Xerxes

I ended up splurging and going a little crazy. Got the Synology 1621+, it's a 6 bay NAS but I am currently only stuffing it with 4x 6 TB drives. With Synology's RAID options I can pop another drive of any size in and the RAID will rebuild retaining all my data. This is the sole reason I went with Synology, other features were just a bonus. They have a RAID calculator that will show you usable space with whatever drives you want. I decided to go big and newest because I want it to last a long time. The more I thought about a 4 bay NAS the more I determined I would need to swap out drives more often and then have a functional hard drive to add to the shelf. This allowed me to get smaller drives now and not need to worry about the future until I get there and hopefully larger storage will be cheaper. It runs modified Linux and I could run VM's on it if I choose to, there are lots of things I could do on it but probably won't. It is way more machine than I need or will probably ever need. Getting it setup was a breeze, it transfers files faster than my old one (60MB/s -> 100MB/s). The AI photo tagging functions of Synology Moments is something the wife really likes. Completely tool less to add drives which is nice, my old one was tool less as well but I had to take the outer case off via thumb screws. Overall, it does what it is supposed to 🙂 I had to turn off transcoding for the time being as it was transcoding stuff into a format one of my smart TV's did not understand. Browsing around I found the area where I can configure transcoding on a per device basis which is a bridge I will cross when I find files I cannot read natively.

I want to go Synology over QNAP simply for software reasons. Synology has a hybrid raid software option (SHR) which means I can pair any amount of any size drives together in RAID and make use of all the combined space. I want to allow for easy future expansion rather than having to replace an entire array at once. Hardware wise QNAP and Synology offer exactly the same specs but SHR has sold me. For example, I could swap the 4x2TB HD in my current NAS for 4x4TB drives, but would need to find somewhere to store the data in the interim which means buying 4x4TBdrives + a 6TB drive to hold the data while I swap. That would cost me ~800 to double my storage from 5.2TB to ~10TB in RAID 5. For ~1300 I could get new hardware with 3x6TB drives and have space to add another drive in the future when/if I need more space. In my Lenovo which I have had for ~7 years now I had 1 drive fail over its life. I had the NAS configured to send me an email, which it did, when it detects a potential drive failure. I have it running ~18/7 as it powers off from 2am -7am since nobody is awake anyway. it has a scheduler which automatically shuts down/boots up at times I specify. The drive that died is till technically operational as well, it just seems to randomly lose power and rebooting will fire it back up for an undetermined amount of time. The NAS is really only used currently as a DLNA server, torrent client and file server. Of course the more I shop the bigger I end up trying to go.

Curious what everyone is running as a NAS. I have been running a Lenovo (rebranded Iomega) ix4-300d w/4x2TB hard drives for a number of years but the NAS is filling up and I need more storage. Looking at getting a Synology 920+ but don't know much or even if it is remotely better than QNAP, for my usage, which is way cheaper. WD also makes relatively cheap NAS's but from online reviews they are not great. I know I can build my own or repurpose an old PC fairly easily but I like the low power / small form factor as what I have now sits in a cupboard and just hums away. I use it for storage and network play via DLNA, not on the plex train...yet.

Diablo 3 on XBO...I wanted to love it but once you get to higher levels its full of people using hacked items thanks to the XB360 backwards compat and character moves....or at least it was that way the last time I played. I added you back to XBL since you got purged after one of my list cleanups 😉 I mostly play PUBG now, started streaming when I can but nobody watches me. I highly suggest an external hard drive for storage since the internal hard drive is so slow. I am using a 500GB SSD and only keep the games I might play installed. My upstairs XBOX where my kids play has a 7200RPM 4TB hard drive that has virtually all the games installed. SSHD is the best place for performance and storage IMO. I opted for the smaller drive as I was purely after performance.

So is this only with 3rd party docks? I am using the one that came with seeing no issues, although only my kids use the switch, but I am sure I would have heard something. On an unrelated note; cannot wait for the Labo to come out and kids go apeshit over it.

This is the first game in some time I actually cannot wait to play, of course I will wait to play b/c of DLC :)

That is the wave of the future in general, the concept of ownership is being lost on the current generation of people. Software as a service is the way to go as it is much more profitable to sell someone a yearly subscription then to sell something once every few years. It also allows for a much easier revenue prediction model. In unrelated news, this newest console gen is terrible. Nothing but mobile games ported to consoles or 'rereleases' of the best of series from the prior gen. Sad thing is, if it did not make money the practice would stop....much like the awful state of DLC. I am reminded of a monologue I believe Bruce McCullough did on MADTV many years ago, the punchline was similar to this re: the TV show friends: Look I don't know whose friends they are but they're not mine. People look, if you just keep watching them they are just going to keep making them. That last statement is how I feel about pretty much every form of mass media currently, everything is mostly terrible but it keeps making money so the cycle repeats. /endrant.

Just wanted to see if anyone here is watching this and if not you should. It's a continuation drama show centered around a character I am sure we all can relate to. The first two episodes got me hooked, anyways just wanted to give a quick heads up for this show. It has already been renewed for a 2nd season so that's a +. usanetwork.com/mrrobot

It is going pretty well. It was my video driver taking a dump all over the OS so I just uninstalled it and am using the Windows generic driver. I lost multi-monitor support but no crashes. I also installed Windows 10 enterprise on my work machine, had a similar hiccup where the video card driver was causing a BSOD but luckily NVIDIA already had a driver update out to fix that so I manually updated there and now have only encountered minimal hiccups. Much less since moving to the latest build though (9879), my work PC got pushed that about a week ago and my home machine just got it tonight. If you can get straight to 9879 that would probably be ideal, the only oddities I have seen myself are video drivers crashing, and Lync just generally running havoc on my work PC.

Installed on my home machine, everything was working beautifully. Then I downloaded a driver update and now I get a good 10 minutes of boot out of it. I will be doing some troubleshooting to see if I can find an earlier version of the driver I think is causing the issue. Otherwise I need to decide what OS I want to use at home :P In the time it was installed I liked it a lot. The metro stuff is still there and it still annoyed me, but much less. The change to Windows + E was my biggest rage! It no longer goes to Explorer but opens up a menu which you can get to explorer in a click but still.

If I knew it did DLNA as it stands I would install it on my home PC, its more or less a file server at this point anyway. Either way I am cautiously optimistic on Windows 10, personally I think they should have followed the other naming convetion of products and went back to years. If that were done it would have the added joke of being Windows 7 + Windows 8 = Windows 15 ! I am fairly close to installing Windows 10 on the unused server sitting under my work desk though just to check it out.

The Internet and I disagreed on this game...Most people thought it was fantastic I thought it was meh, mostly because the addition or super powers and the entire game being in the matrix made it far too easy. It felt more like an addon than a new game, but that's just me.

Bumping old thread - hey Pic0o how is the mining coming? I am considering setting up an old PC to do it when I upgrade but most of what I read says its not worth the trouble with ASIC's now being the gold standard.

www.gog.com (good old games) is DRM free and part of their Christmas sale is to give these games away before the rights change developers :) Thought some people on here may want to create an account and grab these games while you can for the free.

So, these guys are awesome. We asked if they would remove the lyrics from this version: so that my fiancée could walk down the aisle to it and they did. As grumbly as I get with the kids today and their internets, it sure can get you in touch with strangers easier :)