PC Tech Thread

Yes, very lucky I haven't had it plugged in and/or used it for any sensitive data, just a Plex library etc.

Yep, will sort via PM.

I have 2 of those WD my books... but both are offline only as cold backups, and when I connect them I just leave them as dumb NAS drives and connect via a Linux machine to sync to them.

I'll do even less next time, just enclosures and drives.

Speaking of NAS... I'm going to replace the fans in my Synology to reduce the background noise in the flat. It's long out of warranty (the NAS) so I'm cool with this.

The fans I'm going to try are these https://www.quietpc.com/nf-p12-redux-1300 and I've read a load of stories about how some replacement fans can fail to spin in a NAS, that the low speeds actually will stop the fans when the disks are idle and fail to start them afterwards. So I'll be monitoring these too (Graphite + Grafana Cloud).

Summer and living in the country side = thrips. And I've a bunch of them inside my monitor. Any tips on getting them out?

Compressed air?

so I'm cool with this.

Absolute scenes. I can vouch for the Noctua fans, they are well worth the cash. A significant difference to my desktop PC and my FreeNAS unit.

I just installed 2x 140mm Noctua in the top of my case to help vent hot air out their perfect - low and slow.

Means I can now run all my other fans slower and thus more quietly.

Fans are great.

But that turned out to not be the issue. The low noise I'm hearing are the hard drives. 8 X 4TB HDDs in RAID6 that seem to never go into hibernate mode.

Individually reach drive is relatively quiet, but together it's a low hum that can be heard at night.

I was probably going to have to upgrade the storage soon as I'm about 60% used on the storage in this NAS... But that wouldn't been a year away still.

Anyhow... Large SSDs 😁 has anyone loaded a NAS with large SSDs?

I'm thinking of 8x4TB SSD, and when storage is an issue then purchasing an additional drive bay to extend as that will be cheaper than even larger SSDs now.

You seem to know what you're doing!

Getting some stupidly slow transfer speeds on my NAS. Not even PC to NAS, but NAS to NAS. Down to about 50kbps, which is absurd.
I'm on 1gbit and status of all drives is OK with no errors on boot up. Xraid 2.

Where do I start diagnosis?

are the cables laid flat? if the nas you're transferring to is higher than the source one then data will be going slower as it's uphill.

Really the cable should be level or ideally sloped downwards in the direction of data transfer.

yes I am bored.

What NASs do you have?
How are they connected? (i.e. describe all cables and boxes between them)
What are you trying to do?

The speed is determined by the slowest part... it could be a number of things from dud cables, unintentional IRQ storm from a dud drive, etc.

Start with the storage and then try cables, and then do the other bits.

With storage, turn on SMART and run a diagnosis, the NAS should tell you this stuff.
With cables, try other cables only ever changing one cable at a time and re-trying.
With network, look at the cable connections and what colour the little LEDs are.
If the network is wifi (why?!) then honestly it's probably brick walls and just put a cable between the two.

I'm on a Netgear Readynas NVX.
Laptop, router, NAS enclosure. All through Cat5.

It's for my music, of which I have about 1tb of, I'm trying to move files about on the NAS.
HDD's are all on SMART, which are all cached and giving me OK. I booted up multiple times with a boot scan of all drives and it's all green.

Cable wise, I haven't actually tried any other, I'd have never guessed that would have implications.
From reading, it seems like Windows10 firewall seems to place restrictions somewhat, how, I don't know.

Two more questions. I've enabled IPV6 as well as recommended by others, as I'm browser based, but I'm not sure if the enclosure is even equipped for it. Does it have any sort of impact?
Secondly, does the quantity, and fragmentation of the multitude of files have an impact on speed?
As I said before, it's over 1tb of music, all with metadata and supporting image files that need to be moved.

You can see I'm not well versed on this, but there's fuck all ways I can sustain that amount of music without the NAS and its redundancy. Should I upgrade to summat with more modern standards?
I mean...I can post log files, but not sure what you can glean from that.

When I built my FreeNAS unit SSDs were not recommended.

