existed for many years or more that have onboard graphics, pretty much all of the ones I've ever seen use VGA. I don't have any monitors with VGA inputs (only HDMI and DisplayPort), and I don't plan on buying any, probably ever (unless I get the itch to do some retro build ... but actually, when I think retro, I think more EGA or CGA or older, which I think used 9-pin D-Sub connectors). Anyway ... if I was looking at getting a backup GPU, I'd probably want: Something that is not weaker than current / recent APUs (like the Athlon 3000G / Ryzen 3 2200G/3200G. or Comet Lake Celerons/Pentiums / Core i5-11400) Or, is capable of at least launching & kind-of playing modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 (at like 800x600, medium/low, 20fps, no RT), or running 5 year old titles at 720p 30fps medium. Costs preferably no more than $40-70 or so, Single-slot, passively cooled / sub-30W TDP ; bonus points for using PCIe x1 Lasts through several main GPU upgrades. (I'd probably do main upgrades when any of these are true: New generation's entry level (GT xx10) beats my card's generation's flagship (Titan / xx80/90 Ti) ; bonus points for the new entry-level card beating the past flagship Quadro in workstation tasks, like FP64 or whatever is normally gimped on gaming cards; Old card struggles to get 10 fps at 640x480 low settings in a then-10-year-old casual game, while new card does 120+ fps at 4K ultra in the newest AAA titles, AND is half the price & TDP (or lower) vs the previous card when it was new My card dies. (Of course I'd expect the gaming performance to be even more lacking as the GPU ages, but I'd hope that even after 7 or 8 main GPU upgrades, it would still be able to run few-year-old casual games at low settings & resolution & teens/20s fps, or 10-15 year old AAA titles with the same specs. When I was thinking about this a few days ago there were a couple other criteria I was thinking of, but I can't remember off the top of my head. If I had to make some sacrifices though, the important points would be low-TDP / single-slot passively cooled, not weaker than current APUs, and priced like the normal retail cost of GT x10 cards when scalpers aren't involved, and I'd probably only be keeping it for like 10-15 years or so, or through maybe 2 or 3 upgrades.

I was briefly thinking something along the lines of having raid 1 in the physical space of just 1 drive .... but then I had another storage / space - related thought ... So, AFAIK, you can get 1TB MicroSD cards, with 2TB apparently on the way ... and the actual flash chip is smaller than the µSD card. (Also I wouldn't be surprised if flash chips in some storage devices are even denser...) With density like that... I wonder how much capacity you could fit in the physical size of... 2.5" SSD (or HDD, primarily thinking the currently-common 7mm height, although maybe up to 15mm enterprise HDDs) 3.5" HDD 5.25" Half or Full-Height HDD 8" FDD 14" HDD from the 1970s or whenever... (I'll stop there lol) That doesn't take into account the cost of the flash, of course, I'm just thinking capacity. And if you wanted to get even more crazy with storage density ... I hear that DNA storage can supposedly do 215 petabytes per gram... (I wonder how that would convert to cubic mm ... and how much could you compress it, like could you exceed the ~19+ g/cm^3 of, say, gold, tungsten, 22.56 g/cm^3 of osmium, etc ... okay as wild of an imagination I may have, maybe the density of a black hole at the center would be a bit much lol)

Oh, not even with something like an internal Mini- that ... when it happens, cleans up the dust, then continues with the process of not allowing the user to access the drive until they have another one to copy the data to? (And it would still not allow you to access the damaged head / platter ... unless the head is fine and only part of the platter is damaged, in which case it might allow you to access the undamaged parts, but not the damaged parts and a buffer zone around them.) Also another thing I thought of ... if one (or more) of the heads is badly mangled enough, it would bring them off the platter into the parking area, and basically "snap off" the broken head and drop it into some kind of internal mini-wastebin, or something like that, then try to do the recovery / copy with the remaining good ones, at least as much as possible. And if enough heads failed so that you couldn't recover all the data (but not all of them had failed), it would act like UnRAID, not normal RAID ... in that it wouldn't take down the ENTIRE drive, you could still recover the data from platters / heads that had not failed.

