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Ofecks posted:Unfathomable indeed. Maybe they're worried about someone's grandpa irrevocably losing his data because he's clicking around and not reading (or understanding) prompts. They are very much worried about that, which is why the default place MS suggests to put a recovery key is in your MS Account, and Win11 makes MS Accounts mandatory. (Putting your recovery key in your MS Account also means it can be subpoena'd by the cops, if such is a worry for you.) Ofecks posted:Sounds like I need to upgrade to Pro. I'm super-wary of buying an OS key off a random goon, though. But I have kinda done that sort of thing before. I have an IT professional friend who has a TechNet subscription (at least that's what I think he called it), and he gave me a key for Win7 Pro when he saw I was using Vista. This was in 2009 or 2010, I think. I used it for years (until 2017) with zero issues, but I always wondered what would happen if the key gets revoked somehow? Is that a thing that ever occurs? Said random goons have pages and pages of excellent results from happy goons. Including me, or rather the two IRL friends I've told to just get cheap keys from there. The keys are legit: the resellers are likely breaking a contract with MS, but that's not your problem. The worst that can happen is the key gets deactivated. In which case your PC continues to work just fine but you can't cheange the desktop background from the default and has a little message that says you're not activated. Not legal advice. If you are running a business on the PC, maybe spend the money. Ofecks posted:If I understand this correctly... this method has no security if my entire PC gets stolen, since the drive key is tied to the CPU (via firmware TPM)? And there's some security if I lose just the drive(s), but a knowledgeable criminal could brute-force the auto-unlock without the CPU present? Whereas it wouldn't be crackable with TPM+PIN in either case? Plain TPM auto-unlock, yes, it unlocks at Windows boot. I don't know if like an alternate windows boot can also retrieve the key, or only the OS installed on the drive. Never hosed with it myself. It might actually require sophistication well beyond the average criminal to decrypt but I honestly don't know. Plain password is possible to brute-force, but if you have a password longer than 10 characters it takes a literal million years. Bitlocker uses algorithms that are not easy to brute force at present. A few thousand guesses per second on a PC with a 4090. Unless the NSA is involved, you don't have to worry. TPM+PIN is highly secure, it's the same sort of idea that phones use. Ofecks posted:How would you recommend storing the BitLocker recovery keys? I had mine printed on paper, next to the paper that has my emergency 2fa backup codes for my google account (since my google is my fallback recovery for everything else). Just in the back of a drawer, I don't have a safe or bank deposit box. But also I use passwords so unless I get hit on the head and become the guy from Memento, I'm not so worried. Ofecks posted:Sorry for jeopardizing the thread with my noobishness. I saw that Rinkles had another question but it got buried. Rinkles posted:I don't need EFI, or Recovery partitions on a secondary drive, right? Nope! Wipe the whole drive with diskpart clean or another utility. Disk Manager won't touch them. Subjunctive posted:(Can I use FIDO2 as Bitlocker key? That would be even better.) Not FIDO2. Yubikeys have a "smart card" emulator so they can do it, maybe other stuff.
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Aug 26, 2023 00:45
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Klyith posted:Nope! Wipe the whole drive with diskpart clean or another utility. Disk Manager won't touch them. Thanks (and thanks Ofecks as well).
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Aug 26, 2023 00:49
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i used bitlocker for win10 at work, and its pretty annoying for it to ask for the recovery key after BIOS everytime it detects a non bootable external usb data drive
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Aug 28, 2023 01:12
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2TB SN850X for $99 https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-2tb-black-sn850x-nvme/p/N82E16820250247 2TB P44 Pro for $105 https://www.newegg.com/Solidigm-2TB-P44-Pro/p/20-318-013 Both sold and shipped by newegg, remember to get the codes. Get cho self a new boot drive.
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Aug 30, 2023 06:59
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My new SSDs arrived the other day, and I finally got my supplies and sat down to install the NVMe, but I was horrified to discover that none of my various collections of PC screws I've accumulated over the years will fit the M.2 bolts. Apparently my mobo came with 2 screws just for this purpose, and presumably I used one (and a standoff, it seems) for the system drive, but I have no idea where the 2nd ended up. The drive didn't come with one, either. So I had to order a kit. What a pain in the rear end. At least I'll have more for the future now. Further, ASUS and MSI/Gigabyte use different size screws for M.2 drives. Lol, that's ridiculous. Why isn't that a standard thing? The kit I ordered has both types, thankfully.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:02
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M.2 screws are a ridiculous pain in the rear end from being tiny and easily lost and to not being a common thread with anything else in a pc build like you mentioned. Some supermicro boards had great little plastic clip things for retention and I wish those were adopted more. They were all on a plastic connector that was fixed to the board so impossible to lose!
