Random Tech Questions you want answered.

pandasuit wrote:

I have a bunch of old 1TB drives that refuse to die but have been eyeing some newer bigger ones. Has anyone here tried any of the drives branded as being targeted at NAS use such as the Seagate IronWolf or WD Red? Is it just branding?

The CMR variety of the IronWolf drives (Pro or Pro+ or some other BS like that) are pretty highly rated. I am not sure that the SMR versions are bad but they got reviewed pretty horribly when Seagate revamped the product line and made the low-end drives SMR and tried to down-play it (at least they didn't try to outright hide the switch like WD had done with their Red line though).

It all comes down to how data is written to the disk with SMR using a slower and less reliable method where the bits are layered like shingles (thus the name Shingled Magnetic Recording) on the surface of the drive giving them higher data density thus making the drives cheaper to produce at higher data capacities. SMR drives are supposedly not very good for NAS application, but like 6 or 7 of the 12 drives in my file server are SMR drives. My priority was capacity over speed with my server as it is mostly just serving as a backup and a media server so high write speeds don't matter (and if they did my setup supports using an SSD as cache drive to boost speed). Now I had mentioned above that all the 4TB drives I had purchased have failed and I think they may have been first gen SMR drives. I think the last one of them failing (can't remember if I had 3 or 4 of them) was what prompted me to build my current server so that I could get some sweet sweet redundancy. I haven't had a drive fail since building the server, but hopefully I can just pull out a failed one and stick in a new one and then add it to the pool and rebalance and everything will be good.

Rykin wrote:
pandasuit wrote:

I have a bunch of old 1TB drives that refuse to die but have been eyeing some newer bigger ones. Has anyone here tried any of the drives branded as being targeted at NAS use such as the Seagate IronWolf or WD Red? Is it just branding?

The CMR variety of the IronWolf drives (Pro or Pro+ or some other BS like that) are pretty highly rated. I am not sure that the SMR versions are bad but they got reviewed pretty horribly when Seagate revamped the product line and made the low-end drives SMR and tried to down-play it (at least they didn't try to outright hide the switch like WD had done with their Red line though).

It all comes down to how data is written to the disk with SMR using a slower and less reliable method where the bits are layered like shingles (thus the name Shingled Magnetic Recording) on the surface of the drive giving them higher data density thus making the drives cheaper to produce at higher data capacities. SMR drives are supposedly not very good for NAS application, but like 6 or 7 of the 12 drives in my file server are SMR drives. My priority was capacity over speed with my server as it is mostly just serving as a backup and a media server so high write speeds don't matter (and if they did my setup supports using an SSD as cache drive to boost speed). Now I had mentioned above that all the 4TB drives I had purchased have failed and I think they may have been first gen SMR drives. I think the last one of them failing (can't remember if I had 3 or 4 of them) was what prompted me to build my current server so that I could get some sweet sweet redundancy. I haven't had a drive fail since building the server, but hopefully I can just pull out a failed one and stick in a new one and then add it to the pool and rebalance and everything will be good.

The IronWolf 4TB non-pro model on Amazon Canada specifically says CMR in the product title and images. Price isn’t bad. Was thinking about getting a few of those for backup drives and maybe throw a couple in my NAS.

Just do what I literally always do when it's time to upgrade drives on my NAS... go to StorageReview's leaderboard and buy whatever they say is good, lol.

I went there looking for guidance because our QNAP TS-451 seems to be dying....

Smaller NAS (less than 5) – The QNAP TS-451 NAS is a powerful NAS for home, small, and medium businesses along with an HDMI port.

Hrm.

pandasuit wrote:

The IronWolf 4TB non-pro model on Amazon Canada specifically says CMR in the product title and images. Price isn’t bad. Was thinking about getting a few of those for backup drives and maybe throw a couple in my NAS.