That's a little less than what I paid last August for each of two Toshiba MG07ACA14TE drives. (I'm not seeing any in stock right now though, even close to $500, at least of that model, unless you count 3rd-party sellers on Amazon. I don't count them, at least for products that are normally supposed to be available through normal channels.) Well, there was a little problem with those, though.... I've never seen that happen with an SSD / flash card ... although I did make the mistake a few years ago of killing a 256GB SD card by trying to pull it out of my laptop at some weird angle, without taking my laptop out of the case first, and I think I bent the card & broke something on it. A little while ago, I was thinking of an internal RAID1 use case for hard drives... (Although my idea wouldn't have necessarily used dual actuators.) A user of one of those Internal-RAID1 drives would be using it normally, until, one day... **WARNING!** Your hard drive (Brand, Model, Serial) has suffered a catastrophic (physical / logical / whatever) failure! Because your drive runs RAID1 internally, your existing / already-saved data is safe, for now. However, we cannot in good faith allow you to continue writing to the drive, and must limit your ability to read from it as well. How it goes from there would depend in part on how the drive is being used. Two scenarios I've thought of are as a primary boot drive (less likely nowadays), and as a secondary storage drive. (It could also be used as part of a RAID array, and for situations like that there should be the ability to disable the internal RAID.) For a primary boot drive... You have ___ GB of unsaved data. Please insert a USB storage device with at least that much free space, so we can save then reboot your system.... Then, once the data is saved and it's ready to reboot ... If you have another device you can boot from it'd give you the option to do that, but if not... (A lightweight Linux / Ubuntu environment comes up.) We have rebooted your system into a Linux distribution that's stored in flash / firmware on your hard drive, which is failing. You can use this to shop online for a new hard drive or SSD, and to get some light work done online while you're waiting for the drive to arrive, however you will not be able to save data to the failing drive. (You can also go to a local store and buy a drive if you prefer that.) Once you have a new drive, connect it to the PC, and we will begin the data transfer. (This may require a reboot, also you can use another PC if necessary.) For a secondary storage drive, it wouldn't halt / force boot your system, but it would still not allow you to access the drive until you had plugged in another drive of equal or greater capacity, in which case you could continue as before and have it copy all the data to the new drive. Also, in case you had a computer that literally only had room for one internal storage device (like a Dell D830 laptop my dad used for quite a few years), the drive would have the smarts to allow you to plug it, and a new drive, into an entirely different PC that could support multiple drives, and do the data transfer there. Of course if ALL the heads crashed into all the platters simultaneously, this wouldn't recover from that. Also, there would be an option for enthusiasts / experimenters / adventurous souls to bypass the warnings, and continue using the drive, like for testing, "killing in the name of science", etc... but any possible warranty / data recovery contract (like the one some Seagate IronWolf Pro drives come with, IIRC) would be void, and there would be multiple confirmations, authentications, etc to really confirm you wanted to do that. (It would not be as simple as answering yes to like 5 consecutive prompts.) Well, there's one way that I think even modern NVMe Gen4 SSDs can't touch some really old hard drives - and that is ... time it takes to write the entire capacity of the drive. There's a Tom's Hardware article from, IIRC, 2006 (something about 15 years of hard drive history: capacity outran performance - would link it but I'm getting a 503 error on that and some other articles for some reason) ... and from what I remember, it took about 40 or so seconds to write the capacity of one 26MB platter on the 40MB drive. (So I'm guessing it would have taken a little over a minute or so to write the entire drive.) I'd like to see someone test with some old drives, like 5-20MB MFM drives or up to 80MB IDE drives. I wonder if, for example, a 5MB MFM drive (with 5 Mbit/sec interface speed) would fill the drive in like 8 or 10 seconds ... (although that doesn't also factor in the actual data transfer rate possibly being slower ... I do think that the ST-506 interface was far more limiting than the SATA interface or even PATA, although back then I was too young to do hardly any technical stuff with them.) The oldest working drive I have is an 8.4GB IBM Deskstar DTTA-350840. (I have 2 of those drives - the other one is in a video below another quote in this post.) IIRC, it took about 11 minutes or so to write the entire capacity of that drive. Also I think I tested a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo (before I put stuff on it) and IIRC that took upwards of 15 minutes or more, but I don't remember for sure. I'd guess that even the fastest modern high-capacity (8TB+) NVMe SSDs wouldn't come remotely close to touching the "speed" (time to write the entire drive) of, say, a 20MB PATA drive, or a 5MB MFM drive. Also ... for a future storage interface (or a future generation of PCIe / NVMe) ... I'd like to see performance be based on --- not raw GB/s transfer speeds, but based on time to write the entire capacity / have it be able to scale with capacity. That way, for example ... even if when it first comes out, the largest drive you could get is 16TB, and it writes its entire capacity in 8 seconds ... several years later when you can get, say, a 256TB or even a 1PB drive, it would still only take 8 seconds to write the entire drive. (And for an SSD, it wouldn't matter if it's sequential vs random.) When I've looked at buying SSDs, I haven't generally looked at the specific DWPD number, but ... one thing I generally like to get is at least 1 PB of endurance per TB of capacity, when possible, or more. I think I remember a few MLC SSDs a few years ago or so that basically worked out to about 1 DWPD over 5 years, which would be more than a PB / TB ratio, but I don't remember for sure. Also IIRC I've heard of some enterprise SSDs a few years ago (and/or maybe Optane) that had tens of PB of endurance even with well under a TB of capacity. I wonder what the "endurance" of a HDD would be though ... how much could you write to it until it fails like this one has? Also there was a TechReport series of articles on an SSD Endurance Experiment several years ago ... I'd like to see that repeated with modern SSDs (from QLC DRAMless cheap knockoffs, all the way to MLC/SLC(?) enterprise SSDs), and also throw in a few hard drives and see how many TB / PB of writes THOSE can take before they fail like that IBM. Also speaking of those enterprise SSDs, vs consumer SSDs .. what is it that gives them many times higher endurance? Are they using different types of flash, or is there something else going on? Yeah ... I was briefly thinking maybe of doing a little Chia farming with a few drives I already have sitting around (not 100TB though, and if you count available capacity it's only 2x 14TB + 8TB + a few more TB on a couple other drives), but these 2 posts and few others tell me that nah, I may as well not bother. And it reminded me of another thing ... For me, it's usually already too late by the time I find out about something like this, like Chia farming, Bitcoin/Etherium mining, etc, to have any benefit from it. (And on top of that, I often don't like jumping onto something right away that's unproven / be an "early adopter of gen1 stuff" / etc.)

