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  1. Mercutio

    Need a Decent Phone

    I have zero social media. That's not an issue, but as things are, my phone has gotten its last OS update. Security updates end this year as well. That's the biggest problem. The battery is just mildly annoying. I used to end the day with around 45% of a charge remaining. Now it's more like 20%...
  2. Mercutio

    archival storage options

    They're gonna be SAS. Almost ever SAS adapter you'll run across will be an LSI-something-or-ther whether it says Dell or HP or Lenovo on it. SAS host bus adapters are usually 8-lane cards and obviously it's better if you can find a 12Gbps SAS card than a 3 or 6Gbps version. A lot of cheap SAS...
  3. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    More or less every "serious" lens Canon is making right now weighs in at well over that $2000 price point. Sure, there are some relatively affordable RF primes and that weird 3D stereo lens, but most everything (although not the 35mm and 50mm; the usual cheapies) that's /1.8 or faster? $2100...
  4. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    Problem Steps Recorder and Wordpad are deprecated and supposedly will be removed in future Windows 11 updates. I use Problem Steps recorder a lot and really want it on computers I use. Further, deprecated tools don't stop working just because Microsoft stops including them. Windows Easy...
  5. Mercutio

    Need a Decent Phone

    It works well for me, and I think it's incredibly useful to have the ability to change the entire personality of my phone to suit my needs. The contenders for me right now are the A54 ($450), the Xperia 1 v ($1000-ish) or whichever S24 offers a 1TB option (probably $1200+ on an Ultra body)...
  6. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    Didn't Canonrumors get bought out a couple years ago? New guy may have some different priorities. And so might Canon, with all the cheapy-cheap telephoto options.
  7. Mercutio

    Need a Decent Phone

    The #1 reason for the card slot is switching cards so I can back files up from my camera. I can copy over the .CR3s with a non-Canon 3rd party application using Wifi, but I'd rather just swap the cards since it's much faster to do that. Secondary reason is that I have a card full of...
  8. Mercutio

    archival storage options

    I wasn't paid enough to make that my problem. I did the job I was paid to do. I copied the contents of one tape to a thumb drive after I recovered it and made sure that files opened. They didn't ask me to do anything else.
  9. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The divide isn't coastal. It's urban vs rural. Our natural resources are all out in the flyover places and all our economic might is concentrated in our big cities. We can't have one without the other. For the union to fracture, we would have to figure out how to restructure debts and ownership...
  10. Mercutio

    Need a Decent Phone

    The S20 product line was the last Samsung S-series to have an SD slot and it also has more RAM than comparable newer S-series phones have, but my battery life isn't so great any longer and it's PROBABLY time to replace the phone. Looking at what's out there, I'm not a huge fan of Motorola...
  11. Mercutio

    archival storage options

    Early last year, someone asked me to recover data off a TR3 that was written in 1999. Travan was a consumer format that was available in roughly the same time period as CD-R and their CDs were unreadable. I had a HELL of a time finding a copy of BackupExec 7.2 to handle the restore, but it...
  12. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The issue in the US in this point is not Trump. The ongoing nonsense isn't going to stop with him, even if he is not reelected. The position of the republican party at this point is that the will of the people is not as important as their rule over the people, and they're fully willing to...
  13. Mercutio