Looks like they may have switched up the product line again. I am seeing them listed now as IronWolf, IronWolf Pro, IronWolf NAS, and IronWolf NAS Pro with the NAS versions listing CMR in the product description. This was probably a reaction to the negative press they had when they introduced SMR drives into what was considered to primarily be a NAS line. Next time I need a new drive I will probably get an IronWolf model.

My daughter's iPhone SE (2020 model) started having some problems about a week and a half ago: the rear camera doesn't work. When I say it doesn't work, I mean:
1) The native Phone app just displays pure black when the rear camera is selected, and pictures can't be taken.
2) The Snapchat app refuses to even recognize the rear camera (clicking the "camera swap" icon doesn't do anything).
3) The flash doesn't light up at all, even when the system flashlight button is tapped.

Additionally, I noticed last night while she was using Facetime (in front-camera mode the whole time), that the rear camera itself got BLAZING hot. My daughter mentioned that her phone used to get "pretty hot all the time", though it's unclear whether she meant the camera itself, or just like all around the backside where the battery/CPU is.

Her phone has been kept in a hard case, with a screen protector, since she got it last December. She's never gotten it wet (aside from a bit of rain), and she's never dropped it.

Google suggested a few potential fixes, which I've tried:
1) Close and reopen the Camera app - duh.
2) Restart the phone - duh.
3) Update it - already at the latest.
4) Reset All Setting - no luck.
5) Factory Reset - still no luck.

I'm no electronics engineer, but I'd speculate that there's some sort of short circuit that's occurred in the rear camera module. I have an appointment at an Apple store tomorrow evening; mostly just wondering if anyone had seen something like this before, so we know what to expect (i.e. would they potentially be able to fix it on-site, or would they send it out for repair, or would they just swap a replacement for us). I believe/hope that this should be covered in the Apple One-Year Limited Warranty.

In my experience, if it's failed, and a check of the indicators shows no water intrusion (maybe even if it does), they will hand you a new phone and transfer your stuff over. Hopefully it'll be a painless exchange.

Robear wrote:

In my experience, if it's failed, and a check of the indicators shows no water intrusion (maybe even if it does), they will hand you a new phone and transfer your stuff over. Hopefully it'll be a painless exchange.

Thanks Robear. That's what I'm hoping for. My daughter's birthday is next week, and she's been dreading the idea of not having a phone for it. Oh the horror!

Yeah just take it to the Apple store and as long as no water damage they will probably just give you a new one.

They ended up replacing the rear camera module, somehow. Took about 90 minutes, but otherwise no issue and no charge.

Awesome!

I'm not sure if my PC is just old or if something I can fix has gone awry. I built the PC in 2017 for $500 so it wasn't top of the line even then. But for the last couple years it has been slower than expected.

When I go to Task Manager the Disk Usage is often getting maxed out when I don't have much more running besides a web browser. The highest usage by any task will be less than 1 MB/s and there aren't too many tasks running so it doesn't seem like it should be maxed out. Hard drive is WD 1TB HDD (WDC WD10EZEX-08WN4A0). But I tested the speeds with CrystalDiskMark and they line up with expected results for the hard drive so maybe it's just old and I'm too used to using newer machines at work.

I also noticed the memory will hover around 90% used but the list of tasks only totals around 4GB of memory when I have 8GB of RAM installed (Crucial Orig 8GB RAM DDR4 Single Module). I confirmed I'm running a 64bit system which seems to be a common reason by RAM usage gets wonky. I've done some basic googling and tried the suggested fixes for both issues to no avail.

I guess I'm wondering if this stuff seems normal for an old but not too old machine? Or any ideas what might be going wrong? What are the chances that I screwed up somewhere when putting the PC together? I followed the instructions as best I could and thought I had succeeded when the thing turned on, but now I'm worried I hooked something up sub-optimally which is causing these problems. Would adding an SSD fix my disk usage issue? Or am I better off just accepting that my machine is old and start saving for a new one?