Ahh, hmm... Well I couldn't find everything I want in a unit under about $250-300+, and increasing the budget to that level isn't an option. So, since I wanted to leave room in the budget to upgrade to a better one later, I have to significantly lower the budget. Also my brother said avoid TP-Link, and make sure it had gigabit Ethernet. Of the options I listed in the last post, that narrows it down to the Asus RT-ACRH12. Hopefully it's at least not worse than the Buffalo WZR-600DHP it's replacing. Office Depot's website says it's in stock near me for $59.99. My original budget cap was $150, so... Since this one is about $60, if I had to upgrade really soon (like within a year) I'd pay up to $90 for the upgrade. (As for longevity, I'm hoping I get at least about a year for every $10 spent.)

Okay, I just need to get *something* so we have internet again. I really wanted to buy something Sunday afternoon when it failed, but I've spent the last few days and a significant chunk of my data plan trying to find something, and I'm sick of trying anymore. Budget has been lowered to about $40, although there's a couple models I'd consider about $60. Lowered budget is due to urgency, and I don't want to spend $100+ on something I'll regret like 7-10 years later. Also, whichever one I get, we're not replacing it until it dies, and I don't want one known for high failure rates. If I don't get something with better than WPA2 security, maybe I should set the SSID to something like "u:admin_pw:welcome_key:96024999" … jk So which of these should I get? NETGEAR R6020-100NAS AC750 -- $29.97 @ Walmart TP-LINK Archer C20 AC750 -- $34.99 @ Office Depot NETGEAR R6080-100NAS AC1000 -- $59.99 @ Office Depot, Walmart, Best Buy ; $37.99 @ Micro Center (193 miles round-trip, 3 hours not considering traffic) ASUS RT-ACRH12 AC1200 - $59.99 @ Office Depot I'm kinda leaning toward either the Netgear R6020 or Asus ACRH12. It's replacing a dead Buffalo WZR-600DHP. Buying one online isn't an option, as I'm not going to wait a couple extra days to ship, and I'm not paying extra to get it delivered in the amount of time it'd take to go to a local store 5 miles away and pick one up myself. UPDATE: My bro said avoid the TP-Link, and make sure it has gigabit Ethernet. Did a quick check, the two Netgear ones only specify 10/100, but the Asus does say gigabit. Looks like I'll try to buy that one tomorrow (it's 11:12pm right now) unless we can come up with something better and cheaper (under $40).

