PC Tech Thread

I've been using Powertoys FancyZones as a slightly more custom version of the OOTB window snapping in Windows.
The monitor also has a PBP 'PictureByPicture' option that allows it to identify as 2 separate monitors to whatever it's connecting to. So could either connect it twice to the PC to or connect, say, a macbook to one side and PC to another. That moves the issue away from the OS to it being a purely hardware thing. but you can also then tell the OS the two monitors are side by side, so you can drag and drop things or display them spanning across the screens seamlessly.

I tried it at first as most of the time I have my work Linux VM via Citrix, and it was annoying when Citrix wasn't in fullscreen mode that windows key, alt-tab etc would be captured by the host OS rather than the VM.
But it also disabled things like HDR because the monitor couldn't HDR one side of the screen and not the other. And I found a registry setting to let Citrix capture windows key/alt-tab etc as long as it was the active window, so stopped using it. But it was quite cool to have the OS be unaware that it was connecting to the same monitor twice

So it's mostly good for me now. I'm sure there are more complete window managers available but between snapping and fancyzones (and I prefer to avoid extra programs if possible) then it covers most my use cases

/csb

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Actually csb,
thanks

The gutters, in my setup at least, are just transparent windows with no borders, that take up screen space and leave the sole window taking up the central 60% of the monitor.

I have a bash script that makes them and destroys them, which I run with Super+ G keyboard shortcut.

57" (1.3m horizontal) and 7680x2160 pixels. Pre-order now for just £2.2k.

Is there some kind of conflict between running stuff like Windows subsystem for Linux and things like virtualbox?

I've got vague memories that one requires virtualization stuff turned on in settings and the other it turned off.

Is there an alternative to virtualbox where this isn't an issue? Basically want to clone a hard drive from a machine I'm getting rid of in case I ever need to run any of the old stuff on there.

Time to expand the storage in the NAS.

I'm running a Synology DS1817+ which has 8 HDD bays, in those are 8 x 4TB HDD that provide a RAID 6 21.7TB volume.

I'm at 72% used, and 70% is my trigger for "best think about expanding my storage volume" and 80% used is my "oh fuck, it's going to die" threshold.

The HDD I've chosen is the Toshiba N300 16TB HDWG31GUZSVA ( https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-drives-n300/ ) as this is a very standard HDD (none of that SMR stuff) with an incredible long life expected (1M hours between failures = longer than my expected life).

8 x 16TB drives in RAID 6 should yield 96TB of usable space. I'm already using 15.6TB of space, so I'll be at 16.25% used after expansion.

The process is an annoying one:

1. Backup to an external 18TB HDD.
   
2. Perform a data scrub (this is not a delete, it verifies the RAID data and performs error correction and will guarantee that the parity files are all good).
   
3. Deactivate 1 drive in the RAID 6 set, power off, replace the 3.6TB drive with an 18TB drive, power on, silence alerts and let it rebuild the RAID.
   
4. Repeat #3 until all drives are replaced (another 7 times).
   
5. Expand volume from 21.8TB to 96TB.
   
   

I've managed to locate all 8 drives from different suppliers so will hopefully vary the production batch and their environmental conditions, and so have hit the credit card. The drives alone will cost £2k.

Last time I upgraded the storage to the current 21.6TB was in 2016... I'm hoping for a similar time period until the next one... meaning that these will amortise over 7 years, or roughly £23 per month to have 96TB of storage at home.

The first HDDs should arrive a week from now.

The process is an annoying one:

Wouldn't it be less annoying if you bought another box? Obviously adding another £1k to the project is also annoying, but you'd be starting with fresh and presumably upgraded hardware

Yeah thinking about it, I have a week to think about it.

The argument for upgrading that too is mostly the RAID controller being new and network being 10gbps which will be needed within the life of the hardware even if it's excessive today.

Back to the hunt for a cheap psu and case, who was it who said they had a psu but we’re on hols? Apologies, I’m terrible with names.

Not me but I’ve still got that case / PSU and motherboard if you can make it to Royston.

Ohhhhh yeah, maybe I’ll try next weekend. Will dm ya.

Sure thing. I’m out Saturday but around Sunday.

Synology DS1823xs+ vs DS1821+

Both have ECC RAM (yay), but the 1823xs+ has a 10Gbps port.