Have you scanned for any viruses? It could also be a failing hard drive.

lindawson wrote:

I'm not sure if my PC is just old or if something I can fix has gone awry. I built the PC in 2017 for $500 so it wasn't top of the line even then. But for the last couple years it has been slower than expected.

When I go to Task Manager the Disk Usage is often getting maxed out when I don't have much more running besides a web browser. The highest usage by any task will be less than 1 MB/s and there aren't too many tasks running so it doesn't seem like it should be maxed out. Hard drive is WD 1TB HDD (WDC WD10EZEX-08WN4A0). But I tested the speeds with CrystalDiskMark and they line up with expected results for the hard drive so maybe it's just old and I'm too used to using newer machines at work.

I also noticed the memory will hover around 90% used but the list of tasks only totals around 4GB of memory when I have 8GB of RAM installed (Crucial Orig 8GB RAM DDR4 Single Module). I confirmed I'm running a 64bit system which seems to be a common reason by RAM usage gets wonky. I've done some basic googling and tried the suggested fixes for both issues to no avail.

I guess I'm wondering if this stuff seems normal for an old but not too old machine? Or any ideas what might be going wrong? What are the chances that I screwed up somewhere when putting the PC together? I followed the instructions as best I could and thought I had succeeded when the thing turned on, but now I'm worried I hooked something up sub-optimally which is causing these problems. Would adding an SSD fix my disk usage issue? Or am I better off just accepting that my machine is old and start saving for a new one?

I see people complaining about slow computers at work all the time on computers with 8gigs of RAM and HDDs. Upgrading either to 16 gigs of RAM or to an SSD will help and doing both would make it feel like you have a whole new PC.

There is also a Windows System process that runs after startup that I have seen peg disk usage at around 100% for 20-30 minutes on systems with HDDs. You didn't mention seeing behavior like that though.

To break it down a little bit if you are using 90% of your RAM that means the OS is probably having to write RAM out to the page file on the HDD. If you had a faster drive it would be less noticeable or if you had more RAM it would happen less frequently.

Upgrade to an SSD and you will be much happier.

First, jack the memory up to 16 GB. Check the motherboard manual online to see what is the fastest you can run. That should be cheap and easy to do.

Then, I would get a new SSD from one of the big manufacturers (best might be the same company as your HDD) and use a reputable tool to copy the boot device to the new SSD (after backing up, of course - BackBlaze is awesome). (This is assuming your boot disk is 2TB or less, for affordability.) MAKE SURE the SSD protocol you get is supported by your motherboard; check the manual again. Probably SATA, although it is entirely possible you could get an NVME M.2 adapter for like $30 that would let you drop one of those drives in (which would be the fastest option, since it uses the PCI-E slot/bus directly).

At that point, you’d drop the new drive in, pull boot drive (just the connector until you have successfully booted), and go into the BIOS. Make sure the new drive is seen, and set it as the first boot drive option (because doing this will likely scramble the system boot order and it might hang waiting for the old drive). Once the new drive boots, you’ll be done and your system will be noticeably faster (at least 2x loading stuff and much faster in system and game operations thanks to the RAM giving you more room for app and system caches).

This is the procedure I’ve used for updates very successfully. I did find that you have to research the disk copy process very carefully, because it’s a boot disk. See if the manufacturer of the SSD has a copy program (and think about buying the same brand as the existing disk); if not, then look at one of the for-pay tools and make sure they will do HDD to SSD boot devices. Again, lay out the process on paper beforehand just to be sure.

It will extend the life of the system tremendously and your user experience will be greatly improved. Oh, and if your graphics card can be updated, think about that too. That would be the easy part (make sure to account for losing a PCI-E slot to the NVMe M.2 adapter if you go that route).

Good luck!

lindawson wrote:

I'm not sure if my PC is just old or if something I can fix has gone awry. I built the PC in 2017 for $500 so it wasn't top of the line even then. But for the last couple years it has been slower than expected.

