Yeah it’s the drives and the controller for all the drives that are making the power usage what it is. I could replace some of the older drives with a newer one and be able to ditch the smaller drives and controllers, but it seems a waste to do that until they die.

Also, I wouldn’t mind ditching for a Sufficient™ amount of nvme storage, but SSDs aren’t actually getting cheaper and are probably going to do the opposite, so I’ll likely end up doing uh, nothing,

The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

It’s not that they don’t work.

Basically what you’ll see is kinda like a cache miss, except the stall time to go ‘oops, don’t have that’ and go out and get the required bits is very slow, and so you can see 8gb cards getting 20fps, and 16gb ones getting 40 or 60, simply because the path to get the missing textures is fucking slow.

And worse, you’ll get big framerate dips and the game will feel like absolute shit because you keep running into hitches loading textures.

It’s made worse in games where you can’t reasonably predict what texture you’ll get next (ex. Fortnite and other such online things that are you know, played by a lot of people) but even games where you might be able to reasonably guess, you’re still going to run into the simple fact that the textures from a modern game are simply higher quality and thus bigger than the ones you might have had 5 years ago and thus 8gb in 2019 and 8gb in 2025 is not an equivalent thing.

It’s crippling the performance of the GPU that may be able to perform substantially better, and for a relatively low BOM cost decrease. They’re trash, and should all end up in the trash.

Anecdata, but SSDs will last longer than you want to use them in terms of write endurance.

My NAS OS SSDs are 500gb hynix drives from about 8 years ago, and they’re pushing 150 TBW.

150TB is a LOT of write cycles on a small drive, and they’re still reporting 94% endurance remaining.

The controller will die or I’ll upgrade well before that breaks at the rate it’s going.

Also keep in mind that you can read flash all you want and that doesn’t wear anything (unlike a HDD, amusingly), so for most consumer use cases, they’ll load the drive up with their data, and then only slowly modify or add to it, but have lots and lots of read access.

HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total

Whether your drives are idle is also a very use-case specific thing and I wouldn’t spend any time trying to generalize based on that math as a “oh this is how it works for everyone”.

In my case, I’ve got 5 drives all spun up at all times because of torrrent clients, Jellyfin users, and just general media acquisition and public content serving.

This thing would dramatically reduce my power footprint and save me giant buckets of money over it’s lifespan while being smaller/faster IO performance/lower noise.

(My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so…)

Basically every one of them made in the past 4 or 5 years?

Some are better than others - CP2077, for example, will happily use all 16 threads on my 7700x, but something crusty like WoW only uses like, 4. Fortnite is. 3 or so, unless you’re doing shader compilation where it’ll use all of them, and so on - but it’s not 2002 anymore.

The issue is that most games won’t use nearly as many cores as Intel is stuffing on a die these days, which means for gaming having 32 threads via e-cores or whatever is utterly pointless, but having 8 cores and 16 threads of full-fat cores is very much useful.

Well, I can kinda answer that: I’ve got a launch PS4 controller that I mostly use wired on my PC and it’s fine.

If I use it wirelessly, it’ll still get about 5-6 hours, which basically means after 13 years it’s still right on spec for what it should be able to do.

Not really something that’s probably worth worrying about unless you’ve got some absolutely shitty batteries.

(Hell, I’ve still got some PS3 controllers that’ll do 3-4 hours, and they’re freaking ancient at this point.)

And they also had the turn-into-a-zombie plague event when Wrath launched, too.

As I recall, that mostly just made everyone rage because the assholes running around spreading it everywhere were just annoying the crap out of everyone and the general thought is they just needed to fuck off and find something else to do.

Or, basically, Covid.

Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.

nothing of value will be lost

I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)

MSA30

Unless my memory fails, that’s billion year old SCSI drives.

Do not buy billion year old SCSI drives, enclosures for SCSI drives, or uh, well, anything like that.

It’s going to use an enormous amount of power, perform slower than a single modern drive, and be prone to failure because well, it’s a billion years old.

That’s not something you want.

For bandwidth intensive stuff I like wholesale internet’s stuff.

The hardware is very uh, old, but the network quality is great since they run an ix. And it’s unmetered too so it’s probably sufficient.

Alas, the only thing I can think of at this point when someone mentions nVidia:

It’s a slightly more performant GPU with a worse CPU than a Z1. (Zen3 vs Zen4, 680M vs 740M)

But we’re talking very slightly better GPU performance, so calling it essentially equivalent for gaming is probably perfectly reasonable.

Except, of course, you can find the Z1 Ally for $250 at BestBuy damn near any day of the week, soooooo uh, yeah that pricing huh.

Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.

No joke.

I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t really play anything anymore because of it.

You go ‘boy I’d like to see what new games are coming soon’ and you immediately land in a cesspool of people throwing a fit that there’s a black guy, or a trans girl, or a white chick that doesn’t make their little peepee hard, as well as any other awful sexist, racist, ableist swill you can possibly imagine all over every inch of anything that remotely looks like gaming media or discussion forums.

I just kind of have quit looking, and just playing old games for the 2nd or 3rd time, despite the fact I would happily have bought anything that seems remotely fun a couple of years ago because I don’t want to subject myself to those morons, end up playing games with them, or like, having anyone confuse me as being one of them as you said.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

But I was assured it would be the equivalent of a 4090! Surely someone with an ugly jacket wouldn’t lie about their products?

(/s, etc.)

Why is every CEO’s brain turning to sludge all of a sudden? I mean I get sucking on the toadstool of the king to ensure you get your share of the public coffers as they’re looted, but uh, this dude sells plastic toys and video games t-shirts for twice the price of everyone else.

And he wants to sell parts of his company which are in countries that aren’t absolute shitholes, and his sales pitch is that you get… free woke?

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.