Prices for the empty enclosures are £1.7k for the 1823xs+ vs £1k for the 1821+.

There is a little bit of extra CPU oomph in the 1823xs+, but I think that's a negative overall as it just means more power consumption continuously. I tend to always run my NAS as pure file systems and don't need the extra CPU of these things. The only app I run on them is Syncthing.

I'm not sure I care about the 10Gbps network either... as the 1821+ has 4 x 1Gbps ports which can do link aggregation, so I can already get 4Gbps out of the network and Synology is smart about this to the point that the aggregation actually will allow a desktop with a 2.5Gbps port to read at 2.5Gbps.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS1821+

Am quite likely to just buy that too.

It will give me peace of mind on the RAID controller, will make the data migration less perilous than swapping drives and rebuilding, has ECC RAM which will bring that peace of mind.

Which means the total price will be in the £3.5k range, and I'd have to get more RAM and a couple of M2 SSDs to be the cache too... so maybe a little higher still.

Anyone in the market for an 8 bay NAS with 21.7TB usable in RAID6?

Considering getting the new and selling the old... the old is (eBay prices are lowest priced item, not avg price):

• DS1817+ (£600 on eBay, empty)
  
• 8 x 4TB HGST H3IK40003272SE Deskstar drives (£300 each new on AMZN today, £90 each on eBay for used)
  
• M2D18 SSD cache expansion (£160 on eBay)
  
• 2 x 250GB Samsung 860 EVO, M.2 (2280) SSD used for SSD cache (£40 new, effectively free as they're dirt cheap on eBay)
  
  

Suggested eBay price would be £600 + (£90 * 8) + £160= £1,450-ish would likely fetch £1,200 on eBay easily, perhaps as high as £1,300 on a good day.

Would sell on LFGSS for £1k all-in for a 21.7TB RAID 6 NAS with SSD cache.

There are no problems with the existing NAS, I've cleaned and serviced it every 6 months, replaced the fans with official replacements, added the dual-M2 cache, and the disks have only ever had the same data sat on them and appended to so they've had a very low write rate. Seriously was considering this for another 7-8 years, it's only the process to expand the storage that puts me off that idea of just keeping this another 7-8 years, and so it's up for sale. I'd factory reset / wipe it of course.

It works with Mac, Windows, Linux, can do all the RAIDs, is relatively quiet, is relatively low-powered (equivalent to having a laptop on).

would maybe be interested in it without disks...

surprised you're not running a TrueNas setup to hook into all the other advantages that brings.

would maybe be interested in it without disks...

Will try to sell all-in... because if I split it, into raw components the SSD card and M2 drives just end up as landfill, likely the HDD too.

surprised you're not running a TrueNas setup to hook into all the other advantages that brings.

I learned a very long time ago to only run a NAS as a file server and not as anything else. I also learned that the worst part of having a NAS is updating the software to ensure it's secure and stable, and I'd rather leave that to a company to get right on pain of it being an existential threat (to them) if they screw it up. To get that means buying their hardware, and I'm fine with that.

yes, I would take the SSD cache bits also.

I thought that too, until several people I know had their QNAP units cryptolocked - https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/09/12/cve-2022-27593/

yeah, I don't rate QNAP long term support highly, and I don't expose my NAS to the internet.

Definitely getting the new NAS box, the Synology DS1821+ but with the 10Gbps network card, 64GB RAM and 2 x 1TB SSDs for the SSD cache... and along with the 8 x 16TB HDDs in SHR with BTRFS I should have 112TB usable space with 1 parity and BTRFS metadata allowing any 2 drives to fail.

The old DS1817+ box... may well keep it as a local backup and very slowly upgrade it if no-one is interested in the whole thing at £1k. Reformatted to SHR + BTRFS would give me 28TB worth of local backup, which should be enough for a year or so... but as SHR I only need replace two of the 4TB drives with 16TB drives to get the storage to 40TB usable, and so the backup can grow alongside my actual usage.

Interesting reading the above, entirely different from my approach which was to just find a suitable case and motherboard that would allow a lot of drives, get a good PSU and build up a headless PC with Windows 11.

I run Plex server and various scraping stuff, Calibre library, etc on there 24/7 as well as storage. Think it averages something like 15W at idle.

Very little on there couldn't be recreated with a bit of effort so stuff I need gets backed up to the cloud, I do a weekly file listing so I know what is on there and don't bother with RAID or backups (other than the OS which would be a bit more of a faff to set up again).

