Maverickfftytwo

Hey, it just works

That was it! Thank you very much! I didn't even notice there was a headset or headphone option!

So the motherboard in my PC is a Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX Mini ITX, and it has onboard wifi & BT. The headphones I have are Audio-Technica ATH-SR6BTBK. I know BT isn't the pinnacle of sound quality, and I'm not expecting it to be, but when I use my BT headphones with my PC the sound quality is garbage compared to when I connect them to my cell phone (LG V60) or tablet (Samsung S6 Lite). It's like I'm suddenly listening to music through a tin can and the speaker is 1000 miles away. If I play the music over my desktop speakers (Creative Pebble speakers) it sounds just fine, and if I plug the headphones into the speaker jack they sound just fine as well. Literally the only time the headphones sound bad is when they are connected to the PC via bluetooth. In all cases I'm listening to music from Spotify, but it's also the same difference if I watch a Youtube video or any kind of audio content at all. I'm assuming there is some kind of setting in Windows that adjusts the sound quality via bluetooth, but I can't seem to find anything that has made a difference. If anybody could help me out with this I'd be really grateful. This my work PC so I'm at it 8+ hours a day and I can't always listen to music, podcasts, etc. over the speakers. If I'm only listening to Spotify I can get around the issue by pairing the headphones with my phone/tablet and controlling spotify from my desktop app, but for things like Youtube it isn't practical to play the video on screen and also listen via the phone/tablet while it also is displaying the video the entire time, it really should just work correctly with the PC.

Well I got it to boot. I'm not sure why it worked, but it worked so fuck it... In the BIOS I went into the SATA settings and saw there was a "NVME Raid mode" set to disabled, so I enabled it. By itself that didn't do anything, but I noticed a new menu option in the BIOS for RAID config and when I went into that I could see that it was identifying the drive. Went through some of the menus in there and saw a an option to "initialize" the drive so I went ahead and did that. After that was done I booted to my Windows install USB, cleared the partitions from the previous install, did a fresh install...and it works.

Bumping this because I'm still stumped. Really hoping somebody has an idea.

Burned the firmware .iso to a DVD, booted to it, it doesn't detect any devices to update. Crystal Disk sees it. Windows sees it. The BIOS sees it (only with CSM enabled). Samsung Magician and their firmware software don't though...

So, Samsung Magician doesn't see the drive. Windows does. It shows up under "this PC" reports itself correctly under properties, etc. I can move files onto it, delete them, use them, whatever. I popped the m.2 into another PC and I can use it fine in that one as well, although that PC is old and doesn't support booting from NVME so I couldn't check that. I pulled the CMOS battery on the motherboard just to see if it would help, it didn't. I'm attempting to update the firmware on it now. Since Magician won't see it I can't update it that way, so I've got the firmware .iso from Samsung's website and now I have to find a optical drive and another SATA cable to try and get that working...

I've ran the windows installer about three times on that drive just to see. Same result. I've got the SATA drive on it now, windows installed fine to that and it's booting to the SATA drive so I'm going to install Samsung Magician then reboot it with the m.2 installed again and just double check the m.2 SSD. I just can't believe it will report in the BIOS and let Windows partition it and install to it and something about it wont let it boot. I'm thinking it has to be something in the BIOS or a motherboard issue...

Yes, and set to the 1st spot in the boot priority.

I'm putting together a computer for one of my kids from used parts I've found for sale locally. Here is what I have so far... ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard Ryzen 3400G CPU Samsung 960 Pro 2TB SSD Crucial Ballistix 2x4GB 2400Mhz RAM Corsair 650W PSU I put it all together, plugged it in, turned it on, and it posts into the BIOS no problem. Bios sees my m.2 drive, etc. Plugged in my Windows install USB, the installer see's the m.2 just fine, do a clean install, when it finishes it reboots but instead of booting into Windows and finishing the setup it boots back to my USB. If I remove the USB and try booting to the m.2 SSD I get the "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message. The BIOS version of the mobo was 3103, but I updated it to 4301 and saw no change. Everything appears to be working as it's all reporting correctly and even the windows installer was able to access and partition the ssd, I just can't seem to figure out why it's not booting to Windows. I've looked through a lot of the BIOS settings and I can't seem to find anything that looks obvious, it all looks like it's set correctly. Any ideas? edit: I haven't tried a SATA drive yet, but I'm about to just to see what happens.

