Any PC Builders Out There?

lol I was about to say noctua brown or bust.

I don't have a case that you can see inside of so color of the fans don't bother me. Plus my case is on the floor and the side panel faces another desk so you can't see it anyways.

 

I'm not sure you'd notice the brown through the tint of my case's glass but I figured I'd keep it blacked out.

 

Could I run unraid or another server type OS and still keep functionality as a home theatre PC?

 

You could but it would be a layer of complexity. You'd basically run Unraid as the "main" OS, and then run a virtual machine on it (say windows 10). So once you had it setup, you would have it function just like a regular windows 10 install (the VM would). But it can be a challenge to get everything working perfectly sometimes (ie with remotes...pass through can sometimes be a pain).

might be more than you were wanting but just an idea. I use my unraid server as a separate pc and then have a hodge podge of devices at each TV. I use emby server on the unraid box (similar to plex) and then Kodi with the emby addon at each tv.

 

Here are some photos of the first computer I ever built:



No flash, just a workhorse

 

Sounds like a lot of hassle, I probably won’t do it.

I started moving my steam library to SSD tonight.

 

those the 2.5" samsung 860 evo?

 

The target drive is, source drive is either a seagate or WD mechanical.

 

Nice. That had been my main os drive for years. But just the 256gb version.

I finally upgraded to a 500gb 970evo nvme drive. But with my old Mobo it's handicapped quite a bit. Only get around 800MBs soeeds. Going to feel like a brand new drive when I do upgrade cpu and motherboards!

 

I had a 500 GB Crucial MX500 as a boot drive for a few months before I built the Ryzen rig, before that I just had an HDD (almost the last person in my family to get an SSD and also the person who fiddles with computers the most ) and now in the Ryzen I have a 500 GB 970 Evo for boot.

I’m not really sure how I want to set up my storage now, with the 2 new 1TB 860’s (in hindsight I should’ve gone with 2TB) replacing 1TB mechanical drives I’ll have a total of 3 TB of SSD storage, and then I have 10TB of USB attached storage that I keep my photos and videos on and actually work off of those for Lightroom and Vegas.

The 1TB 860 Evo that I just installed last night took the data that was on both mechanical 1TB drives (one had about 600GB of Data and the other about 200) so I can eliminate both the mechanical drives and still have an empty SSD.
I may use the empty SSD for Plex, or I could wipe the crucial SSD and use it as a cache for Plex and have long term Plex storage on a mechanical drive (or the 860 Evo, but that seems excessive).

 

I think I’ve decided to pool the two 860 Evo’s as well as the 2 1TB mechanical drives using the windows storage spaces utility, I can set it up to have redundancy for potential drive failure and I can have my OTA DVR récord to an SSD and then the files would (in theory) be transferred to the mechanical drives.

 

This is very interesting, I have to reload a few of my steam games and my network connection is a steady 300-350 Mbps down but the disk write speed is 40-45 MB/s with occasional spikes to 100+ MB/s.

I don’t understand the variance in what is coming in vs what is being written to the drive, my RAM usage has stayed pretty much the same so it’s not going there.

 

I see a pretty big valley in network speed
there. What can happen is the PC will download at high speed to fill the drive write cache, then slow down momentarily while the cache is written, and repeat. Whatever data comes in when there is no available cache is either paged directly on the drive or silently dropped. It's like filling a bucket of water with a hole in it faster than the hole can empty the bucket. The water either exits the hole (your HDD platters) or runs off the top (dropped packets). Whatever is dropped is quickly reaccessed and resumed, so fast you'll never notice it.

 

Also your write speed is highly variable, as is your download speed, so imagine the hose filling the bucket is surging and you wiggle something in the hole of the bucket to keep it flowing out fast lol.

 

This is also why I've never regretted moving off to the fastest reasonable SSDs available (PCI-E 4.0 NVMe). My drive can easily out write my connection leading to short download times.

 

348 Mbps is about 43.5 megabytes per second. Seems about right to me.

 

Good catch, I didn't even notice the unit change lol. Good ole windows making zero sense.

 

I’m a big fan of the Samsung Evo SSD’s. The Samsung disk cloning utility has also been very reliable. I just turned another aging/slowing laptop from the brink of extinction with a cloned SSD. I think that was the 7th computer I saved this way. I like to use my gear as long as possible.

 

I forgot about the conversion.....

I'm also a big fan of them, I now have 3 Samsung SSD's in my system (970 Evo NVME 500 GB for boot, 2 1TB 860 EVO SATA in storage pool) and I'm very happy with them.
I used the migration software from Samsung to move my boot drive from a Crucial SSD to the 970 Evo and it worked awesome, no issues with the mirror/replacement that I've come across yet.

 

GPU came in today, it looks pretty good!

I have to say I’m very happy with my system now, just next year I’d like to upgrade some of the peripherals, my keyboard is still ps/2 and my monitors are all 60 hz and one of my 3 screens is 1360x768 and the other 2 are 1080P.