Torey

The choice between two raid 0 or one raid 10 isn't for a performance reason, just figured having them separate would be safer in a way. But I have no experience with that, was just an assumption.
 
Anyways, thanks for your help. Between here and reddit I think I have all the information I need.

Yeah, it's a great CPU yet. Around three years ago I bought a 2550K for $100 USD at Fry's Electronic store. The only reason I upgraded from that was to get a friend who had no money a modern PC. I upgraded for his benefit, sold him my stuff super cheap. Anyways, I would keep that 2600K until it dies or until the CPU world has a revolution.

Hello fellow Windows users and tweak geeks of the LTT forums!
 
I have spent the time since I upgraded to Windows 10 from 7 tweaking, modding and overall trying to make my windows exactly how I want it. A Unique and personalized operating system is, as I'm sure many of you will agree, something that is truly special and I would like to share the codeplex repository I have created to share the tweaks I have built for Windows 10 with you all.
Anybody who would like to host any of their tweaks or tools on this repository, please message me as I would be more than happy to share anybody's (safe) tweaks with the world.
Enjoy!
 
https://windows10tweaksanddebloat.codeplex.com/
 
The Windows 10 Tweaking and Debloating project
The goal of this project is to put all of the Windows 10 tweaks and tools in one place, as well as to provide an access platform for all the current and up-to-date debloating tools for Windows 10. This, in theory, will make it easier for all members of the windows community to come together and access, for free and without hassle, any tweaks or tools they may need to make their windows experience truly how they want it.
Currently only tweaks written by me exist however I hope that in future the Windows 10 community will reach out to me and allow me to put their projects on this page.
RULES: *No malware/spyware/rats etc. *Nothing that would disrupt the freedom of the user
DISCLOSURE (please read) I hold no accountability for anything that may happen to your system on use of these tools, they are unofficial tweaks and, therefore are making changes Microsoft have not ordinarily allowed the user to make in the GUI itself. Therefore take into account the risk factor involved in this before using any of these tools. I would HIGHLY suggest creating a system backup point before using any of these tweaks and backing up any personal data.
 
Edit #1 Added a reg tweak to change the system tray clock and calender
 
If you would like to visit the reddit post I first made about my project please visit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3ffn9j/windows_10_tweaks_and_debloating_tools_codeplex/
[yes I know I copy and pasted it over...shhh it's our little secret ]
 
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope that my project has made yours, or someone you know's Windows 10 experience better!
 
regards,
- Dragoon
 
 
 

Must Have : 
 
http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/6015-pc-folders-add-remove-windows-10-a.html

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/6051-personalize-classic-context-menu-add-windows-10-a.html

 

I like the site and the start to it. One suggestion I would make it so provide more detail into what each tweak does under source code. Perhaps explain what the thing is that you're removing, disabling, etc. 

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

When going to Goodwill I have one thing in mind, electronics. I finally lucked out today when I found a CM Storm Trigger with red switches. I bought it for $4 dollars, took it home and started cleaning it because...  it needed it. 
 
Anyways here are the progress pics. (Sorry for the bad quality)
 
I still prefer my Noppoo Choc Mini, but I love red switches now. Definitely will be buying a mini mechanical with reds soon.
 
(Link to Pictures)
 
Oh, I forgot to mention that it works perfectly. The only thing even remotely wrong with it is the A and D keys are worn down. I guess the person was just too lazy to clean it.

I guess I never really thought of that. I just figured it would give it what it was told to whenever being stressed. I don't know how to do 4.45 on this motherboard. I just pick a whole number for the multiplier. 

1. $35 could have been an overage fee, did you have the proper funds in your account yesterday?
2. $35 could have been a placeholder charge. 
3. Contact your bank ASAP. 

I bet the $35 is a placeholder until the station knew what you actually bought. Keep an eye on it, but I bet that $35 goes away.

Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage
 
In lots of the storage builds that exist here on the forum, the primary method of data protection is RAID, sometimes coupled with a backup solution (or the storage build is the backup solution). In the storage industry, there are load of systems that utilize RAID to provide redundancy for customers' data. One key aspect of (good) storage solutions is being resistant to not only drive failures (which happen a LOT), but also failure of other components as well. The goal is to have no single point of failure.
 
