Be Excellent To Each Other

How much data do you have to back up or store on them, and how critical is it?
Oh, and how frequently does it get accessed?

If you want a nice always-on media store then a NAS makes more sense, but for occasional use or low priority backups then you could save some cash and just buy standard USB drives.

Or an online service.

What should I be looking for when buying a CPU heatsink?

That's a very vague question. Like, really vague.

Satisfaction

Computer shop

Oh wow, I thought I'd pressed "cancel" on that.

A good fan. That's the answer, a good fan.

And pleasantly angled fins, for agreeable heat dissipation.

This is well regarded as being one of the finest HSFs ever produced, and for under £20.

ALSO, HEATPIPES.

And spokeydokes.

Amazon says it wouldn't fit on the CPU I'm getting (5820k). :-p
I think I might go with the Corsair H100i GTX.

Water is usually overkill unless you're after big overclocks. (And even then there tends not to be a massive amount in it.)

Quiet, though. And pretty cheap nowadays.

I got a universal Thermaltake one from eBuyer in June for £40, and it's fine (I'd link you, but it's been discontinued).

Yeah but you've got a pump, and a fan, and tubing, and mounting to worry about, and so on. Plus I'm not convinced they're any quieter than a good air cooler.

For most people, most of the time, the stock supplied HSF will do the job. Failing that a quiet £25 air cooler will get you most of the way to what a water cooler will do.

I realise the all-in-one water coolers are very tidy solutions compared to water cooling contraptions of yore, but I'm still not sold on them really.

The Rajintek Triton is better and cooler.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/raijinte ... 16-rt.html

It is a little bit more fiddly to install, though.



Over the past couple of years AIOs have improved a lot. So much so that you need an enormous air cooler to perform even remotely similar. That means NH-D15 or one of the other enormous coolers and that means you usually can't access your memory after installation.

99% of cases are designed to pretty much hide a 240mm rad in the roof now, meaning space around the motherboard (and ram slots) is miles better.

With a 5820k I would want to overclock because they are absolutely balls out of the box (totally derped clock) and just lately they've been getting better due to better quality binning from Intel. Mine will do 4.6ghz bench stable on a single 120mm AIO and 4.4ghz 24/7 stable, a far cry from the samples at launch that couldn't even do 4ghz.

Sorry guys.. Right, back to the NAS.

I want something that's on 24/7 and can be accessed by all of the computers in the house and the laptops. Just something I can store images on and so on.

I was originally thinking build a server, but from what I can gather a NAS is just like a tiny PC that serves yes?

I could use an external drive, but I would need to lug it around and it's not really practical on a laptop.

Something like this would probably do you fine:

http://www.ebuyer.com/569164-wd-my-clou ... 20hwt-eesn

It's 'only' 2TB but just buy a larger capacity one if you need it.

A NAS such as this is essentially just an external hard drive with a Linux backplane that is the 'PC' or 'server' if you will, running bespoke vendor software, along with a network connection.

As previously discussed, you administer it via a web interface, create your share or shares, set permissions and suchlike, and then map into them from any device on the network with the credentials you specified.

Obviously the NAS is only a backup if it's the second copy of your data, the number of people who buy something like this, copy everything to it and then maintain it as THE ONLY COPY of their data, and then get all upset when the drive fails and they lose everything, is quite alarming.

You can buy a two-bay (or more) NAS such as this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/618586-wd-my-clou ... 40jch-eesn

That'll do hardware RAID-1 if you want (or RAID-0, or JBOD, or spanning), but even in RAID-1 you still have a single point of failure in the Linux backplane, and if that goes you have to send the unit away to get your data back. (Although that is admittedly rather unlikely.)

How many copies of your data you want to maintain to make you feel safe is obviously up to you (personally I go for three), but using the NAS as a backup (therefore the second copy) is probably fine.

