PC Tech Thread

One of the work machines:-

[24:XXXXXX@ZZZZZZ]:XXXXXX $ df -g | egrep "GB|ZZZ"
Filesystem GB blocks Free %Used Iused %Iused Mounted on
/dev/ZZZZZZfs 1119252.27 311837.32 73% 461347124 39% /ZZZZZZ

1 and a bit EB.

They're very good kit.
I replaced a SFF PC (with a i7-3770k) with a NUC815BEH i5-8259U.
Some scouring of eBay and good fortune timing it with an offer ended up getting it for £275.
It seems as quick as the i7 and benchmarks suggest there's nothing between them. 5/7, would buy again.

Or two 4TB mirrored cheaper still.

Nope (even with 3TB).

3TB NAS drive = £97.49
1TB NAS drive = £44.98

(Prices from scan.co.uk)

so 2 x 3TB mirror is more expensive than 4 x 1TB in Raid 5, although a 2-bay NAS enclosure would be cheaper than a 4-bay.

(You can make it cheaper by using Desktop HDDs but I've seen too many HDDs fail at work and would rather pay the slight bit extra for piece of mind.)

What are you guys storing that is TBs in size and needs to be replicated?!

I only have photos, documents and music replicated and redundant.

Actually not even music anymore, deleted my music collection a few years ago when literally everything I owned was available on streaming services.

TBs in size

Surly it's just about scalability. Or that 1TB is only marginally more expensive than 500GB (edit: actually few seem to sell anything less than 1TB).

As an eg iirc my back up external HDs have been 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB. Each time I've paid about the same price, and been driven by price point rather than storage requirements

HD Porn

Peasant.

UHD VR FTW

Even so. Mirroring stuff at home doesn't increase redundancy that much. Burglars steal computers, laptops and NASs. If you have a fire, flood or theft, expect to lose your NAS as well as your other devices.

I pay Digital Ocean $5 per month for 250 GB of remote storage, which I replicate everything important and irreplaceable to on a nightly basis. This buys me peace of mind that should my home storage be fucked, I'll have a copy.

To be honest, even this is a legacy arrangement as I don't tend to store anything locally now and am moving to a cloud to cload backup arrangement. Surely the ideal endstate is to not have any data stored at home at all rather than mess around with NAS devices?

The arrangement I am gradually moving to is all data being on Digital Ocean storage, with a nightly snapshot to an OVH storage container. My google docs are bundled into that too. Costs me about $12 per month I think and I get to swap out PCs without worrying about copying data.

UHD is HD

VR intrigues me though, do go on... :)

What are you guys storing that is TBs in size and needs to be replicated?!

Nothing in TBs, I'm probably under 250GB in total, my wife might have a chunk for her business(es). I'll also be a remote rsync destination for my brother (who might be 250GB or so), and possibly my other brother, and my neighbours, etc. 3TB is about the minimum with a 4-drive NAS so that'll do nicely for me.

Even so. Mirroring stuff at home doesn't increase redundancy that much. Burglars steal computers, laptops and NASs. If you have a fire, flood or theft, expect to lose your NAS as well as your other devices.

Indeed. Hence my plan:-

NAS = main backup with redundant disk(s)
external HDD = on-site backup in case NAS dies
rsync to brother's NAS = backup in case house burns down

Why a NAS rather than just a couple of external HDDs?

• More than one computer to back up so connecting an external HDD to each and every machine each time is a pain
  
• Also useful to have a simple always-on computer as a central store/host for various things
  
  

The NAS can also be used as a central store for things I don't need backed up, e.g. holding movies for streaming to laptops, etc.

To be honest, even this is a legacy arrangement as I don't tend to store anything locally now and am moving to a cloud to cload backup arrangement. Surely the ideal endstate is to not have any data stored at home at all rather than mess around with NAS devices?

It's a nice idea, but I'd still want to be in possession of a copy of my data. I'm not ready to trust it all to the cloud (or multiple clouds for the data that needs to be backed up).

I'm always ashamed to struggle with the trackpad on the train. On my x260 though I find it shocking

It's a nice idea, but I'd still want to be in possession of a copy of my data.

Can't argue with this, not everybody is comfortable with third party hosting. And perhaps rightly so.