I went on several nearby store websites, and came up with the models they have in my price range. Any that jump out, one way or another? WPA3 is extremely important, as well as open source support (and can't void warranty if I have to flash it myself); WiFi 6 would be nice too but can maybe forego if it's not needed for the next (price-in-$ / 10) years. There's, I think, dozens or maybe 100+ models, and I'm finding it really tedious on my phone to go through them one at a time to find out which onez support WPA3 and (without voiding warranty) open-source firmware. Getting one shipped isn't an option, cause once I decide which one to get, I want to be hooking it up within about an hour or so after that (or a bit over 3 hours if Micro Center has the best option). So going to the store myself is how I'm buying it. Iwouldn't have that urgency if I wasn't trying to replace a dead router Also a tide-me-over cheap router would directly eat into the budget for a separate future good router at a 1:1 ratio (unless it lasts longer than $/10 years). I also need to go to DMV to get my license renewed (in-person required cause first time RealID), I'm strongly thinking about going to a store on the way home and just grabbing a router, hopefully it won't be a piece of Scheiße. Best Buy: Office Depot: Walmart (someone said avoid exclusives, iirc cause no DD-WRT support): Costco (having difficulty seeing if items actually in stock in-store, pages say warehouse pickup available, standard delivery times apply): Target: Staples: Micro Center (only if it's worth the 193 mile / 3 hour round trip commute): I also tried to make a spreadsheet to sort the models a different way, and have price comparisons (similar model, different stores) bur it's not turning out well. But if you want to see it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U5FiKOJu2GyavP-OA31mVjdDfGh9IeUow6TnP6bixkM/edit?usp=drivesdk

What do you all think of the Netgear AX1800 (RAX10-100NAS)? It has WPA3, within budget, available locally, did find a review complaining about constantly kicking people off their network in router mode, but other than that most reviews are pretty positive from what I can see. I'm leaning toward that one.... Or maybe not, bro says reviews mention something flaky; also... One concern though ... https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1200014 implies to me, it may not get DD-WRT support. So far it's the only one I've seen under about $250 that supports WPA3. Also my bro comnented that he should start boycotting Broadcom.

Ahh, @Donut417 ... Yeah I know our Buffalo came with DD-WRT, but haven't found much current. AsusWRT does look promising though. My bro suggested the Asus RT-ACRH13 ... The '12 is in stock locally at Office Depot ... But they might be too old to support WPA3, idk. (I think they were released around 2015/6 or so.) Also we often don't replace things if we don't have to, at least not until we get serenaded by a well-fed lady. And I don't like replacing things every generation, I like to skip some. Also my brother says avoid Linksys, and recommends Netgear, and confirms that I should make sure it has WPA3. .... I'm still looking, but was thinking about the importance of a few requirements/preferences: WPA3 support - an absolute, non-negotiable requirement! I don't want to compromise security with WPA2. (Some of our devices only support WPA2 for now though, and we won't be replacing them anytime soon - Pixel 3a/4a phones till probably around 2025, my laptop maybe 2028-30 or when DDR6/7 is mass-available. My desktop is the most likely next replacement, around 2022-24 or so.) DD-WRT - strongly preferred, but would consider other open-source alternatives. However, it MUST support open-source, and if I have to flash it myself, doing so can not void / alter any warranty. WiFi 6 / 802.11ax - can probably be more lax on this one, so long as it doesn't bottleneck the next couple devices we have as it gets older and we get newer devices. (My preference is to hopefully replace the router every few laptop/desktop replacements, which in turn would get replaced every few DDR generations or so, leapfrogging each other.) Also general longevity would be nice too. I was just thinking, since this will be my parents' router (I'll buy my own when I need it) ... They're getting up there in age, and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this is the last one they ever buy. Dad's turning 75 in September, Mom turned 77 in January, dad has a couple relatives that lived to 98 (grandma) and 100 (great aunt). Dad's father (my grandpa) lived to 87 (barely - 1915-2002), mother to 94. (1916-2010; Her mom was dad's 98 year grandma, 1901-1999.) I don't want my dad to have to replace the router when he approaches or passes the age his dad (my grandpa) was when he passed away, if he hopefully makes it past that.

