Carskick

I've been researching for days, but I've had a hard time finding what I'm looking for... I'm looking for a switch with AT LEAST 3 Ethernet ports that support at least 2.5gbe for under $200, or a really good router that has this for around $300. Most switches in this category give 2x 10gbe ports and a bunch of 1gbe ports for about $200, but I need at least 3 of the high speed ports. (1 for Server, 1 for my PC, 1 for wife's PC) I got excited when I found the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000, but then discovered it only has a single 2.5gbe port. I've looked at switches such as the Netgear GS110EMX, which is perfect, but is short 1x high speed port (it has 2x10gbe & 8x1gbe) If anyone knows of any magical device that'd help me out, please let me know. For those who are interested, here's the situation: Our office contains our 2 PCs that currently have 1gbe (Will buy upgraded ethernet cards to bring them up to speed), as well as other computers that only need 1gbe. The router & modem are in this room, as will be the new switch. Getting CAT 6 from the router/switch to these PCs is easy, and only .3 to 5 meters away. (CAT 5e may even work here) I'm currently deploying a home server that will have a 4x12TB HDD RAID 10 that I'd like to be able to access from our main 2 office PCs at 200-300MB/s minimum per PC and more is just icing. So in theory, 2.5gbe to each PC & 5gbe to the server would allow both PCs to saturate the RAID10's maximum speed. 10gbe would be good future proofing, but is overkill. The Home Server is also in another room, and the cable distance is probably close to around 20 meters away. Currently, I have a single CAT 5e cable running to the server room, which also contains the switch that wires in the rest of the house. But I'd likely run a direct CAT 6a wire from the server to the new switch/router in our office in this upgrade, giving the server it's own high speed line, and the rest of the house a shared CAT 5e line. Planned Wish List: - New Switch/Router with at least 3x 2.5gbe or higher speed ports, and extra 1xgbe ports are a plus ($200-300) - 3x PCIe 2.5gbe ethernet cards ($30 to 100 each) - CAT 6a & Hardware as needed Thanks so much!

Option 1: Cleanup existing drive (ie, CCleaner, Windows Disk Cleanup, uninstall apps/programs, remove unnecessary data) Option 2: Add another drive, move stuff to it Option 3: Buy a larger drive, clone everything from original drive to new drive, then swap.

Problem solved! Thanks to an Amazon review on my Sabrent SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure, I discovered that a firmware update of the USB enclosure fixes the problem https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/FIRMWARE/Others/JMicron-JMS578-USB-30-SATA-Controller-Firmware-124010002.shtml I was able to replicate the issue on a 3TB WD I had lying around. I then flashed the firmware, then even the enclosure gave the same GPT Protective error. I used diskpart to clean the drive, recreated, and boom, all is normal. I'm cloning my user files SSD to this hard drive now, which Macrium wouldn't do with the enclosures old firmware, and will try putting it in the server. If all is good, I'll do the same with the Toshiba drive, and proceed from there. So all this hassle and my previous reformat was caused by the stupid stock firmware on this controller... Unbelievable. As I mentioned before, it worked fine with smaller drives. I recovered customer data off of it many times, etc. But I guess the issue had to do with how it handled 2TB+ drives or something. Thanks everyone for helping me get through this nonsense!!!

I found this on Macrium's website. I'll bet this is the problem: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW72/Incompatible+Disk+Selected External USB enclosures... We have identified that a number of recent external USB enclosures will 'fake' 4096 Bytes per sector disks and cause the error above. This happens regardless of the actual sector size of the attached disk and even if the disk supports 512e. Why do they do this? Normally disks with 512 Bytes per sector that are larger than 2TB would need to be initialized using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format. Note that GPT disks are not supported by Windows XP, however, MBR disks are supported by all Windows Operating Systems, including Windows XP. If the reported sector size is changed to 4096 Bytes then MBR disks can be as large as 16 Terabytes and still be accessible by Windows. So, by changing the reported disk sector size to 4096 Bytes for disks attached to the enclosure this enables all Windows PC's from XP onwards to be able to access disks greater then 2TB. If you are selling USB enclosures then this gives you a larger potential market and is a 'no-brainer' product feature. Isn't this good? Well yes, if the only purpose for the USB enclosure is to provide additional storage and you do not intend to take out the disk. But this is bad if you intend to clone to a disk in the enclosure and then use the cloned disk to boot your PC. It simply won't work. If you remove the disk from the enclosure then it cannot be read. This is because the sector size will change and the partition structures on the disk will be unreadable. So what do I do? If you receive the 'Incompatible Disk Selected' error shown above and you are using an external USB enclosure, then either try a different enclosure which doesn't change the reported disk sector size or directly attach the disk to a spare SATA port on your PC's motherboard. This will ensure that the disk manufacturer's drive geometry is reported correctly and may allow you to proceed with your clone or restore operation providing that the reported sector size is now compatible.

The computer is definitely using UFEI. But you have helped me get somewhere with this. I am using a USB 3.0 docking station with the drive on my PC. Tried it on my wife's PC, which has the same exact docking station and motherboard, drive detects correctly! When I put it into the 2nd PC, different motherboard, different USB 3.0 docking station, no go. So I brought my USB 3.0 adapter over to the 2nd PC, and it now detects it! So it appears the issue is switching from direct SATA to a SATA/USB bridge, or to a SATA/USB bridge with a different chipset. Never had an issue doing this with MBR, is this a GPT specific issue? I originally planned on sometimes bringing this drive from my Server (2nd PCs) hot swap bay to my USB 3.0 as needed, but it appears this won't be possible over GPT. If I want it to work predominately with SATA connections, I'll have to reformat it while connected to SATA, then recopy over all the data, correct? Geez, why is GPT so picky this way? Any way around this?

As other's said, you may be asking the wrong question. I assume you're asking if cacheless drives are worth it, since sequential speeds are capped by SATA3 (6gbps) I've installed hundreds of SATA SSDs in a variety of PCs, from low end to high end drives/PCs. Based on this, here is my opinion: Cheap DRAMless drives are fine as boot drives in old & lightly used computers. They are also fine as game storage and general data drives where speed isn't that important, specifically write speeds. For heavy use case or drives that are heavily written to, I NEVER suggest a DRAMless drive. Especially since you're usually only saving $10 to $20 on a drive.

In it's current form, I'm using USB 3.0 on the first PC, and sata on the 2nd. Just tried using USB 3.0 on the 2nd PC, and it detects it the same incorrect way. SATA on the 2nd PC is set to AHCI, and I've tried it with Hot Swap setting on and off. (It's my new server I'm setting up, so it's got hot swap bays, though by-passing them directly to SATA didn't make a difference) That being said, as I mentioned before, switching form SATA on my PC to USB 3.0 before I reformatted caused the same issue. The reformat wasn't a long term fix.

I've come across this issue a couple of times, but have never found a fix. Hopefully someone knows a long term fix for this. I have a 5TB Toshiba X300 that is plugged into my computer (Win 10) through a USB 3.0 dock. It is formated as 1 large GPT partion and has data on it, and it all works fine. When I take the drive out and plug it into another Windows 10 (via SATA or USB), the computer tries to detect the drive as MBR, and the partition appears as a 1.99GB GPT Protective Partition. I cannot convert it to GPT with Windows "Computer Management" or EaseUS Partition Master. If I put the drive back into my USB 3.0 adapter to my computer again, it's back to a 5TB GPT partition and is fully functional As an aside, I had to format the drive when I went from internal SATA to the USB 3.0 drive on my PC, because I this issues. Why is this drive's GPT format not being detected correctly when it's switched from one PC to another, or one interface to another? Is there a fix? Thank you!