The primary cost is in drives. I repurposed a AsRock H77 PRO4/MVP motherboard, i5-3570, and 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 1600Mhz from a rig that I replaced. Picked up a Antec P101 Silent for $90, bought a new PSU for $127, picked up a LSI 9207-8i HBA for $60, got two breakout cables for the HBA for $26, bought a Sandisk Cruzer Fit thumbdrive for $9. So $312 for the hardware. If I build a second one as a backup I'll use one of those AsRock motherboards with the Celeron CPU built in. Those are $70-80 plus another $20-30 for DDR4 RAM (which I actually have some spare...) so even if I didn't have a motherboard/CPU/RAM combo sitting around it would only be like $400-450ish. Remember, I'm not running VM's or dockers so I don't need beefy hardware. The case has eight 3.5" bays, and I've started populating those by buying 10TB hard drives which are about $250 a piece (if you can catch a sale) so after I get all eight that will be $2000 for the drives. I want to add two SSD's as a cache drives as well, so that will push it towards $2200ish. Unraid license is $59 to $129. Now in your case you have drives already, so it really boils down to if you also already have hardware or if you want to try and acquire hardware cheap. For reference, you could buy a Mediasonic ProBox 8 Bay 3.5" SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure for around $270 and that would be a DAS, or for the same kind of capacity you could pick up a 8 bay Synology NAS for around $800 but with your drives being all different sized you're going to lose capacity even with Synology Hybrid Raid. This is why I went with Unraid and PC based hardware. Price wise it's comparable, the hardware is replaceable and upgradeable, it doesn't need to be directly connected to my workstation taking up desk space like a DAS, and most importantly I can "add drives as needed" without any issues. I can literally set it up out of the way, let it run, and just keep shoving data onto it until I need more space. Then I just order another HDD, put it in, and keep going. The HDD doesn't even have to be any particular size because if I buy a bigger drive than my parity drive I can just make the new drive a parity drive and then convert the old parity drive to a data drive. IIRC, those full size Dell Optiplex's had a decent amount of drive bays. You can get those pretty cheap, add in a Unraid license, and boom you'll have your issue solved likely for less than the cost of that DAS.

If you want to reduce the footprint of your desktop PC's I'd recommend small form factor builds for the gaming PC's, and Intel NUC's or AsRock DeskMini's for the non-gaming PC's. The NUC's or DeskMini's can be VESA mounted behind the monitor to give a more "all in one" feel to the workspace, without many of the downsides of actual all-in-one systems. The gaming PC's will hold you hostage to space due to the GPU. The only other alternative I can think of for saving space would be the desk PC's LTT is so fond of, but that's quite the project and expense.

Is it expensive? Even if you bought the $130 top tier OS it's going to pale in comparison to the cost of the hardware. When I'm done populating my basic desktop based unraid server with drives it will have cost me about $2600 total, and that is with using some "free" hardware left over after upgrading my gaming rig. I don't need a ton of cores or RAM to run VM's or dockers, I just need storage space. It would easily be over $3000 if I needed new hardware with lots of cores and RAM. And realistically, if I wanted to bite the bullet and buy all of my drives right now I would be in the perfect situation to one of the free solutions as all of my drives would be the same size. In your case, with such a variety of drive sizes, unraids ability to "mix and match" drives should be quite the value as it would prevent a lot of hassle for you and it seems you've already saved quite a bit by being able to repurpose those drives instead of buying all new matching drives.

Look into Unraid. Your system is pretty similar to an old system that I have and I am going to be using unraid for photo storage.

Bad deal. IIRC you could get those for $50 cheaper prior to the RTX 3000 release, which is when we've seem a climb in used GPU prices. I know the regular 1070 hybrids were slightly under $200 and crept up $50 or so for sure.