Sam I Am Not

I regularly do single footage dumps in excess of 1TB and my understanding was that the NVMe cache would speed up those transfers since the NVMe has a write speed of around 3500MB/s, albeit limited to around 1000MB/s or whatever the limit of the 10GbE connection is. I thought the file transfers would quickly write everything to the NVMe cache and the HDDs could copy from that over time while they play catch up with their slower transfer speeds.

You don't know the half of it. I just spent two days going through my 29 hard drives (mix of external/internal) and making a huge document of the capacities and contents of each so I can load them all onto a single NAS solution. Out of 29 hard drives, mostly dating back to 2003 until now, I only had one drive that was dead. And surprisingly an old 160GB external firewire from 1998 (the size of a large dictionary) mounted and still worked. I for sure thought that would've not even powered up. But yeah, I definitely need redundancy in my life.

Two days is nothing. Up to a month would be the longest rebuild time I'd find acceptable. By i/o, you mean the drive being in use while it's rebuilding? Guessing the rebuild is faster if it's doing nothing but the rebuild? If so, my i/o would be next to nothing if anything. My work is done 100% on NVMe storage and then archived to HDD storage after the job is wrapped. Any idea if more RAM or the NVMe cache speeds up rebuild times at all? The RAM upgrades with Synology are insanely overpriced ($700 for 32GB) but if more RAM makes a big difference then I might stomach the upgrade cost.

Are there still SMR drives being sold today? Sounds like they are to be avoided. I Googled "18TB Ironwolf Pro SMR" and couldn't find anything saying that they're SMR. Those are the drives I am going with. There's a good deal on them now at B&H Photo Video.

Is there any way to calculate an estimated rebuild time for large RAID arrays when a drive fails? I found a rebuild calculator at memtest dot com but the calculator only has checkboxes up to 5TB and I don't know what you'd enter in the "Rebuild Time" field. The default "Rebuilt Time" is set to 10MB/s which seems insanely low. I was planning to set up a NAS in RAID 6 (6x18TB HDDs and 2x2TB NVMe cache drives) in a Synology DS1621xs+, but now I'm having cold feet after learning about rebuild times. I've found some people posting rebuild times online but they seem to vary greatly, with some rebuild times being not too bad (per TB) and some that are alarmingly slow. For example, one person said that they had a 3TB drive fail in a 4x3TB RAID 5 array and it took 33 days to rebuild, for a single 3TB drive failure. At that rate of 11 days per TB, that'd equate to 198 days for an 18TB drive which is not an option for me. TLDR; I need a SAFE mass storage solution for video footage that won't take several months to rebuild if I encounter a drive failure. Right now I've got all my projects spread across 5 external HDDs (1x20TB, 1x12TB, 1x10TB, and 2x8TB) that are all in RAID0. I've been pushing my luck (knocks on wood) without a drive failure for years but I know it's just a matter of time before 1 of the 10 drives inside those 5 striped externals fails and I lose and entire drive worth of data. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated!

96TB of hard drives but technically it's only 64TB of storage since it's in RAID 6. Thankfully it can be expanded to 144TB on the cheap with a 5-bay expansion unit. The rebuild times after a drive failure must be days on a RAID that size though.

I ended up populating the motherboard with all 2TB 970 Evo Plus drives. I was going to get the Sabrent for current projects but ended going the NAS route so I can have everything in once place. A 96TB NAS with 2x 2TB NVMe drives for read and write cahce ended up being a better solution. The NVMe cahce drives and 10 Gigabit connection give me more than enough overhead, even when working with 8K footage.

Thanks. I'll check it out. I found an extension that let me download images with a single-click. Not as fast I was hoping for but much much faster than Right-Click > Save-AS on every one. I'm not sure what you mean about walking the line of copyright protection. I'm not pulling random photos from random Instagram accounts. They are from a clients account to be used in a video for their company.

The title says it. I'm looking for a tool that will download all photos from an Instagram profile. I need hundreds of photos pulled from a clients Instagram for an After Effects animation. It's easy enough to right-click > Save As a photo, hit the next arrow, rinse and repeat. What I want is to find a tool that can streamline that down to a few clicks. As in, enter the desired URL, click Select All, and hit download. Or something along those lines. My animation only requires photos so I don't need a tool that does video also, but it's not a negative if it does. I'm not sure if a tool or browser-based service like that is out there. Anybody know of one?

I just built a new PC and it's super fast compared to my old PC. However, I've been experiencing restarts and BSOD with the stop code "WHEA uncorrectable error". After I built the PC I started benchmarking. Puget, Unigen Heaven, 3D Mark TimeSpy, and Cinebench R15 and R20 passed with flying colors. Then I went to AIDA64 to stress test and the PC restarted within 1 minute or less. I tried a few times with the same result. Then I tried doing a 15-minute run of Cinebench R20 the PC would always crash before it'd reach 2-minutes in. I also get random BSOD crashes even when I'm idle or under light load. After fresh Windows installs and much troubleshooting, I just swapped out the 256GB G.SKILL kit with a cheap 64GB Crucial kit that doesn't even have heatsinks on it and I've just passed a 15-minute Cinebench R20 run and I'm currently 30 minutes into an AIDA64 stress test with the Stress CPU, Stress FPU, Stress cache, and Stress system memory boxes checked without a crash or BSOD. Could it have just been bad RAM that has been plaguing me this whole time? I'm going to let the AIDA64 hit 45 minutes, restart the PC and then try another 15-minute Cinebench R20 run and then AIDA64 stress test again to see if I'm still stable after a restart. If I pass again I'll try re-installing the 256GB kit and see if the crashing and BSOD comes back. I'd really like to get to the bottom of the BSOD and restarts and have a fully stable PC. *SIDE NOTE: Just about 1-minute into the AIDA64 test, my screen went black and I thought I crashed. Then a few seconds later the screen came back on and the timer was still ticking away at 1:14. Is that something that happens with AIDA64 sometimes? PC Specs: CPU: 3970x (stock) Motherboard: ASUS Zenith II Extreme Alpha RAM: G.SKILL 256GB Trident Z Neo 3600 (I tried the bios default 2666 and DOCP 3600) Storage: 2x 1TB 970 Evo Plus m.2 (one for OS, one for scratch drive) PSU: Corsair HX1000i Cooling: Custom EKWB Loop Idle Temp: 32C Under Load: Currently 63C (25:13 and counting into an AIDA64 stress test; CPU, FPU, cache, system memory). I've never seen the temp go above 64C.

Found out how to tame the RGB party mode. Taming the jungle hiding behind the side panel tomorrow with some Cablemod cables

Finished! The tubing is sloppy and needs to be redone but it's running.

CPU and monoblock installed. That probably should've taken 20 minutes instead of two hours but I really didn't want to screw up that part.

The CPU arrived. Time to start the build.

Another is being sent out and is supposed to arrive in 3 days. I think there must be a thief in the Amazon shipping department. That seems more likely than somebody buying and returning it with the CPU removed and the empty packaging getting resold. Somebody must inspect returns on items of this price. I highly doubt a CPU ever comes from the AMD factory like this which Amazon seemed to suggest when they asked if I wanted to sort it out with AMD directly. Thankfully the replacement is getting delivered soon. I'd be very upset if I had to deal with starting a claim and waiting for days or weeks of investigating before I could get a refund or replacement.