For the benefits (tiny, quiet box) you get a couple of major downsides - cost and the danger of wearing out your SSDs via write amplification. For practical purposes, a mechanical drive can be written on almost infinitely, but an SSD has a defined lifespan. A single RAID5 write is 2 reads and 2 writes across your entire RAID set, and on SSDs that's killer if you're frequently updating your storage.

Two posts in a row but I thought I'd chime in - do not underestimate checking the simplest things first, especially cables and connections.

I recently had an issue with my NAS recently where the speed dropped to 40mb/s - turns out that the cable wasn't pushed in all the way at the back of my computer, meaning it was negotiating at a lower rate...

For the benefits (tiny, quiet box) you get a couple of major downsides - cost and the danger of wearing out your SSDs via write amplification. For practical purposes, a mechanical drive can be written on almost infinitely, but an SSD has a defined lifespan. A single RAID5 write is 2 reads and 2 writes across your entire RAID set, and on SSDs that's killer if you're frequently updating your storage.

For active file servers in offices where the files change routinely I'd agree.

For a media file server where it's movies and music, large files that once written do not change I disagree.

I've seen SSD burnout at Cloudflare, the rate was astonishing... but then, they used them within the CDN with an LRU file cache which was constantly churning. The positive thing that came out of that... across thousands of SSDs the story was the same, they last way way beyond the rated ops.

It's the writes that matter with SSDs, and I'd probably consider something like Synology's RAID F1 which is similar to RAID5 but where RAID5 degrades all SSDs at an equal rate, RAID F1 pushes the parity to the most aged SSD, and reduces writes on the others.

Oh wait... are you doing the copy operation from Windows? And do you have anti-virus installed?

As in... are you reading a file from a NAS, to your Windows laptop... writing it to disk (trigger AV to check), reading from disk (maybe triggering AV to check) and then writing it to the other NAS?

If so... disable AV. But also... make sure your laptop isn't actually on the WiFi.

As velocio says, are you going direct from NAS to NAS or using a Windows pc in the middle to do the copy?

If the latter I've had some super slow speeds in the past. Have a look at whether there is some way to copy directly from one to the other (may require using terminal on one of them).

Yes, I take your point, especially with the fact you can have asymetric wear, something lacking on FreeNAS afaik.

How hot is too hot for PCs? Thinking of moving my file server and plex server to the loft but it can get hot up there (up to 40 degrees yesterday). I'm intending to quite overspec it on the processor so the vast majority of time some throttling won't matter (and obviously we don't get that many sunny days) but will there potentially be other consequences?

I thought about putting things in the loft too... but it's not just that it's hot, lofts are dusty and potentially damp/humid with condensation and being prone to a degree of dew.

If I put machines in the loft, I'd want to put them in a cabinet at least. My loft isn't dry enough as it is (slate tiles without felt).

The heat I don't believe is an issue as computers can handle heat.

Things I'd think about:

• Damp and dew
  
• Dust (clogging the machines making them hotter)
  
• Power (a single socket that is probably on the light ring isn't going to be good for the rest, and I'd rather extend the socket circuit to the loft but obviously that's a ton of work I don't want to do)
  
• Noise and vibration (loft insulation is not sound / vibration insulation so a NAS above the bedroom would be audible still)
  
  

I thought about it and concluded it wasn't worth taking seriously as a thought.

I'd be worried if your loft was damp / prone to condensation - It should be well ventilated!

Loft is reasonably dust-free and boarded over so there are quite a few stages between the loft floor and the ceiling below. Now you mention it would probably need some filters for the fans though.

The plan is conditional on me being able to take power and network cables up through the chimney breast but it may be worth a trial.

I'd be worried if your loft was damp / prone to condensation - It should be well ventilated!

Slate without felt... when it rains, there is a definite humid heaviness to the air within the lost. I'm being presumptive on dew though.

Noob question If I've paid for MS word/ office on pc can I use same paid version on a Mac?

Noob question If I've paid for MS word/ office on pc can I use same paid version on a Mac?

I don't think so. They are treated as entirely different products by Microsoft.

If I were you I'd abandon or sell your Office license and just start using something in the cloud.

Using a local copy of Office isn't far off watching black and white telly for most use cases :D