Yeah that looks about perfect dude. I would say in total we have about ooo, 6tb in all of our machines? Thing is two of them are gaming PCs and thus most of the data on them is games that don't need backing up because I always buy media where I can and replacing them on Steam for example is quite easy, given we're on 72mb fibre.

It's mainly music and films I want to back up. Oh and of course photos, because I lost several year's worth of digital photos recently.

I need a laptop that will run office 365 and do the internet. I don't care for games. How much do I need to spend and what should I buy? It will spend a lot of time plugged into a monitor so massive screen not necessary. What about this? I want to spend about that

RAID also won't help against accidental deletion, or data corruption, or ransomware encryption, or any number of other mishaps. As you wisely say, RAID Ain't A Backup. But discs are cheap and I'd rather guard against the most common source of data loss -- drive failure -- via RAID than have to schlep tons of stuff back from cloud storage.

SurfaceBook. Future you will thank current Me.

You just suggested a $1500-plus laptop in replacement for a £400 one. Good work, fanboy.

Unrelated to claims of fannish preferences, have you looked at a Chromebook MaliA? The new Dell mid-priced one is a good bit nicer than the £200 cheaply models but not as spendy as the Pixel.

I suppose it depends where your own comfort level is with the security of your data based on its importance to you.

For example a music or film collection might be considered non-critical but you'd still rather not lose them, whereas cherished family photos and videos may well be considered vitally important.

Personally I run with two 'live' copies of my data and one 'offline' copy of my data.

The master 'live' copy lives in my own PC on a 2TB drive. (This is what propagates out to everything else when I run my Goodsync backups.)

The secondary 'live' copy lives on the 2TB NAS (two 1TB drives in spanning mode). This also serves it back out to the network as it has films, music, family photos and videos on it etc, so anyone can access it from any PC on the network. (There's also a private share on there where I put my own stuff, and Mrs Hearthly has a 50GB quota-ed share on there which she dumps pics and videos from her phone to, for me to assimilate into the main master family collection on my PC, which in turn propagates back out to everything else when I run my backups.)

The third 'offline' copy lives on a basic external 2TB hard drive connected to my PC that I only plug in when I'm doing a backup, then it gets unplugged again. (The idea being that day-to-day it's inaccessible, incorruptible, immune to any kind of horrible ransomware etc, so in the event of a catastrophic failure of some sort, that's my recovery drive. I suppose for maximum security I should keep it in a different property inbetween backups so it becomes a genuine offsite backup.)

My current issue is that I'm nudging up against the 2TB limits, hence having to shop around for new storage solutions.

I may just replicate what I have now, but up everything to 4TB. (4TB internal drive, 2x4TB NAS, 4TB external drive - and run the NAS in RAID-1 to give extra protection against what is indeed the most common source of data loss, drive failure.)

Maybe one day I'll cave and just lob everything up to THE SINISTER CLOUD.

I would also recommend the Chromebook.

Actually, can you Citrix with a Chromebook?

I wouldn't RAID with a backup. I've used RAID plenty in the past on SSDs because it's run striping 4 SSDs and then watching how fast they go, but I would never bother with a backup as it's another risk factor.

You are confusing RAID0 with redundant RAID variants.

yeah I probably am. TBH it's not really something I've studied much

That 2tb jobby will do me fine.

We had a look in PC world and the budget crept.. I liked the look of this Lenovo for £549. It has a vga port so we can plug a monitor into it. i7, 8gig ram and 1tb hdd.

I might get one for myself now you mentioned it.

Lenovo have really been trying hard lately to make great products. Some of their recent laptops and tablets have been fantastic

Don't forget to check out the Argos outlet on Ebay, dude. My wife bought a natty Beats laptop from them for about £350 a few months back. Win 8.1, 8gb ram 1tb etc. Very nice little laptop and £150 off retail.

If you genuinely just need internet, email, Office functionality, media playing, a selection of apps, and suchlike - then a Chromebook is genuinely fantastic.

