PC Tech Thread

I've done that a few times over the years and the drives didn't even have jumpers. Don't know if I was just lucky or something. Would be curious to know how common drives with jumpers are now days. Feels like something from when I built PCs 20 years ago!

Yes, I don't think it's actually jumpers like they used to be. It's something about joining pins or covering pins on the power supply connector.

I’m thinking of doing this for a NAS I’m having delivered.

I thought that hard drive prices would be lower than they are...

yeah I shuck external hard drives all the time - often it's a cheap way to get large HDs to upgrade my NAS storage. Amazon and other large retailers often do 25%+ discounts on WD elements drives for short runs, which contain WD white drives, almost identical to WD reds. Last one I picked up was a 14tb WD white for under £150, when the equivalent WD red costs around £360. In some cases you'll need to insulate one of the 3.3v terminals to get a drive to work but with SATA drives the jumpers really don't do much anymore.

I thought that hard drive prices would be lower than they are...

I picked up a 1tb M2 SSD for £67 earlier today and was quite pleased with how cheap that was but then I saw the price of spinning disks and can see what you mean.

My old NAS has a 2t hard drive in it, and I don't remember it being that much more expensive than it is now.

When I next upgrade my PC (which might come soon by how its behaving at the moment) I'll definitely have an M2 SSD.
Perhaps it will give the usable performance and responsiveness jump that moving from disk to SSD would have done?
Currently have a Sandisk ultra 512gb SATA which was probably my best PC purchase so far.

This computer, the only one I've owned with m2, is so much higher in specification than any other PC that I have used before that its hard to know how much performance is down to the SSD. I suspect M2 does make a big difference for some disk intensive types of use.

Perhaps the increasing popularity of Intel Optane has increased the price of mechanical disks?

I'm thinking Ryzen, 32gb ram, 1tb SSD, keep my Geforce 1050ti (it appears to not have lost much value at all since I bought it)

Looks like the GPUs are the budget blower at the moment?

I am looking to buy a VR headset, already have a high specs PC as some of you might remember my drama of getting it for my 3D work end of 2019.

Any first hand experience? Anything to look out for in particular?

Occulus are good but all your purchases tie to your facebook account so if that gets banned they're lost forever. The Quest 2 is standalone meaning you don't need a pc, the Vive or Reverb will do slightly higher resolutions and refresh rates but you need to be tethered to the pc.
It's hard to beat the Quest 2 for bang/buck but if you want the top then I'd be looking at the Valve Index and HP Reverb G2

Is FB likely to be banned or go out of business anytime soon...? I don't really use it much these days but... how about the Oculus rift s? I have been reading about the difference between the rift and the quest and other than the fact that quest is a standalone device, it seems the image quality isn't as good as the rift?

I think the Oculus is much more within my price range, it's just for a bit of "lockdown has finally broken me" fun.

Is FB likely to be banned or go out of business anytime soon

It's more a risk of your FB account getting banned for no reason and you losing your purchases.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316326-facebook-is-permabanning-oculus-quest-2-owners-for-owning-an-oculus-quest-2

Buying hardware that's tied into a platform like that seems a bit nuts.

Then again, I imagine that the HP headset will stop working as soon as you run out of cyan ink.

Is there any easy way to work out what heat will be generated by a PC?

I have a convenient spot for my new server but it's in a cupboard with limited airflow and I don't want the fans going full blast. I suspect the two aren't really compatible but wondering if there was a way to actually tell.

Pretty much all power it consumes will be output as heat.

I have everything at my desk running through a cheap Maplin power meter so I can tell my usage:-

• 43" 4K monitor
  
• Work laptop
  
• iPhone charger
  
• Ikea lamp with 7W bulb
  
• ESXi server with 4-core i7-4820K and minor loading
  
• A couple of Netgear network switches
  
  

And all of that is taking ~120W most of the time. I wouldn't even that amount of heat to be boxed up with limited airflow.

What's the expected load on the server going to be? And what's the rough volume of the cupboard?

A light load in a big cupboard (e.g. 6ft x 3ft x 3ft) is going to be a lot different to a heavier load in a 2ft x 2ft x 2ft cubby hole.

in a cupboard with limited airflow and I don't want the fans going full blast

any kind of closed cupboard is going to be a bad idea. you may need ducting. or replace door with mesh.

any kind of closed cupboard is going to be a bad idea

To some degree, any room is a closed cupboard. You can use standard room heating calculations to determine the temperature rise for a given power dissipation.

If you install grilles towards the top and bottom of the door, your server becomes the heating element in a convection heater, and you can generate a fair bit of air flow without mechanical ventilation

Cheers all.
Cupboard is something like 40x30x80. Server would be six hard drives and normally low processor load but occasional transcoding.
Vents wouldn't be possible.

It's looking pretty much like a no I'd say.

Anybody want a brand new unused 512GB M2 SSD? £50 posted.

500GB WD Blue 3D, M.2 (2280) SATA III 6Gb/s SSD, 3D NAND, Read 560MB/s, Write 530MB/s, 95k/84k IOPS, Retail

Monitors, anyone seen anything apart from the sold out LG that's 4K and 120hz plus?
Eve is vapourware and I got my money back once I tricked others into backing it, but now I actually need something.

To some degree, any room is a closed cupboard.

we are all in the cupboard, but some of us are looking at the stairs (from underneath)

#rep
Who knew Wilde would have something to say about WFH😉

Arguably, he did WFH when he did manual labour at Reading Gaol.

(He also probably did much of his writing at home.)

You wash your dirty mouth

Ignore.