    archival storage options

    The thing you are looking for is called LTO. You need to understand that you will need to buy multiple drives and that you will also want to preserve both a working PC and the relevant software to work the drive(s) you've chosen. LTO 5 is highly affordable for 1.5TB/tape and secondhand drives...
  14. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    I'm sure it is, but there are plenty of BS features on GPUs that only a minority will use. Doesn't mean there's an excuse for not supporting it if every decent mobile device can do it without issue or complaint.
  15. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    I'm just not willing to spend $500+ on crippled hardware. If Intel and pretty much every contemporary mobile SoC can handle 10 bit 422 HEVC in hardware, why the hell can't nVidia?
  16. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    There's a certain level of aggravation in the low-cost slow aperture RF telephotos but $2000 seems reasonable for THAT much zoom range. The guys getting mad that it isn't able to keep up with $kidney-priced pro telephotos they want are perfectly free to go buy them. I had good enough weather to...
  17. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    This might be of interested to LM. 4x10GBps SFP+, 1x2.5GbpsBaseT, 2x 2.5 SATA, 2x nVME, SFF 8087, USB C on a contemporary 8 core Celeron CPU. That's an awful lot of I/O for a small, dedicated server. Edit: Amazon Link.
  18. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    There is no new manufacturing process. I think we're just doing more RAM and wider memory buses for this round.
  19. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    nVidia is about to announce new RTX Super hardware at CES. AMD may have new cards coming as well. The 4070Ti Super has 16GB RAM and a not-crippled 256-bit memory bus for $800 MSRP and there are price cuts expected for the current 4080, 4070Ti and 4070 and probably on the AMD side as well. I...
  20. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    Haven't gotten one yet. I'm probably waiting until spring to go visit my rack at this point.
  21. Mercutio

    Network the NAS

    You can use a media adapter to get your cables all on one standard and you'll probably have to manually assign the port speed on the switch rather than have it auto-negotiate. 10GbbaseT is kind of notorious for high power draw compared to 1Gb or 2.5Gb. Media adapters can be REALLY picky about...
  22. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    I'm sure I CAN. The obnoxious issue is that the $800 cards don't do something the entry level Intel cards can.
  23. Mercutio

    Network the NAS

    You run the 2.5s to a 2.5Gb switch and SFP them to the bigger guy.
  24. Mercutio

    Network the NAS

    This guy give your 8x 10Gb SFP+ ports that'll negotiate down to 2.5Gb if you just want to deal with what you have now. For 100% more money, you can get one that has a brand name on it. The Trendnet DOES support management functions, so if you wanted to have one VLAN for your internet...
  25. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    According to PugetBench, it seems that Resolve Studio works best on a 24GB Radeon 7900XTX, which is kind of interesting because its closest price competitor is the 4070 Ti, which is considered by most metrics a mid-tier card. This generation of GPUs is insane. I want an Arc for hardware codec...
  26. Mercutio

    Something Random

    You could also potentially apply for a student visa. My older brother found a WFH job with a decent salary, moved to Prague and started taking classes at Charles University. He completed a BS, MS and PhD over the course of 13 years and since he now has a functional psychology practice, I believe...
  27. Mercutio

    Something Random

    FWIW I use Mellanox QDR Infiniband adapters between my main desktop and file server. The ~8m twinax cable running between them was the most expensive component. As Handruin said, that interface is fast enough that the network connection between the systems isn't the bottleneck, but rather the...
  28. Mercutio

    Hard Drive Recommendations

    I'm under the impression that anything with *Star in its name is carrying the IBM/Hitachi legacy forward, but I still prefer not to deal with WD. My relationship to WD has been marred since the days when drives were measured in the 10s of megabytes.
  29. Mercutio

    Fast Public Transit for North America

    True story: Las Vegas in theory has an Amtrak stop. The "stop" is a bus that takes you to goddamned Arizona to get on or off a train that runs to transit hubs in San Francisco and Denver/Chicago. It's also off Freemont Street, the "old strip" which isn't particularly easy to get to or close to...
  30. Mercutio

    Hard Drive Recommendations

    My issue with Toshiba drives in general is that its warranty service is trash. Kind of the opposite of WD, where the drives are born trash and die trash, but at least they make it easy to replace their garbage-hardware. Toshiba drives are a black hole where you send something out and never get...
  31. Mercutio

    How to Recover Data From RAID 5 on Buffalo TS5400D NAS?