I've got one of the 'cheapy' £200 affairs and it's a heck of a lot nicer to use than any low-end Windows laptop for duties such as those listed above. (SSD versus hard drive, infrequent and small updates versus constant massive ones, incredibly quick to boot/sleep/resume, and so on.)

I've had mine for over a year now and I've been consistently impressed with it.

Obviously it just gets better if you're reasonably well involved with the Google ecosystem, which in my case is Google account, Google drive, Google Nexus phone, signed into Google on all my various devices etc.

Really nice bits of kit.

My last couple of laptops have been lenovos. They're decent pieces of kit.

Although they did make a huge misstep with the entire superfish thing, the fools.

I'm not saying I'd never buy a Lenovo again after the spyware thing, but it'd take a fucking massively good reason. Like, it'd have to be free or something, just on the principles that is prefer not to spend my money with companies run by dickheads.

I don't know. On one hand yes, but on the other hand, I doubt they realised quite what the effects were and they're more likely to be damn careful about not doing something similar again than other companies who haven't been bitten.

In an ideal world the first thing you'd do with any shop-bought laptop is blow it away and rebuild it if you had access to a legitimate OS.

Failing that you'd simply spend a couple of hours uninstalling all the utter shite that gets pre-installed on them. (PC Pro ran a piece on this a couple of years ago, and the impact in terms of boot-up times, general performance, RAM/hard disk usage etc was pretty shocking.)

The Lenovo Superfish clusterfuck was a whole new level of shittery though, when you need to launch MMC consoles and start manually deleting fake HTTPS certificates to make the laptop secure, the company involved gets onto my 'never buy' list and no mistake.

With all that in mind, I am now outside PC World waiting for it to open to buy a Toshiba satellite l50. Although a Chromebook could do a lot of the stuff, the boss doesn't want one.

Now I changed my mind and a hp envy is 70 quod cheaper with an amd a10

Thank you for your kind help which I ignored to buy something completely different but it has a sub woofer.

It won't play cds.

Is it Windows 10? You need to download a CD player from the App Store as media player doesn't exist anymore.

No it doesn't have an optical drive. But I will do that, too, as I have a usb dvd whatnot

VLC!

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

I contemplated the possibility that it didn't have an optical drive but concluded that even you wouldn't have raised that complaint under the circumstances.

Have you tried an external usb cd drive into a pass through memory stick to convert info from the cd into an .mp3 format on the fly?

Yes it does. You just need to go to your preferred apps thing and change it from that stupid media player to the original one. I've been using MP since day one

Yeah, I thought I still had media player. I presume you mean that it's no longer supported and being updated?

That's fine with me.. I use Zune anyway.

I didn't even mean that. I meant it doesn't have dvd playback. Not that I care.

If you want a cheap NAS then this will do the Job

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCen ... ywords=NAS

You could get 2X2TB HD and do the lost for £150

One thing to be aware with cheap NAS is that the controllers are cheap as well. I bought one of the D-Links for my Dad so he could have some TV and Films for his XBMC, its never gone wrong but the copy speed is slow around 11MB, on a GB network, My Thecus NAS will do 90MB or more. So if you have a lot of data to move cheaper ones are fine just remember it will take a lot longer to get the data copied.

Also you should have a look at your data, TV and films and other stuff are not worth bothering about, you can download this stuff again. Things like photos matter to me and I have these on Ondrive so the cloud is worth looking at as well.

Thanks will give it some consideration

Is this the Chromebook you mean? I fancy a Chromebook for my commute, for writing and whatnot. But I also need access to software like Final Draft, which appears to only be available on Windows and Mac. What's the likelihood of there being a groundswell of non-Android software coming to Chrome, as the platform increases in popularity? And how long is a piece of string?

Going back to this, Fish. Do I have to run two drives in it? To be honest after looking at my data I would need probably less than 1tb in total to back it all up. If that's the case then I have a 750gb laptop drive as an example that I could throw in it.