Ah. If that's the case, then I wouldn't want to spend more than .... Well, if I had to get 2 units (one cheap one to tide me over until I can get a better one), and a better one when I can find something, then the TOTAL budget would be around $120-150 combined. More likely though, once we have one (the first), we're not likely to replace it until it breaks and can't be fixed. My googling of our deceased Buffalo WZR-600DHP tells me it came with DD-WRT firmware, and IIRC the web interface mentioned that too with Buffalo branding. Also my brother says get something that supports DD-WRT, and avoid anything that doesn't support open source, and I agree. My brief research tells me that loading a 3rd-party firmware is likely to void the warranty, and I want to avoid that, so it needs to come with an open-source firmware preinstalled. (I might also consider OpenWRT, AsusWRT, Merlin, Tomato.) Yeah, true. We may not yet have devices that support WPA3 or WiFi 6, but was thinking, I don't want to have to replace the router so quickly when we get devices in a few years or so that do support those technologies. Would WPA2 still be fine in like 10 years or so? (Otoh maybe I shouldn't worry about it, I wonder if we may still be using some devices (probably not computers though) that are old enough to not even support WEP, but idk. Bleh I wish things weren't designed to be thrown away, I think it's wasteful and bad for the environment. I recently saw something (article, YouTube, I forget) that mentioned companies deliberately started designing light bulbs around the 1930s that would fail a lot sooner, so people would buy them more often. Also in a recent video, the short-haired version of Jesus Christ--I mean Louis Rossman was upset at companies for requiring like a $30k medical table to be replaced when it could be fixed with a $500 part, or refusing to sell a $1 part to fix a $2K MacBook or something like that. Here at home, my parents have a freezer from 1973/4 that still functions pretty well (they got it when my brother, born Oct 1973, was a baby, it does need to be defrosted now and then), an oven from 1962 (house was built then) that just failed in the last several months or so, I have two Baldwin Hamilton pianos from 1956 & 1950 that are mostly playable, just need a bit of repair & maintenance, dad has various test equipment like scopes, power supplies (no, not the ATX variety), etc from the 1960s or 50s or older, we may have some other non-electronic items dating back to the 1800s.... Ah ... Well here's a couple more pics - a basic floor plan, and a cropped view of the entire yard. The network cable shows where our Cox cable comes in, and the SSD is just there to cover up personal info. I forgot to mark the spot where our WiFi extender is, but its near the west end of the wall in the upper right corner of the large southwest room, S side of that east/west hallway. (The wall goes partway up, and has a shelf with posts going to the ceiling, the extender is on that shelf.) Total yard is about 1/2 acre, or about 90 x 270 feet. We now have a couple storage sheds in the back yard, one west of the pool (replaced the metal shed in the pic), other in the far northwest corner. One thing I was thinking earlier (before our current unit failed) was it would be nice if I could use a directional antenna to push the vast majority of the signal west, and avoid sending it east to the street. Should we maybe consider mesh, or would it be more expensive or harder to set up? (I'm still trying to come to grips with the idea that when we get a new router, we may have to reconfigure our many devices, and won't be able to just connect to the same SSID with the same passcode we've used at least since we got the existing router. We never changed it, or the admin login, from the defaults.) Ah.. so maybe I should consider Asus a bit more strongly then... (I was gonna say I would have hoped those 2 firmwares would have supported WiFi 6 already, or at least by the time we had devices that use it, but I don't remember if we EVER updated the firmware on our existing router.) Ahh, I'll have to look a bit more / again, and come up with a list of models. Normally I'd leave this tab open and do that on my PC, but my phone loves to sin by reloading pages when I switch back and forth (and lose things I'd typed), so I'll have to go ahead & submit post now, then come back and reply later. The RAX35 came up in my search yesterday too - I think it had some deal-breaking flaw or negative review, I'll have to look it up again as I don't remember. We don't have Sam's Club membership, but we do have Costco. If Micro Center wasn't 3 hours 11 minutes / 193 miles round trip driving, I'd also consider getting something there. (Fry's is gone as I'm sure you already know, it was about 15 minutes away or so.)