    Buffalo NASes run Linux and it's REALLY likely that it's just using LVM. You have two big challenges. The first is that you have to figure out the interleave order of your drives. Once that's been determined, it's mostly just a matter of patience as whatever software package you use to attempt...
  32. Mercutio

    mATX Rebuild

    I have 18 tabs open looking at different products right now, LM. I am looking. Do you have a 4x or larger slot you aren't using?
  33. Mercutio

    mATX Rebuild

    Here is a PCIe 3.0 x1 card to supply 7 USB 3.0 ports and here is one that supports 5Gbps USB 3.2. If you're dead set on getting external access to a high speed interface, you might need to look at a thunderbolt adapter + dock instead.
  34. Mercutio

    Blackened October/November Deals

    At a guess, Via and Renasas didn't care to build a reference board or offer a newer chipset? For USB 3.x, I think ASmedia is the most common chipset.
  35. Mercutio

    mATX Rebuild

    Do you have a 10Gbps USB 3.x device that you're worried about? PCIe 2.0 will give you 8Gbps, which is plenty for everything but a new SSD or card reader. Here's this guy. He's in Belgium, but that's 1x 10Gbps type A port on a PCIe 3.0 1x card with an ASMedia 3142 controller. My experience is...
  36. Mercutio

    Mini PC

    My partner convinced the Event Management people she works for to hire her to do art design work. They bought her a prebuilt at her request, although in all likelihood she's going to do everything on her M1 Macbook. She just wants a gaming PC and this is an excuse to get her hands on one...
  37. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    If you bought it in 2019, it's almost certainly still under warranty. I'm sure you could get it replaced.
  38. Mercutio

    Blackened October/November Deals

    I'm just not enough of a fan of the P-core E-core nonsense to look at Intel. I understand why it makes sense for gamers. I am not that.
  39. Mercutio

    mATX Rebuild

    There ARE such cards. Startech and Inateck are brands I've known to make them for years, with many less expensive cards from weirdo Chinese brands promising much better specs and features for around half the price. USB hubs are fine for a lot of things. The places where they fall down are...
  40. Mercutio

    Fast Public Transit for North America

    Rail works great on the east coast of the US because there's a major city every 40 miles or so from Boston to Washington DC. In that corridor, there's already plenty of good and useful rail service. Having rail service from Ontario to Vancouver likewise makes sense because some crazy huge...
  41. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Yeah. I'll probably wash an NVMe drive sooner or later regardless. I'm going to start pulling my oldest 4TB S4510s. I remember paying $1200 apiece for those guys and I'm just replacing them with new (unused) ones. The new ones are under $300 apiece. I'm thankful for how much prices have come...
  42. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    This is actually good to know, when on some future day I wash an NVMe drive instead of just a crappy USB one.
  43. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Laundry and dishes are the absolute worst and they're both never-ending. I do believe my fob is actually waterproof though.
  44. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    As an aside, I also wash the lock fob for my car with regularity and it ALSO seems to hold up to that level of contact with water without issue.
  45. Mercutio

    Software Defined Storage Solutions

    Cloud makes more sense than rolling out a private datacenter for companies that have scores or hundreds of employees. I agree at that scale. I can't remotely justify those costs when a shop is small enough that hosting costs could pay salaries that would meaningfully impact the head count of the...
  46. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Maybe start with cleaning contacts and see what happens?
  47. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    Fingers crossed for an R6v3 when I get around to updating, although I suppose a feature like that will probably be reserved for the more expensive SKUs for at least the next couple generations. The 1DXmk3 is also a low-MP sports shooter and was fairly recently Canon's flagship, so there is...
  48. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Given how frequently I was the wad of USB drives I keep in my right front pocket, it's actually possible that it's fine if the drive is commercially produced as an external drive in the first place. I keep them all on lanyards but there's a good reason to have each of them and I had enough of a...
  49. Mercutio

    Software Defined Storage Solutions

    I have a TrueNAS back-end for the primary storage I have at my datacenter. It's easier to apportion file services for that than try to resize virtual drives. Since my native systems are all on the same 10Gbps switch, it's really hard to complain about performance with the TrueNAS VM mostly...
  50. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    Not having to worry about banding on electronic shutter under cheap lights would make me a lot happier given my shooting needs, but I'm not buying a $6000 Sony just to get it. Maybe the R6 mk 3 or a Canon R1 will have it.
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