PC Tech Thread

Where do folk go for external hard drives these days? After a midrange 500GB unit

scan.co.uk usually.

Argos also have plenty of that kinda thing.

Not sure 500GB is mid-range these days, you'll get 1TB for just over £40.

I'd highly recommend avoiding spinning drives these days, especially for such a small capacity. Glacial speeds.

You can roll your own SSD-based external drive in seconds:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/480gb-kioxia-exceria-25-ssd-sata-30-6gb-s-tlc-flash-555mb-s-read-540mb-s-write-retail

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-ib-235-u3-icy-box-enclosure-fits-25-sata-hdd-ssd-1xusb-30-type-a-usb-powered-black

£33 all-in, can go cheaper if you look around.

@ectoplasmosis gah wish I’d seen this, maybe a future project. Argos sorted me out for £45 (speed not a massive concern)

Is there anything out there to benchmark After Effects/AME rendering times? I've reset the bios as part of a troubleshooting excersize but now have an M2 drive holding most of the media and a 3090 GPU which I would have though would be powering through things a bit more than it is. Updating bios is on the to-do list.

Edit: actually the AE source file is on the network - that's probably going to be slowing things up eh?

Wouldn't have thought the source file being on the network would affect rendering if the media is local.

What's the CPU and GPU use look like?

To be honest I've lost track of where the source footage is a bit. GPU carked it with 2 weeks until delivery and I've been limping by on my old machine and just rushing everything to get it out the door without having time to check if everything is working as effeciently as possible. Just doing a collect and will test with everything definitely coming from the local disc to see if it make a difference.

CPU is Ryzen 9 5950X GPU RTX 3090

What made me think the .AEP would make a difference is network traffic seemed to be maxed out (though that's not uncommon, our network is pitiful here)

Edit: collected all sources to C: and it's miles faster, especially in buffering. So our network is slow... that's not news to me.

Edit edit: encoding still slower than I would like. probably just a result of the codec or effects on the layers.... GPU acceleration is enabled.

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Which final output codec are you rendering to?

I'd assume that GPU acceleration only happens on specific effects, some will still be on the CPU.

Could it be limited by something reliant on a single-thread? Check the CPU page and right-click it to show logical processors if it isn't doing so already.

It was an MP4 with a H.264 codec. I did wonder if maybe it was just a limitation of the codec.

@Brun yeah it did appear to be multithreading, but not with all cores at 100% like when I render with Vray. Good point about the effects though, they might not all be capable of multithreading.

Fucking OneDrive.

My company moved to MS365 a while back. One drive is central to that, but it keeps adding My Documents as a synced folder no matter how many times I remove it. Anyone know a way to reliably stop it from happening without uninstalling onedrive (I like the idea of synced folders, just only the ones I tell it to)

Also, any recommendations for a disc space analysis now my previously used JDiskReport won't run because they haven't updated their Java security certificate?

Windirstat is pretty ubiquitous

Ta. Does the job

Is there a defacto 'things to do immediately on new build' list? Just built my first windows machine in 15 years - want to make sure I've done the needful!

All the updates. Two or three times. All optional ones too
Setup bit locker, back up the keys

things to do immediately on new build

Uninstall as much of the bloatware as possible

I'd highly recommend avoiding spinning drives these days, especially for such a small capacity. Glacial speeds. You can roll your own SSD-based external drive in seconds:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/480gb-ki­oxia-exceria-25-ssd-sata-30-6gb-s-tlc-fl­ash-555mb-s-read-540mb-s-write-retail

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-­ib-235-u3-icy-box-enclosure-fits-25-sata­-hdd-ssd-1xusb-30-type-a-usb-powered-bla­ck

£33 all-in, can go cheaper if you look around.

Can someone explain why I might not want to use something like this for a drive plugged into my router?

I have this setup, fitted with a 2TB SSD, plugged into my Linksys Velop router. Works well for file sharing via SMB.

Far from a replacement for a proper NAS solution though…

Yeah, I don't think it'll be a NAS. But it'll do for now. (backing up what's on computers in the house, being somewhere I can put films/telly on for when the internet goes kaput. that kind of thing)

if anyone is in the market for a nas/ nas drives, I bought 4 x 8tb wd red pro's from scan just before christmas only to install them and realise the raid level I wanted to use actually didn't leave me any real wiggle room in free space moving forwards so I'm currently in the process of doing a disk-by disk swap with some new 16tb drives instead. which leaves me with 4x 8tb red pros i don't need but can't return.

I also have my old wd mycloud PR4100 knocking about as I upgraded myself to a more recent qnap enclosure (ts-464), which has 4x4tb wd red (normal version, about 6yo now) in currently but could also swap out with the 8tb drives.

On the NAS topic, dipped my toe in the NAS thing about a year ago by getting a small 2x2tb setup, which is now getting close to full (around 70% or so). Is it worth upgrading to a 4-bay or would it be perfectly fine to just grab a pair of higher storage drives and keep the current 2-bay? I'm happy enough with the drives just mirroring, but am aware I'm limited to 50% of the total capacity vs 75% or so with a 4 bay.

Edit: After about 5 mins thinking, I'm going for a 4-bay, guessing it's the obvious choice.

Might be worth thinking about how much of your stuff really needs mirroring.

I realised that the vast majority of stuff I had was easily replaceable so ended up doing away with mirroring and just backing up the important stuff to OneDrive (which gives 1tb)

Yeah that's a valid point, most of it is just films/music that can easily be re-downloaded.

Just checked and I also have 1tb of OneDrive space that I haven't used, so will likely just do the same as what you are. Thanks for the tip!