AndrewJB

I've personally had a good experience with the Creative Sound Blaster Z. Haven't used any of the Asus cards though. Does the motherboard audio work if you use a live linux distribution like Knoppix?

Classic shell might be the culprit, I know that the dbpoweramp shell extension causes me lag when I open up folders with flac files in.

I would recommend clearing the CMOS by shorting out the pins on the motherboard or taking the clock battery out to reset the firmware configuration.

I've had this lag happen in the past if the drive I was right clicking had spun down due to lack of activity and had to spin back up. However, I would recommend checking your drives with CrystalDiskInfo and see if there is any lag selecting discs using that. Also, have you tried updating Intel Rapid Storage Technology to a newer version? Try using 14.8.16.1063 (I use it with my Z87 motherboard). And I would also recommend updating to Windows 10 1909, 1803 is no longer supported by Microsoft.

I personally use Openvpn to access my home network, more specifically I used the Pivpn installer on my Pine64. It was very easy to set up, and the only tweak I had to do was change the duration of the CRL days to prevent it from expiring if I didn't need to add/revoke users often. I do have a static ip address though which made the process easier.

Yes it does do system image backups in the free version, along with incremental backups. Backing up my user directory (folder backup) is a paid feature though.

I've used Macrium reflect in the past to do system backups. It managed to back up my Ubuntu installation in 3 minutes I believe (going by the created and modified timestamps), and took 50 minutes to backup my Windows 10 user directory (158GB).

Have you considered getting a 4TB Datacentre grade hard drive?

Have you tried a different sata to usb converter?

So I've had a look at the above post and it seems to be missing the specific command. When doing the file system, you need to do "mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/partition" according to the arch wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAT) to get a fat32 file system.

I would recommend either removing the 4TB drive or disabling the sata port in the bios first before reinstalling Windows, so it certainly puts everything on the nvme SSD.