I run Plex server and various scraping stuff, Calibre library, etc on there 24/7 as well as storage. Think it averages something like 15W at idle.

I'm not sure I believe this number... but single machines are so hard to measure. The Synology will be 26W idle, and 59W fully active. The SSD cache allows the HDD to hibernate for longer, meaning it will be idle the majority of the time.

And it depends what you have on the storage as to how important it is and how paranoid one is likely to be... for me:

• All photographs
  
• All docs, banks statements, conveyancing, receipts, manuals, insurance, mortgage, etc
  
• All of my partner's academic research, papers, PhD, notes, etc
  
• All of the music I ripped from the 6K CDs in the loft that took over 3 years to rip
  
• All of the movies I ripped from the 1.2K DVDs and Blu-Rays
  
• Some other downloading media from various sources (there's a lot of this, but not more of this than the other stuff above)
  
  

The first few of those are such that yeah, I'm doing full 3-2-1 backup strategy, at least 3 copies (local, NAS, and backup), on 2 medias (SSD local + HDD NAS and backup), and 1 off-site / disconnected (the backup).

I'm even more paranoid in fact, the document class above is also syncthing on a few encrypted laptops so my primary copy is always a working copy rather than the NAS.

But the NAS is the golden copy, the long-lived copy.

You're right, just had a look and it averages 25W at idle (6 spinning drives plus SSD with AMD 5600G). Last week, despite some spikes of 100W when there was a lot of transcoding going on, it averaged 32W.

It's really only the first two of those that I have that I care about and they are on cloud (two clouds in the case of photos) and local (plus a reasonable amount of stuff on either paper or email).

Losing other media would be a bit annoying but there's probably nothing there that can't be replaced but obviously that's a pretty personal point of view.

6 spinning drives plus SSD with AMD 5600G

This is the problem with self-building a NAS.

One of the biggest costs from an always-on machine is the power, and a CPU with a TDP of 45-65W (in modern CPUs this is the average power consumption under load) and 6 spinning drives... is considerable.

Hence the desire for a CPU with 12-25W TDP, and that can fully hibernate the HDD when they're not used, and can spin fans at a power rating so low that when I tried putting Noctua fans in they didn't work and my power meter showed that Synology are only putting 2v to them in Quiet mode (too low to start a Noctua fan). Reddit people measuring the DS1821+ get it to 20w idle and about 80w fully loaded with 8 x 12TB HDD... larger drives use a fraction more power (they spin faster more of the time), so I'm expected a range from 20-85w for "night time" vs "fully loaded operation".

I could easily self build... but the power usage would never be where I wanted it, I'd have to maintain it, the perf wouldn't be the same (that SSD cache is nice), the physical space requirement is larger (case not as compact), I couldn't afford ECC memory within similar price point, etc.

The big reason to self-build though, ZFS... Synology does not do ZFS. But the RAID5/SHR+ BTRFS combination yields the same benefits and is what their Enterprise class products all do, so I'm OK going down this path.

I remember considering the dedicated NAS options when I was doing mine but decided the increased energy costs would be offset by the increased cost of the NAS plus needing another machine for the other tasks.

If it's only idling at 5W over the NAS option then I'm fine with that. I'd definitely like it to be smaller but theoretically the case can fit something like 14 drives if needed.

I'm lucky that I only really want to backup:

All photographs
All docs, banks statements, conveyancing, receipts, manuals, insurance, mortgage, etc
All of my partner's academic research, papers, PhD, notes, etc
All of the music I ripped from the 6K CDs in the loft that took over 3 years to rip
All of the movies I ripped from the 1.2K DVDs and Blu-Rays
Some other downloading media from various sources (there's a lot of this, but not more of this than the other stuff above)

Even having multiple copies of much of this data, which I'm slowly deduping and sorting out, and not having any expensive DSLRs means it's still less than 2TB.

Considering getting rid of my NAS as I just don't use it.

Hey, anyone delt with this error?

I did the V++ install recommended on google but no luck. I installed a new screen as I broke the OEM one, Inspiron 7501. Windows 11.

https://laptopdisplay.eu/lcd-laptop-display-screen-15-6-fullhd-1920x1080-led-ips-edp-slim-new-matte-350mmBit stumped

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