If you can dig up the details, please list what motherboard you're using. It's only 4 years old, and even as a budget PC, you should be able to give it some additional capacity as others above have noted (add another 8-16GB RAM, replace boot drive with SSD/NVMe).

On a related theme, how easy is it to clone a hard drive on a Mac? At work, I used a 2013 iMac. I can tell the HDD is on its way out, and I want to replace it with an SSD.

I've done this before on a PC, and it's easy, but I don't trust anything to be easy on an Apple device.

It's probably easier on a mac. I don't know if iMacs have it, but macbook can boot into target disc mode that makes them act like an external hard drive. Hold "T" while booting to go into this mode.

Carbon Copy (Plus?) is the imaging/cloning software I've used extensively and most recently.

Thanks everyone for the useful responses! You are all amazing. I ran a scan with Malwarebytes and didn't find anything so I think I'm ok there. Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-H270M-DS3H so I should be able to put more memory on there. If I want to go from 8 to 16GB could I buy a matching 8GB chip and add it to what I have or is that asking for trouble and I'm better off starting fresh with a new 16GB chip? And I'll look into adding and SSD as well.

That was a very nice board at the time!

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...

That link should get you to the specs (if not, just google and included “Rev 1”.

Looks like you can drop in an i7 processor if you don’t have one, and that will let you use somewhat faster RAM. You can add in some 6GB/sec SATA SSDS/drives, and an M.2 (it has a slot, just pay attention to the “M” connector form factor mentioned because there are a few other types these days). If you really want to get good RAM performance go with 4 sticks to fill your slots; alternatively 2 would be good. 1 is last choice.

Good luck! I suspect these will be more budget parts than top dollar. NewEgg is your friend.

lindawson wrote:

Thanks everyone for the useful responses! You are all amazing. I ran a scan with Malwarebytes and didn't find anything so I think I'm ok there. Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-H270M-DS3H so I should be able to put more memory on there. If I want to go from 8 to 16GB could I buy a matching 8GB chip and add it to what I have or is that asking for trouble and I'm better off starting fresh with a new 16GB chip? And I'll look into adding and SSD as well.

If you have only one 8GB stick, then yes, definitely buy a matching (as close as possible) 8GB stick and slam it in there ($40ish). Also a nice m.2 NVMe SSD would be a great pick-up for you as a replacement boot drive ($130 - keywords to look for are "m.2 nvme pcie 3.0").

With due respect to Robear, I'd probably recommend not trying to upgrade the CPU at this point, though; not a great bang-for-the-buck upgrade right now.

Yeah, but the i7 would not be terribly expensive, I’d think, and would enable faster RAM. Still, I was just calling out another upgrade and you may well be right.

CPU is an i3-7100 3.9GHz 3MB Cache Dual so upgrading to an i7 seems like a big leap. But might start upgrading one piece at a time and see where I'm at after adding RAM and SSD.

Yeah, I would be upgrading from a dual core i3. I'd put that above the RAM upgrade.

Yeah, but the peak of that generation looks like the Core i7 7700K - doubles the core count to 4 from what lindawson has already, which is good, and the cores are each ~10% faster than that i3-7100... but it's $420. Even used CPUs on ebay are going for that price (or more). I still stand by going for a RAM and SSD upgrade first, for the best bang-for-buck.

So my rig is getting on in years. Bought in 2016, fairly high-spec then (i7 6700K quad-core, GTX 1070, DDR4 RAM on a Z170 motherboard).

Obvs, the GPU is getting long in the tooth, and if I could lay my hands on a 3080, I'd put it in there.

My questions are:
1) at what point does the entire thing get "too old" and Ship-of-Theseus'ing it no longer cuts the mustard. I'm assuming that if I'm not already limited on a potential CPU upgrade by the motherboard socket, that'll become an issue soon. Cos I was eyeing a new CPU as a potential parallel upgrade with the GPU.

2) starting to get concerned about drive life - the OS is on an small SSD and there's an optical drive too that are both original. Should I be looking to replace and migrate those before they die on me?

