James Stokes

Thanks for the information! I think I will wait and see if anything goes on sale during the Prime Day sale on Amazon. At the moment I think I might get a Elements drive and see what it's like. If I like it I might get another later if I decide I need more storage.

When you edit a post there should be box below your text that shows all the images associated with your post. If you click on the trash can on the bottom right of the second duplicate image then it should also remove itself from the post. The scores for your HD are very nice, especially the random reads and writes for small files. I am actually pretty impressed how strongly your drive performs overall. Most drives I have seen perform really well in one area and then more poorly in most other areas.

Thanks for the link. I will look into it and see what I find. Shucking may be something I may look into in the future. However at the moment I am a bit leary of buying an external drive due to the relatively large 1 star reviews (about 20%) I saw for the 8TB WD My Book I was looking at. One of the drives I was thinking about getting was the 6TB WD Blue drive. The main thing that made me hesitant about getting the drive is that I was wanting an 8TB drive. Do you think getting the WD Element is worth it compared to the WD Blue drive?

Cool thanks! I will probably get a 6TB or 8TB drive so I think leaving at least about 100GB of free space should be good.

I found an article that talks about cache and the types of user that would benefit from a larger cache in their HDD. TLDR cache is important but unless the drive is being accessed by multiple programs at once or being used in a server then having the largest possible cache size is not as important. Here is an article talking about disk cache for hard drives: https://www.techjunkie.com/what-is-hard-drive-cache Also with regards to your question about upgrading to all SSDs, with current pricing it would cost you $1,345 to upgrade to 5 2TB Samsung EVO 860s. This is a lot less when compared to $545 for 5 2TB WD Black drives. For your use case I would recommend getting a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe drive for your boot drive (plus your applications) and continue using mechanical HDDs for your other drives. From my research I think that for your situation a WD Black would serve you better then a WD Red. The main reason being that the firmware was set up with desktop users in mind, while the Red lineup was created with servers and other similar uses in mind.

I have been looking into the new 4.0 PCIe NVMe drives and was blown away at the insane speeds shown on the benchmarks I saw with 5GB/sec for seq read and 4.2 GB/sec for seq write. In comparison my 960 EVO NVMe drive has 3GB/sec seq read and 1.5GB/sec seq write. I would be very interested in seeing some real world testing done to see how much of a difference it makes in different types of tasks. My expectations is that it would only make a marginal difference in booting or gaming when compared to the 970 EVO NVMe drive. However, I am sure that it would make a very marked difference when using it for rendering videos or running complex simulations of protein folding (I don't really know how much of a difference a fast storage drive would make when doing that, I only have heard a little. I think that based on the little I know about this topic that a fast CPU and GPU would make a larger difference). I think it is possible that in the future having a fast NVMe drive will make more of a difference as software developers for mainstream software and games optimize their code to better utilize faster storage speeds (a similar thing happened a couple years ago as multi threaded CPUs become the norm, at the moment it would not be unusual to find modern games that utilize 4 or more cpu threads in running the game). Below are some links to a couple articles I found on PCIe 4.0 storage drives. Overview of PCIe technology: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-you-need-to-know-specs-compatibility.html Amazon link for a Gigabyte 4.0 PCIe NVMe drive https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-PCI-Express-Interface-Performance-GP-ASM2NE6100TTTD/dp/B07TJWZGL9/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=Gigabyte+AORUS+NVMe+Gen4+M.2+500gb&qid=1562877972&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0 This is the benchmark for my 500GB 960 EVO m.2 SSD drive This is the benchmarks for the Gigabyte 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD I got from the PCWorld article I linked above

