Thank you.

I know external drives are usually regular HDDs, there was a trend a few years ago of buying external drives and opening them to remove the drives and use them as regular ones because, for some reason, external drives were cheaper than regular ones.

My biggest worry was, and still kind of is, to use it vertical instead of horizontal. But Yuri's comment put that fear in the back seat.

The only issue it may introduce is extra vibrations as it's not actually secured, which is pretty much a non-issue in the modern era... It's not like we are running with Quantum Fireballs anymore in a massive RAID array.

For a period, drives used to come with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations even in desktop cases.

I do use one of these frequently when grabbing an old spinning rust drive and sourcing data from it... But to be honest, the best thing I ever did was buy an 18TB HDD on sale for $500 AUD a month ago, you get a better sense of data security as the drive has low operating hours.

It's actually a common practice to grab lower-priced external HDD's and "chuck" them, by removing them from the enclosure and installing them in a NAS or Desktop PC.

Unfortunately, some drives actually have the entire motherboard swapped out with a USB-only variant, Western Digital did that with some runs...

Thanks for your comment.

At one point, I thought about buying a 14-16TB drive because they're better value (a 16TB drive costs roughly 3 times more than a 4TB one) and put everything in it to reduce the amount of drives inside my system. But then I remembered that just because it's bigger, that doesn't mean it will last more hours before failing compared to other mechanical drive, and the idea of losing virtually everything if one drive goes bad is kind of terrifying. And yes, I know the answer to that fear is to buy two drives and use the second one as backup, but that makes the whole change a lot more expensive.

Hardware Unboxed recently did some testing comparing the 16GB Radeon 6800 vs the 8GB Geforce 3070.
Some surprising results with the 6800 sometimes having 50% more performance.

And not even 720P+DLSS can resolve issues in games like Hogwarts.



More games will push more than 8GB VRAM going forwards.

They have a MTBF.

That is... For every Hour/Day/Year/Decade that a drive is in use, the probability of it failing increases... And increases exponentially.
And the more individual aging drives you have, the greater your overall chances of at-least one failing.

The modern and large drives by their very nature of having Helium that can leak through sealed metal, I would probably lean towards replacement every 5 years anyway to be on the safe side.

RAID is definitely your best bet of ensuring data retention, but even that isn't always fool proof.

I'm not sure I'd pick RAID for any kind of data retention in home use... As the old saying goes, RAID is not a backup, and for a good reason. Helps a bit though, but with ransomware and other nonsense, I wouldn't trust RAID. Of course this coming is someone with no backup solution at all (too lazy to do anything about it so far, will probably be really sorry about it later)...

Intel Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs Reportedly Part of 14th Gen Desktop Family

https://wccftech.com/intel-raptor-lake-refresh-cpus-reportedly-part-of-14th-gen-desktop-family/

NVIDIA claims GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 offer equal DLSS performance without Frame Generation

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-claims-geforce-rtx-4070-and-rtx-3080-offer-equal-dlss-performance-without-frame-generation

Not very unsurprising

Intel confirms no more updates for Skylake iGPU

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-confirms-no-more-updates-for-skylake-igpu

Absolutely incredible

One thing to keep in mind is this comparison is a bit unfair to begin with. At MSRP, a 3070 was not a 6800 competitor because the 6800 had an MSRP of $580 while the 3070 had an MSRP of $500. 3070s real competitor is the 12GB 6700XT which had an MSRP of $480 which performed similarly to a 3060 Ti at just $20 less than the price of a 3070. Also the 6800 was much faster than the 3070 even at launch. The real competitor to the 6800 is the 3070 Ti which had an MSRP of $600 at which point, the 6800 was still a much better value because of the vram.

Now fast forward today and the RTX 30 series cards retained their MSRP and Radeon cards have drastically gone down in price. A 6700XT can be had for the price of 3060, 6800 or even 6800XT can be had for the price of 3070 at which point it is without a doubt RDNA 2 is the better option.

So while the video does make a good enough point to showcase the difference between the vram, the comparison isn't really the best because the 6800 was much faster than the 3070 to begin with and the GPU was in a higher tier of class than the 3070 at launch.

The 6700 XT's suggested price was very likely already inflated in the context of 2021's GPU scarcity, though, so it was overpriced from the get-go. But a QHD/4K benchmark between the two would have been interesting, though it'd be an apples-to-oranges comparison in some games if the 3070 isn't properly loading textures.

That being said, the whole 'Nvidia has worse image quality' thing has been going around since the Riva days, sometimes just as a conspiracy, sometimes confirmed by some driver or hardware limitation such as possibly here.

Doesn't really matter if the price was inflated or not. Anyone that was eyeing the 3070 class wasn't cross shopping with a 6800 because that was a higher tier of gpu class along with a higher price even at launch and not to mention it was an unicorn that was more unobtainable than a 3080 because of how limited in stock it was. And during the crypto boom, upgrading to a higher class wasn't $80 more, it was more like several hundred dollars more.

These days it's different because everything is in stock and RDNA 2 has had massive discounts below their MSRP. So the situation these days is a lot different but those days, I think the 3070 was a valid choice given the alternatives.

The execs at Monster Energy have lost their f*cking mind. Last wekk, I posted an article about how they were suing a developer for a game called Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals.

Well, if that's not insane enough, now they're going for no others than Nintendo with Pokemon and Capcom with Monster Hunter:

https://gamerant.com/monster-energy-trademarks-pokemon-monster-hunter/

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/monster-energy-drink-pokemon-monster-hunter-trademark/

It's worth keeping in mind that you can't trademark a common word like monster, and that a quick Google search reveals that Monster Energy was founded in 2002 while the first Pokemon game launched in 1996.

I don't know what they're expecting to get from all this besides bad publicity and paying hundreds of thousands if not millions in legal fees once they lose.