3) What other components are the big hitters when it comes to life-limits? Fans? PSU? RAM?

Jonman wrote:

So my rig is getting on in years. Bought in 2016, fairly high-spec then (i7 6700K quad-core, GTX 1070, DDR4 RAM on a Z170 motherboard).

Obvs, the GPU is getting long in the tooth, and if I could lay my hands on a 3080, I'd put it in there.

My questions are:
1) at what point does the entire thing get "too old" and Ship-of-Theseus'ing it no longer cuts the mustard. I'm assuming that if I'm not already limited on a potential CPU upgrade by the motherboard socket, that'll become an issue soon. Cos I was eyeing a new CPU as a potential parallel upgrade with the GPU.

2) starting to get concerned about drive life - the OS is on an small SSD and there's an optical drive too that are both original. Should I be looking to replace and migrate those before they die on me?

3) What other components are the big hitters when it comes to life-limits? Fans? PSU? RAM?

1) Five to six years depending on what role the computer is serving IMHO. A friend has a PC running as a file server that is like 11-12 years old at this point. It still works so there is no reason to build a new one in that case.

2) SSDs are pretty dependable compared to HDDs. They last for quite a while under regular usage. Now if you download a lot of stuff or encode video or use it as a scratch disk in Adobe products or anything else like that it can shorten the lifespan of the drive. Depending on the brand of drive you have your manufacture may have tools you can download for free to check the health of the drive (there are also some general purpose ones). If your drive health is good you might just need to cleanup your Windows install or even do a fresh reimaging of the SSD to improve performance. Whatever you do don't run a defragging tool on an SSD.

3) I think that HDDs and PSUs are probably the two most likely to fail over time, but things happen sort of randomly when it comes to failures as devices age. My last computer's motherboard's SATA ports started failing, everything else seemed to work just fine but that. I just couldn't get anything to work anymore with like 3 of the ports.

Technically you could upgrade to the same i7 7700K I linked earlier, but it would only get you a few percent improvement. Going to an AMD 5900X (or whatever the latest Intel equivalent is) should get you something like 400% improvement I think - if you can actually find the chips in stock at a reasonable price.

HDDs/SSDs generally should last for 10+ years, but YMMV, not every drive is created equal, not all drive usage patterns are equal, etc. I wouldn't start panicking over a 5-year-old drive, unless you've noticed specific things that cause you concern (e.g. SMART alerts). That said, NVMe drives are very reasonably priced these days, are even faster than SSDs, and frankly are even more delightful to install than a SATA SSD.

If you're going to the hassle of installing a new motherboard, personally I'd take that opportunity to swap out most of the other components as well - PSU, fans (CPU fans especially, case fans less critically), and RAM (not because of failure concerns, but because of compatibility and performance).

lindawson wrote:

CPU is an i3-7100 3.9GHz 3MB Cache Dual so upgrading to an i7 seems like a big leap. But might start upgrading one piece at a time and see where I'm at after adding RAM and SSD.

Man that i3 is a major bottleneck, if you find a good deal on an i7 it would be worth the upgrade. As far as I am concerned 1 stick of ram is never an option. Running in single channel mode will really slow down your computer. Do you currently only have one 8 gig stick of ram in your system? Or two 4 gig sticks? Cause upgrading may be easier if you just bought a matching kit of 8 gig sticks for a total of 16 gigs, and got rid of what is currently in there.

The upgrade to SSD regardless of form factor, NVME or SATA 2.5" will make a big difference. NVME should be much faster speed wise and it is a cleaner install as there are no cables to plug in.. Either way I would recommend a fresh windows install, don't try to clone a HDD system drive over to an SSD or NVME, it's a pain in the butt. Backup your files and disconnect all your old drives. Add in the new solid state drive as the only drive plugged into the system, install windows from scratch then after that is done you can plug in your old drive/s and use them as data drives for music and pictures etc.