I encrypt everything stored remotely, not everybody has the knowledge to do this in a safe way. Its easy to make a mistake.

Uncompressed DVD and Blu-ray video.

And backed up online as well.

This seems...shortsighted quite frankly. Why pay to stream what you already own in digital form? You can fit about 3000 CDs in a single TB.

If you just listened to the music you owned it wouldn't make sense to pay for a streaming service.

If you want to listen to anything new then you'll likely be paying for a streaming service, in which case keeping all of the old music (which the streaming service can provide) doesn't make as much sense.

I gave most of my CDs away to Oxfam a few years ago. Probably kept 20 or so. (Never got in to vinyl.)

I've been fully MP3 and laterly FLAC since about 1999. Wow, coming up for 20 years so my switch from CD to digital was longer ago than most people, so I've been toying with storage and backup costs for music storage for quite a while.

As @greenbank says, if you mainly listen to new music and only rarely want to go back to that CD you bought in Our Price 25 years ago, it soon becomes a bit silly to repeatedly buy storage to keep it when you can listen to it on demand whenever you want.

This seems...shortsighted quite frankly. Why pay to stream what you already own in digital form? You can fit about 3000 CDs in a single TB.

But there's the faff of then setting up your own NAS and Plex/whatever other server you want, a bit of extra setup on your firewall, an app or two if you're trying to listen on your mobile.

Which isn't much once you've got it set up. And I did once have everything ripped from CD and DVD, and the home server and firewall.
Then I donated all my CDs and DVDs, never bothered buying anything Blu-ray as it seemed like it was obsolete tech even on the day it was out.
Between BBC/Netflix, Spotify/Tidal then the vast majority of what I want to watch or listen to is sorted.
Don't own a CD or DVD player (not even had one in a PC for 5-10 years).

Can see the argument for keeping everything local, but it's not one that seems worth it to me.
I'm happy renting/streaming content for the sake of convenience. Obviously not everyone is.

I guess I'm in the minority... I wasn't arguing for owning vs streaming in general though, but against actually deleting an existing music collection from a drive.

I have a streaming subscription myself. However I can stop that (as I did for a while when on a budget) and still have my own collection. Which is not all available on streaming services.

I didn't need to serve it remotely though as it was uploaded to free-tier Google Music and streamed via that.

Also, content available from each platform does vary over time. More so with video.

I actually have a NAS (well 2, one Synology, one running MediaVault with docker images as well for fun) but I also cloudback up.

For photo's they are backed up directly to Synology AND Crashplan (at the same time), then sync'd from Synology to Amazon Photos.

For my documents sync'd to Crashplan only.

Anything going to crashplan is encrypted locally. Honestly, I've had to restore from CP before and while it's a little pricey now at $10 a month, having UNLIMITED versions is very VERY useful.

Don't fall for cheaper backups, which after a period of time will hard delete anything you've deleted. So not really backups but more of a sync (and yes that's people like Carbonite etc...)

Decided to look at a new PC rather than mess about upgrading current one - will relegate number 2 kid's gaming PC for number 1 kid to use for school work and minecraft.

Could someone let me know if this spec makes any sense? Build is from PC Specialist website.

Budget is £1k for the PC only, use will be mid level gaing, nothing serious just Fortnite, FIFA etc:

Case CORSAIR CARBIDE SERIES™ 200R COMPACT GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Eight Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.4GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard ASUS® TUF X470-PLUS GAMING (DDR4, 6Gb/s, CrossFireX) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2400MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 10301st
Storage Drive 480GB ADATA SU630 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb (520MB/R, 450MB/W)
2nd Storage Drive 2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 256MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY
Processor Cooling STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Extra Case Fans 1x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)Wireless/Wired Networking WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARDUSB/Thunderbolt OptionsMIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00001]

any advice appreciated - i know very little about this.

Probably easier to look at pre-configured machines. That is a high end CPU but low end GPU.

Good point. I'll see what they have off the shelf.

I just got a pc built around the ryzen 9 cpu, I basically built in on scan, then rang them up and they may recommendations based on what I was using it for, might be worthwhile doing.

Any need for a Blu ray or dvd player? I've not had one in years and never missed it