First, let's ask:
 
What is a Single Point of Failure?
 
A single point of failure is exactly what it sounds like. Pick a component inside of the storage system, and imagine that it was broken, removed, etc. Do you lose any data as a result of this? If so, then that component is a single point of failure.
 
By the way, from this point forward a single point of failure will be abbreviated as: SPoF
 
Let's pick on looney again, using his system given here.
 
Looney's build contains a FlexRAID software RAID array, which is comprised of drives on two separate hardware RAID cards running as Host Bus Adapters, with a handful of iSCSI targeted drives. We'll just focus on the RAID arrays for now, since those seem like where he would store data he wants to protect. His two arrays are on two separate hardware RAID cards, which provide redundancy in case of possible drive failures. As long as he replaces drives as they fail, his array is unlikely to go down.
 
Now let's be mean and remove his IBM card, effectively removing 8 of his 14 drives. Since he only has two drives worth of parity, is his system still online? No, we have exceeded the capability of his RAID array to recover from drive loss. If he only had this system, that makes his IBM card a SPoF, as well as his RocketRaid card.
 
However, he has a cloud backup service, which is very reliable in terms of keeping data intact. In addition, being from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, he has fantastic 100/100 internet service, making the process of recovering from a total system loss much easier.
 
See why RAID doesn't constitute backup? It doesn't protect you from a catastrophic event.
 
In professional environments, lots of storage is done over specialized networks, where multiple systems can replicate data to keep it safe in the event of a single system loss. In addition, systems may have multiple storage controllers (not like RAID controllers) which allow a single system to keep operating in the event of a controller failure. These systems also run RAID to prevent against drive loss.
 
In systems running the Z File System (ZFS) like FreeNAS or Ubuntu with ZFS installed, DIY users can eliminate SPoFs by using multiple storage controllers, and planning their volumes to reduce the risk of data loss. Something similar can be done (I believe) with FlexRAID. This article aims to provide examples for theoretical configurations, and will have some practical real-life examples as well. It also will outline the high (sometimes unreasonably high) cost of eliminating SPoF for certain configurations, and aim to identify more efficient and practical ones.
 
Please note: There is no hardware RAID control going on here, all software RAID. When 'controllers' are mentioned, I am referring to the Intel/3rd party SATA chipsets on a motherboard, an add-in SATA controller (Host Bus Adapter), or an add-in RAID card running without RAID configured. The controllers only provide the computer with more SATA ports, and it is the software itself which controls the RAID array.
 
First, lets start with hypothetical situations. We have a user with some drives who wants to eliminate SPoFs in his system. Since we can't remove the risk of a catastrophic failure (such as a CPU, motherboard or RAM failure), we'll ignore those for now. We can, however, reduce the risk of downtime due to a controller failure. This might be a 3rd party chipset, a RAID card (not configured for RAID) or other HBA which connects drives to the system.
 
RAID 0 will not be considered, since there is no redundancy.
 
Note: For clarification, RAID 5 represents single-parity RAID, or RAID Z1 (ZFS). RAID 6 represents dual-parity RAID, or RAID Z2. RAID 7 represents triple-parity RAID, or RAID Z3.
 
Note: FlexRAID doesn't support nested RAID levels.
 
[spoiler=Our user has two drives.]
Given this, the only viable configuration is RAID 1. In a typical situation, we might hook both drives up to the same controller and call it a day. But now that controller is a SPoF!
 
To get around this, we'll use two controllers, and set up the configuration as shown:
 

 
Now, if we remove a controller, there is still an active drive that keeps the data alive! This system has removed the controllers as a SPoF.

[spoiler=Our user has three drives.]
With three drives, we can do either a 3-way RAID 1 mirror, or a RAID 5 configuration. Let's start with RAID 1:
 
Remembering that we want to have at least 2 controllers, we can set up the RAID 1 in one of two ways, shown below:
 

 
In this instance, we could lose any controller, and the array would still be alive. Now let's go to RAID 5:
 
In RAID 5, a loss of more than 1 drive will kill the array. Therefore, there must be at least 3 controllers to prevent any one from becoming an SPoF, shown below:
 

 
Notice that in this situation, we are using a lot of controllers given the number of drives we have. Note also that the more drives a RAID 5 contains, the more controllers we will need. We'll see this shortly.