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Aug 31, 2023 21:07
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ASUS is starting to put their tool-less M2 design on more boards too, thank god. buying any sort of used mobo is a guarantee that youre gonna have to hunt down some bizarre rear end standoff or M2 screw... or just use kapton tape, lol
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Aug 31, 2023 21:14
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If I have (2TB WD_BLACK SN770) x 2, I should be able to set up one as a mirrored backup to the other, right?
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Sep 2, 2023 17:24
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Thunk posted:If I have (2TB WD_BLACK SN770) x 2, I should be able to set up one as a mirrored backup to the other, right? Sure, though depending on how you are going about it this is either kinda wasteful (a 2TB HDD is half the cost and works fine as a backup), or is a RAID mirror which is not a "backup". A RAID1 mirror is proof against hardware failure, but that's not the same as backup. For example, it is zero protection against malware encrypting all your poo poo, or something as simple as accidentally deleting things you didn't want to. The primary function of RAID is for uptime -- one of my drives died, I can keep working while waiting for the replacement. While hardware failure is a great way to lose a bunch of data if you have no backups at all, relying only on raid will eventually teach you the lesson that raid is not backup. A backup needs to consider stuff like malware, fuckups, and "what if my PSU blows up and takes out everything in the PC with it?" Your backup should be in a different machine (such as a NAS box), offline (such as an external drive you unplug between backups), or elsewhere (in the cloud).
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Sep 2, 2023 18:44
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So a better option would be to get a big plug-in drive and do regular backups with it, and also make cloud storage copies of any really important documents? I can work with that. Thanks!
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Sep 3, 2023 01:34
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Thunk posted:So a better option would be to get a big plug-in drive and do regular backups with it, and also make cloud storage copies of any really important documents? I can work with that. Thanks! It needs a bit of a consideration if an external drive or a NAS is better option. The biggest problem with the external is that it requires judiciously plugging it in and running the backup and then unplugging the drive. A NAS, at minimum a external drive plugged in to a router or some other always-on device would automatic backup. The problem with the NAS is that it is always online and under some risk, if you get a crypto ransomware on you computer it might be able to encrypt the NAS too. But it may be possible to hide the NAS enough that the average ransomware won't find it.
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Sep 3, 2023 19:21
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You don't give windows the credentials to the backup target, just the backup software.
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Sep 3, 2023 19:33
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Flipperwaldt posted:You don't give windows the credentials to the backup target, just the backup software. But's it's still pretty trivial to check what credentials the software is using if you go trough the effort. Half a dozen most popular software should be good enough.
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Sep 3, 2023 20:06
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Sure, increasing the effort required is all you can do. I know that if making backups requires me plugging things in on the regular, it ain't happening. The data gets backed up from the nas to a third place that isn't accessible from the computer as well. I understand that at that point it may have grown beyond something you can recommend to the average Joe.
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Sep 3, 2023 20:36
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Flipperwaldt posted:Sure, increasing the effort required is all you can do. Traditional and pretty effective method is to have the backup server fetch the data so the origin doesn't have access to them. But requires a bit unusual situation in home use.
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Sep 3, 2023 20:46
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If this is a thing you are concerned about, your NAS should run a filesystem that includes snapshots. (Ex TrueNas with ZFS, synology with btrfs.) Have the NAS set to make snapshots of your important data once a month or whatever. This means that, to limits of your set quota or drive space, you have snapshots to roll back to if something bad happens to the current data. AFAIK the snapshots will either be read-only or completely invisible until you log into the NAS admin panel. But also if you are this paranoid about data safety you should have an offsite backup (cloud or physical drive). What if your house burns down?
