Snoz

Maybe do a video/refresher on what to look for in SSD storage. I recently was looking into purchasing M.2 storage for a laptop. I found a 4TB drive which seemed like a great deal, only to look at reviews saying that it was slow compared to others. It turned out the particular brand used QLC memory and didn't have a DRAM cache - but used the systems RAM for caching. I then looked into other M2 drives and found that one should also be looking into the specs for the total data written over the life of the drive and the mean time between failures. The QLC M2 drive had low values for the total amount of data over the life of a drive, whereas MLC and TLC had higher values. For instance the 4TB drive I orignally looked at had lifetime of 800 TBW where as a drive like the Kingston KC3000 which used TLC was not only faster but had a lifetime of 3.2PBW - so effectively can be overwritten with a lot more data before failing, however I guess this is the difference between a cheaper and more expensive drive. Given the option I would choose the drive with the longer life such as the Kingston SC3000 but given the cost I would probably choose a lower density 2TB drive which at this point in time is a more affordable option. Anyway, I thought this might be a good topic to talk about for people wanting to upgrade their storage. If I hadn't have seen bad reviews on the M2 4TB drive I had originally looked at and dug into why I wouldn't really have thought too much about it and probably have gone with the cheaper one.

Hi DaveMath, Thanks will have a look.

I know you guys do a lot of building a PC videos, but maybe another one about what to look out for/gotchas that might initially be something a person might miss. My son and I just built our first computer with components, as opposed to buying a ready made machine. We purchased some hardware in the recent sales, an intel i7-12700K, MSI Z690 A Pro Wifi with DDR5, crucial DDR5 4800Mhz memory an MSI AIO cooler and RTX 3070Ti, and a corsair 1000W PSU. We purchased a XIGMATEK Lamiya case which came with 4 RGB fans, which was on sale a year or so ago when we first started at looking at building a machine. Some of the issues we came across. While the case said it supported 180mm PSU and the PSU we have is 180mm, and while it fitted in ok, there was no room to plug the cables once the PSU was installed. The 3.5" HDD bay mounting bracket was in the way. We had to drill out 2 of the rivets holding the HDD Bracket so it could slide out of the way to install the PSU cables. After looking at the MSI doco about installing which fans onto which FAN headers, we found out that the case fans were not compatible with the motherboard FAN headers. Instead the FANS connected to a FAN controller which was just connected to the power and provided two speeds - high and low. They just come on with the power and so the motherboard cannot control the speed but you have a remote control to do this. We installed everything and we were pretty happy it booted fine first go. When we went to the BIOS I tried to change the XMP profile to 4800Mhz. However the system wouldn't boot at this, it only booted at 4000Mhz. I have since found out that the while the MSI motherboard does support speeds of up to 6400Mhz, it turns out there is a list on the MSI website, which lists memory compatibility and unfortunately the crucial memory is only supported at 4000Mhz. I guess we just assumed that since the motherboard supported 4800Mhz, buying 4800Mhz memory of any brand would have been supported, but we've found out that is not the case. Similarly I guess since it is the first time buying a case that came with fans we just assumed they would have the right connectors. The only fans we control with the motherboard are the AIO Cooler fans and pump (connected to the CPU fan header and pump header). Anyway, just my 2 cents worth about issues with building a PC for the first time

I agree with those talking about using a tape Library. Since most of the data is going to be archival, an Linear Tape File System (LTFS) could be used. You can get devices like what used to be called StrongBox NAS - now called StrongLink LTFS. It connects to the backend tape library running LTFS and has a disk cache, so the tape library appears as a NAS device on the network. You can migrate older data from your live file system across to the archival LTFS system. This helps alleviate the pressure of always expanding disk storage as the data grows. You can pick up some older tape libraries which are capable of supporting up to LTO8 on the second hand market - some of them if they come out of large data centers usually have a full slot licence (which is usually a big cost). You just need to replace the LTO4/5/6 drives they are usually sold with for LTO8. LTO8 tape drives alone though may cost more than the second hand library - LTO8 SAS are around US$7500 and LTO8 Fibre Channel are around US$8200.A library with 166 slots and storing LT08 uncompressed at 12TB would give you 2PB archive, or even a 133 slot library would give you around 1.6 PB.

Maybe Alex could do a video on upgrading the prusia 3d printers to a 3 colour or quad colour print head which do colour mixing. Such as the Diamond Hotend https://reprap.org/wiki/Diamond_Hotend or the quad fusion print head https://store.printm3d.com/products/the-quadfusion-print-head An example from instructables: https://www.instructables.com/id/Full-Color-Mixing-3D-Printer/

Maybe Anthony could do a video on benchmarking PC's running Linux with various linux benchmarking tools that are currently available.

Hello Tech Wizard, fellow Oztarian, CPU-Z in the screen capture above. The second picture is a photo of the console in the computer room which is pretty much what you see in the picture without cropping. cine.mp4

Best I ended up getting before reinstalling.

Running cinebench via remote desktop to new server before it gets reinstalled. The lower score highlighted was from the same machine the other day.

Maybe do a video on PCIe as a switching Fabric and possible a comparison of other Fabrics like Infiniband and Fibre Channel - like speed, cost, advantage/disadvantages. A3Cube had a PCIe Cluster via it's PCIe based RONNIEE Express technology. PLX/Avago/Broadcom have a PCIe switches, as well as Microsemi's Switchtec PAX Gen 3 Pcie Fabric Switch. The demos from Microsemi look pretty good - being able to share Pcie devices between machines and swapping devices between machines on the fly via commands to the PCie fabric switch.

Hi, With your guys running out of space on your petabyte storage, maybe you could look at tape archive - I know you guys did a video and thought the price was a bit for backing up before so you were doing google cloud backup - but maybe it's time to look it at again. You could look at Linear Tape File systems and if you had a device like a "Strongbox NAS" which has disk caching, you could make the tape archive appear like an ordinary NAS to your hosts. That way you could still make your old data still appear online - even though it's on tape. You might be able to pick up an older multi-slot tape library system with a robot like DELL ML6000 series and replace out older LTO drives with LTO7 or LTO8.

Worlds most expensive PC ? Hi All, Doing some quotes for work, I couldn't resist selecting a no disk option when I saw the price of the configuration. Thought I'd share some screen shots. Use you best Dr Evil impression when reading the price ?

Apart from WebDav server for Android found a few other options: As mentioned in a previous post by Black3v3r there was the USB Mass storage connection once phone is in developer mode - under the Developer Options https://www.doubletwist.com/help/question/usb-connect-mode/ Software for MTP as a Windows Drive http://www.mtpdrive.com/ Try Changing Device driver for Portable Device https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/how-to-assign-a-drive-letter-to-a-portable-device/829e43b6-7210-4566-8e47-1ac147946f7b?page=2 Using FTP server software on Phone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5097389/can-androids-internal-memory-be-mapped-to-a-drive-letter-on-pc http://www.ztw3.com/forum/forum_entry.php?id=115992

I wouldn't mind seeing a video on ScaleMP. You'e done the multi-user gaming on a single machine, how about a gaming machine out of many machines. From my understanding the free version of scale MP allows memory to be aggregated, but not cores. Maybe you could get the ScaleMP people to give you a licence to aggregate CPU's. Running XenServer with a single windows host you might be able to get a machine with Terra bytes of memory and a Gazillion cores :-) It would be fun to see. Unfortunately I am under resourced to test out the scenario :-( All the best