General Computer Thread

[Marc]

Yeah, it's amazing how much SSD's have dropped in price this past year. I bought 2 of them, one for each laptop. And now HDD prices for backup storage has dropped a lot too. On Black Friday or Cyber Monday I'm going to pick up the best deal I can find on one of those. Reliability from tried and true brands like Western Digital and Seagate are good enough that SSD is still nutty pricing for something like backup storage.

now if the price would just drop as we got a big increase in storage capacity

Most of my spinning rust could be replaced with SSDs except for my media storage drive which is a 4TB and that capacity in a SSD is not affordable for me short of a lottery win.

And gotta say after using SSDs for the past few years, hate going back to HDDs. Part of it is probably the processor (AMD A4) but I instead the Windows 10 1809 build on the wife's laptop last week and it took two bloody hours.

I had wanted to fit a SSD but Acer in their wisdom buried the HDD right down in the guts of the machine and inaccessible without an almost total tear down.

 

[Santaman]

Only my game machine has SSD's the rest still HDD, some machines because when they were built SSD's didn't exist and some machines are backup/storage machines rotating rust is the only type of drive for those.

 

[Amaris]

The firmware and O/S will attempt dancing around read errors as best as possible, when you start hearing audible changes. But basically the clock is ticking. I had that happen to my Toshiba HDD. Thankfully the corruption happened mostly in the zone of system files, so I lost very little user data. But it was a bear to recover. I had to futz with a variety of tools to fix / step over broken sectors so that I could get it to boot the O/S. Once that was done, it made it easier to run diagnostics and fix things enough so I could transfer the remaining user data.

Yeah, it's amazing how much SSD's have dropped in price this past year. I bought 2 of them, one for each laptop. And now HDD prices for backup storage has dropped a lot too. On Black Friday or Cyber Monday I'm going to pick up the best deal I can find on one of those. Reliability from tried and true brands like Western Digital and Seagate are good enough that SSD is still nutty pricing for something like backup storage.

Oh yes, I back up everything! I have an external 4 TB HDD that I picked up years ago, and it's a trooper.

 

[Gary7]

Oh yes, I back up everything! I have an external 4 TB HDD that I picked up years ago, and it's a trooper.

Which brand? I have WD MyBook that works well.

 

[Amaris]

Which brand? I have WD MyBook that works well.

It's a Seagate external with USB 3.0.

 

[Marc]

Oh yes, I back up everything! I have an external 4 TB HDD that I picked up years ago, and it's a trooper.

And the strange thing is those external drives can be cheaper than just buying a straight up drive by it's self.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Now if there was a way to use my laptop and yank the screen off. I've seen videos of people doing that but the end result looks bad because the case ends up a little butchered. I know tablets and things exist. I have a small 2 in 1 that had Windows on it but I put Linux on that one and now it is much better to use. But that is made to convert into a tablet.

Anyway I digress it does work as it's got a standard hdmi port. I'm thinking keep the laptop base and battery and move it from location to location using external screens.

OH and data backup is so essential now. I learnt that lesson the hard way.

 

[Amaris]

And the strange thing is those external drives can be cheaper than just buying a straight up drive by it's self.

Yep. I picked up that 4 TB external for $99 years ago. At that time, that was the cost of a 2 TB drive.

 

[Santaman]

Nothing strange about it, when you order drives in bulk, like WD etc do you pay far less per drive.

 

[Marc]

Nothing strange about it, when you order drives in bulk, like WD etc do you pay far less per drive.

Given that WD are the drive manufacturers I fail to see how they ordering in bulk.

On top of that the drives in the enclosures are identical to the drives sold individually.

I have a 2TB WD drive sitting in my server that I shucked after the enclosure's USB->SATA board developed a fault.

 

[Santaman]

Yeah, for WD themselves it is easy, they can get the drive for the exact production cost, but companies that don't have their own HDD's still get a lot of discount on drives if you buy enough of them in one go.

 

[Tom Hendricks]

For Black Friday, I picked up the Samsung HMD Odyssey VR mixed reality headset for my son for his birthday. He's turning 10 on December 5th and he really loves VR, the local library has an Oculus Rift and we plays it all the time. So I sent it up today, considering he will be getting it in a few days. I wanted to make sure it all worked properly and can just jump in and use it. I intended only to set everything up and ensure everything is working. Well 3 hours later, I'm hooked. What a great way to play games, I played a little Halo trainer and some Minecraft VR. I toured the ISS and actually felt like I was there. I can't wait for him to get it.

 

[Amaris]

For Black Friday, I picked up the Samsung HMD Odyssey VR mixed reality headset for my son for his birthday. He's turning 10 on December 5th and he really loves VR, the local library has an Oculus Rift and we plays it all the time. So I sent it up today, considering he will be getting it in a few days. I wanted to make sure it all worked properly and can just jump in and use it. I intended only to set everything up and ensure everything is working. Well 3 hours later, I'm hooked. What a great way to play games, I played a little Halo trainer and some Minecraft VR. I toured the ISS and actually felt like I was there. I can't wait for him to get it.

Just so you know, there are LOTS of free or dirt cheap Steam VR games, and a few solid Windows Mixed Reality free VR games as well. The real fun, though (IMO) is in the educational stuff, like LittlStar VR, which is a free Microsoft Store app that lets you watch dozens of educational videos that put you right in the middle of everything: parasailing, skydiving, river rafting, a lava flow, the ISS space station, it's so much fun.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I took a picture of the inside of my laptop. I noticed another SATA connector on the right hand side of the board, or at least what I'm assuming is for one of those long SSD drives on a bare board M-Sata I think it's called.

Also what kind of connector is the wifi module on? It looks like they haven't used all the connections on the socket. My regular SSD plugs into the empty port near the bottom left.

 

[Santaman]

No idea what kind of connector it is, so I guess you'd need to read the manual or visit the manufacturers website might be it's in there.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

No idea what kind of connector it is, so I guess you'd need to read the manual or visit the manufacturers website might be it's in there.

I did that. It's never mentioned in the manual that they put the extra connector there. It's an M.2 connector on the right. It's listed in the BIOS as SATA and using ACH1 mode same as the one I am using now for the internal SSD

 

[Santaman]

Then you can drop in a m2 SSD, would give you extra storage.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Then you can drop in a m2 SSD, would give you extra storage.

I'm wondering if the m.2 connector itself will be faster at all then the default one they are using.

 

[Santaman]

if it is SATA then nope, it will be about the same.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

if it is SATA then nope, it will be about the same.

OK that's a little disappointing...... I guess using the slot could add an ounce of extra storage just when I took the lid off it was to clean the fan noticing the extra slot there was a surprise as it wasn't mentioned anywhere.