I think that for gaming you would be very satisfied with the 970 Evo NVMe drive. I most games care more about the CPU and GPU for reducing stuttering in games. Plus what monitor you are using and its refresh rate/ the milliseconds in lag (2-4ms would be about as good as most people would need). The main benefit you would get with an NVMe drive is in loading levels of games and not the actual gameplay itself (and I doubt you would experience faster loading of game assets unless it is a graphically intense game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Final Fantasy). However, as long as you are using at least a SSD you should experience good performance in games. For me the main benefit to a NVMe is snappier response while using Windows 10 opening and closing programs and moving files on and off the drive. You would also benefit from a NVMe if you were using it to scrub through videos while editing them or running other intense productivity software. Here is a video I found that explains the differences between different types of SSDs: This is a video that shows the loading times of different games using a mechanical HDD, SATA and NVMe SSds: Here is a video that compares SATA and NVMe and the effect on gaming: I hope you find these to be helpful

I am looking for a HDD to backup my current data in case one of my drives fail. When I get my new drive I was curious how full I should fill a mechanical HDD. Is it bad for the drive to fill it to 80 or 90 percent? The only thing I can think of is that it would lead to more file fragmentation due to the limited space to put new files.

I am looking for a hard drive that I can use to create a backup for about 5TB of data, plus I would like to have room to grow in the future. Does anybody have any suggestions for a HD that would be good for my backup needs? Also I would be using the HDD to backup the data and to retrieve the data if needed onto other HDDs. I would not use it to install and play games or anything like that. Thanks for all the help!

Just keep in mind that the Zenfone 3 zoom takes about 2-3 hours to fully charge due to its massive 5,000 mAh battery. While reading a review I found that the phone uses a 2A/5V charging adapter. The reviewer speculated that it was using technology very similar to Quick Charge 1.0 but tweaked slightly to be better optimized for their phone. One suggestion I read while researching how long it takes to charge a Zenfone 3 Zoom was to turn the phone off while charging. That way the phone is not using power while it juices up. If I took the 2-3 hour charge time and interpreted that to mean 2.5 hours of charging. Then, that would be 150 minutes from 0% to 100%. And, with a 5,000 mAh battery, this would be an average charging rate of about 33.33 mA's/ minute. As you will see after looking below that charging rate is actually pretty good when comparing it to other commonly used phones. I think that users of this phone need to remember that it has a battery that is about 60% larger than the average phone. Thus it stands to reason that it will take longer to fully charge the phone. To put this in perspective I have listed the average charge rate for some popular phones. The iPhone 7 (2,900 mAh) takes about 138 minutes to fully charge. This would be about 21 mA/minute. The iPhone 8 Plus (2,675mAh) takes about 116 minutes to fully charge. This would be about 23 mA/minute. The Pixel 2 (2,700mAh) about 2 hours to fully charge. This would be about 22.5 mA/minute. A OnePlus 5 (3,300 mAh) would be fully charged in 90 minutes. This would be 36.67 mA/minute. A OnePlus 3 (3,000 mAh) would be fully charged in 72 minutes. This would be 41.67 mA/minute. I hope you guys find this useful. Or at least interesting.

That is good to know. This is my first time buying a phone that I was not already pretty familiar with. lol

Thanks very much. That is a really useful tool.

After looking into different options available I have so far found a few phones that I like so far. The phones I have liked so far are the Zenfone 3 Zoom, Xiaomi Mi A1, and the Nokia 6.1. Both the Zenfone and Xiaomi phones have 15 plus hour battery life and for a decent price. I also like that they both have USB type C. The main thing I am concerned about these two phones is whether I would be able to make phone calls in the US with this phone considering that they are not marketed for the USA.

Cool, thanks! I will look into that phone.

A friend of mine asked for some help locating a phone for him to use with Ting. I was hoping for some suggestions for a good starter phone with a good battery and for about $100-$200. My friend will mainly be using the phone for calls. The only other feature he expressed interest in is using maps for when he goes on trips every year or two. These are the main points I am considering when looking for a good match: The phone needs to have a pretty good battery life. At least 32GB of storage. I would prefer that to not be extra bloatware/ apps that are not needed. It would be nice if it was close to stock android. One other thing to keep in mind is that it would be very unlikely for him to play many games or watch videos using the phone. Thanks, and I appreciate any help or advice