 
[spoiler=Our user has four drives.]
We'll stop using RAID 1 at this point, since it is very costly to keep building the array. This time, our options are RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10. We'll start with RAID 5, for the last time.
 
Remembering the insight we developed last time, we'll need 4 controller for 4 drives:
 

 
This really starts to get expensive, unless you are already using 4 controllers in your system (we'll talk about this during the practical examples later on). Now on to RAID 6:
 
Since RAID 6 can sustain two drive losses, we can put two drives on each controller, so we need 2 controllers to meet our requirements:
 

 
In this situation, the loss of a controller will down two drives, which the array can endure. Last is RAID 10:
 
Using RAID 10 with four drives gives us this minimum configuration:
 

 
Notice that for RAID 10, we can put one drive from each RAID 1 stripe on a single controller. As we'll see later on, this allows us to create massive RAID 10 arrays with a relatively small number of controllers. In addition, using RAID 10 gives us the same storage space as a RAID 6, but with smaller worst-case redundancy. Given four drives, the best choices look like RAID 6and RAID 10, with the trade-off being redundancy (RAID 6is better) versus speed (RAID 10 is better).

 
[spoiler=Our user has five drives.]
For this case, we can't go with RAID 5, since it would require 5 controllers, and can't do RAID 10 with an odd number of drives. However, we do have RAID 6 and RAID 7. We'll start with RAID 6:
 
Here we need at least 3 controllers, but one controller is underutilized:
 

 
For RAID 7, we get 3 drives worth of redundancy, so we can put 3 drives on each controller:
 

 
In this case, we need two controllers, with one being underutilized.

[spoiler=Our user has six drives.]
We can now start doing some more advanced nested RAID levels. In this case, we can create RAID 10, RAID 6, RAID 7, and RAID 50 (striped RAID 5).
 
RAID 10 follows the logical progression from the four drive configuration:
 

 
RAID 6 becomes as efficient as possible, fully utilizing all controllers:
 

 
RAID 7 also becomes as efficient as possible, fully utilizing both controllers:
 

 
RAID 50 is possible by creating two RAID 5volumes and striping them together as a RAID 0:
 

 
Notice that we have reduced the number of controllers for a single-parity solution, since we can put one drive from each stripe onto a single controller. This progression will occur later as well, when we start looking at RAID 60 and RAID 70.

I was wondering if some people could recommend a few pair of headphones that are ~$150 and have nice mesh/soft ear cups. (Similar to these http://uncrate.com/p/2010/09/akg-headphones-xl.jpg)
 
Also what is the current headphone amp/dac that people seem to agree is great that's ~$100?
 
I'm planning to buy myself a combo for Christmas and would love to see what people recommend. 
 
Things I plan to do with them are: Listen to all kinds of music (Literally everything), Play video games (Mostly CSGO), Listening to TV shows and movies, and chatting with friends.
 
I will probably never leave my home with them, so the looks and amp/dac shouldn't matter in this way.
 
Thanks to anyone who'd like to help, it's much appreciated.

#? New Linus law, recommended by Paul. Faster Anuses

Hit sign up, then nothing happens, oh well.

Anything that lowers the prices on something I want is a win for me!

Anything that lowers the prices on something I want is a win for me!

Anything that lowers the prices on something I want is a win for me!

Put your fingers on the tubes to even see if the pump is running. You can generally feel or hear the water moving if your close enough, unplug all the other fans to see if it's even working.

Guys, guys obviously "This" makes a gaming motherboard. Did you read the part about the gaming USB ports. A must have.
 
 
.. In all seriousness I have this board and it's great. But as of right now, nothing really makes a motherboard gaming or not. Just buy the board that fits your price range and has the features you want. 

Anything that lowers the prices on something I want is a win for me!