Okay this is hard to type on my phone, but it's the only working thing I have right now.... Anyway, our WiFi router (Buffalo WZR-600DHP) passed away earlier this afternoon, so I need to buy a replacement. (It happened around 2pm or so, its now 11:58pm PDT (UTC-7) as I type this sentence at 0.00001 wpy on my phone.) All it does is a 2 red flash every few seconds, and Google tells me it's basically bricked. I don't have the expertise to even attempt a firmware flash, which a few sites mentioned as well. So right now mine & my dad's phones are the only devices with internet. I don't feel safe plugging my desktop's Ethernet directly into our Netgear CM500 cable modem. (Just remembered my mom's phone is on the same plan with dad, but her phone is painfully slow and some things often don't even work on it.) I've spent most of the last several hours trying to find something online that I could buy at a local store & set up tonight, to no avail. Either they lacked required features, were over budget, had deal-breaking negative reviews, or weren't in stock locally. I'm basically looking for: DD-WRT preloaded (may consider OpenWRT, AsusWRT/Merlin, Tomato? But only if it comes factory installed) Under $100-150 WiFi 6 (or under $70 if only 5/ac) WPA3 (or under $30 if WPA2* or older) Designed to last a long time, like 10-12+ years or more. (Or at least 1 year per $10 spent) I need to buy locally as we otherwise have NO INTERNET on our PCs, so shipping is out of the question, unless it's faster than driving to a local super walmart the moment it opens & buying one there (if I drive 25mph over the speed limit (most you can do and still take traffic school to get rid of the violation point, still have to pay the ~$400+ fine though), do "California stops" at stop signs, enter the store like Heath Bell used to come into a baseball game from the bullpen, know exactly where the item is that I want, and there's no one in front of me at the checkout). My searches on Costco, Best Buy, Walmart all turned up units that were either too expensive, not available in-store, or had other glaring flaws. I really need to get a router this morning, so we can plug it in & get it running right away. Hopefully we can get a drop-in replacement that doesn't require reconfiguring the network, or re-authenticating existing devices or starting over with their ip, gateway, mask, etc settings. Also several times in my search some mesh devices came up, should we consider that or just go for a traditional router? Our current devices: Dad's laptop: Dell Inspiron 17" from 2017/18 with i7-8550U My daily driver laptop: 2015 Clevo P750DM-G with i7-6700K My desktop: built 2015, with i7-4790K, ASRock Z97 Extreme6 (not the AC version) Dad's phone: Pixel 4a My phone: Pixel 3a Mom's phone: Samsung Galaxy Core Prime with Android 5 Other devices include dad's old Galaxy Core Prime, 2008 Dell D830 laptop with Core2Duo T7250, my Moto G4 Play, LG G4, Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G, & a few older dead devices. Technically we dont NEED WiFi 6 now as I think none of our devices support it, but i anticipate some possible upgrades in the next several years. I'd prefer growing into an already capable router, not having to replace it so fast if it can't keep up with their new devices. House is about 2100 sq ft, cable modem (Netgear CM500, we have Cox) & old WiFi router are in a front corner of the house. We do have a Linksys RE6400 extender near the middle of the house. So… any recommendations on a locally available (not shipped / from online) router we should buy?

Ahh. (Was editing the previous post when you replied, was going to put this in it) I hit a bandwidth limit of (I think) a different type when running DBAN on a bunch of HDDs in my desktop last year. Had 10 drives connected to my ASRock Z97 Extreme6 (CPU = i7-4790K), plus 2 more drives plugged into a ByteCC BT-PESAPA PCIe to IDE/SATA card. (I forget if the card was plugged into a 1x or 16x slot though.) There's too many pics to attach even in a spoiler (would exceed the 20MB limit), so instead I put them in a shared Google Photos album. For example .. the 5TB HDD (NAG226TK) starts off at about 65 MB/s in the first screenshot when the total bandwidth is 1193 MB/s. (A 2TB drive is running ~138 MB/s, while a 4TB is ~163 MB/s.) A couple of the last screenshots show a list of all the drives that were connected, when the process was completed. Later, when some of the smaller drives (and probably a couple other 4TB and/or 5TB drives - there were 3 of each) were done, that 5TB drive jumped up to around 100-140 MB/s. Basically I think I hit a limit of around 1 GB/s (or a bit more) on the chipset / SATA lanes. (Also somewhere else I thought I had a few pictures where a DBAN was taking like over a week to complete ... I think it was with a few 8 and 10TB drives, and multiple passes.) Was just thinking ... I wonder if there are any platforms where the total PCIe bandwidth is as much greater than the RAM bandwidth, as a typical consumer system's dual-channel RAM is faster than a hard drive... (So that, instead of RAM being much faster than your storage, it would be much slower )

Ah ... but even with PLX, I have a hunch that would still not get past a platform bandwidth limit? For example, let's say you put 8 of those cards that take 4 NVMe drives each, in this board (see spoiler) .... I'm guessing you wouldn't have (3.5*2*4 + 3.5*4*4 -- 4 slots are 8x so 2 SSDs each I guess, also I'm assuming PCIe 3.0 and rounding to 3.5 GB/s) 84 GB/s combined transfer rate? I have a feeling LGA 1155 couldn't do that...

Ahh, well I was thinking bifurcating / splitting them ... I thought at least on some server platforms you could bifurcate, say, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot into 8 PCIe 3.0 x4 devices? Or is there no way to double the number of lanes if you step down a generation, even via risers, etc?