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Sep 3, 2023 20:56
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Looking for some recommends - I've got two 1TB SSD drives, one m2, one SATA, leaning towards getting another 1-2 TB SSD just so I don't have to worry about juggling game installs or where I save stuff too much. I assume I'll want a SATA drive since I only have the one m2 port on my mobo? (I assume there's like PCIE cards that give you more m2 slots but dont know if that's worth it?) Then also any recommends for an external, probably just HDD for backups just so I can worry a little less about losing important projects.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:09
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Oxyclean posted:Looking for some recommends - I've got two 1TB SSD drives, one m2, one SATA, leaning towards getting another 1-2 TB SSD just so I don't have to worry about juggling game installs or where I save stuff too much. I assume I'll want a SATA drive since I only have the one m2 port on my mobo? (I assume there's like PCIE cards that give you more m2 slots but dont know if that's worth it?) Then also any recommends for an external, probably just HDD for backups just so I can worry a little less about losing important projects. what's your motherboard? sometimes using a motherboard m.2 slot can turn off some sata ports, so it's important to check before you add that. (this isn't a thing on most recent boards but only one m.2 slot makes me think yours is a bit older)
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Sep 6, 2023 16:25
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Oxyclean posted:I assume I'll want a SATA drive since I only have the one m2 port on my mobo? (I assume there's like PCIE cards that give you more m2 slots but dont know if that's worth it?) A card that does a single pcie slot to m.2 slot is like $10, since they're just a passive circuit board. Probably don't look at cards with multiple m.2 slots -- those either need specific support by mobo or are very expensive. Whether that's worth it depends on your mobo -- for example the extra slots on an AMD X370 or B450 are PCIe gen 2, so putting a blazing fast gen 4 drive in that will choke it quite a bit. (OTOH 4x gen 2 is still twice as fast as SATA.) So I'd say sata vs nvme + adapter depends a lot on what you have now vs what future upgrades you might do and when. Like, if you'd plan to get a new PC / cpu+mobo upgrade in the next year or two, the new stuff all has lots of m.2 slots so you'll easily be able to use both nvme drives at full speed. Oxyclean posted:Then also any recommends for an external, probably just HDD for backups just so I can worry a little less about losing important projects. Whatever's cheapest between seagate and WD. There's a big price jump at 8TB because you go from SMR to CMR drives. This is probably not a big deal though, most backup strategies work fine with SMR drives.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:51
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Arivia posted:what's your motherboard? sometimes using a motherboard m.2 slot can turn off some sata ports, so it's important to check before you add that. (this isn't a thing on most recent boards but only one m.2 slot makes me think yours is a bit older)
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Sep 6, 2023 17:19
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Is this related to that story about borked SanDisk Extreme Portables? I have the 1TB model. Windows keeps telling me it needs to be fixed when I connect it, and sometimes that works but sometimes it doesn't (and then Windows treats it as an unknown device, i.e., it's useless).  But from the coverage it sounds like the drive is unrecoverable, but mine still sometimes works if Windows' repair succeeds (it might depend on the pc).
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Sep 7, 2023 22:04
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When using a high capacity NVME SSD in a USB-C enclosure, is it better to have an SSD with DRAM over one with just HMB for the following use case?: The usb drive would be used to edit videos, so Davinci would import files from the drive into the editor view and then export back to the drive. It's just hobbyist video editing so I'm not ultra concerned about the most optimum performance, but I can choose between two 4TB drives, one of which is a Gen 3 3500/3000 with DRAM (Teamgroup MP34) and the other being a Gen 4 7000/6000 with HMB (Lexar Ares) for comparable prices. Since USB-C is going to cap the speed anyway I'm not worried about the Gen 3/4 split, only the DRAM / HMB difference. Thanks!
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Sep 8, 2023 14:01
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:When using a high capacity NVME SSD in a USB-C enclosure, is it better to have an SSD with DRAM over one with just HMB for the following use case?: A drive in a USB enclosure will not have any host memory to use as buffer, so random performance will suffer. I would definitely get the Teamgroup w/ DRAM if the external enclosure will be the permanent home for the drive. OTOH, as long as you are using the external drive to store the source video & project files, and davinci is using a fast internal drive for all caches, I doubt it'll be particularly noticeable one way or the other. People use NAS storage on HDDs for that. So if you think you might upcycle this drive into your next desktop or whatever, I don't think the Lexar would be terrible. (I wonder if a NVMe drive over thunderbolt would be able to get HMB? That's effectively a PCIe link. All I can see on this in google is other people asking the same question, no trustable answers.)
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Sep 8, 2023 14:40
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Klyith posted:A drive in a USB enclosure will not have any host memory to use as buffer, so random performance will suffer. I would definitely get the Teamgroup w/ DRAM if the external enclosure will be the permanent home for the drive. Thanks for the response! Davinci would be installed on an SN850 non-x, so almost top of the line Gen 4. I hadn't actually realized that Davinci would be importing the source files into a cache and then using that cached file in the editor, but that makes no-duh sense now. I guess I have to look into the settings and see where it's putting its cache. As I said, totally (beginner) hobbyist and still learning how to even use Davinci. In that case, if random suffers with the HMB drive, wouldn't importing a video into davinci just be a sequential transfer/read and not be affected by HMB/DRAM, or is that not how it works? I could definitely upcycle the drive yes into a new system down the line, but I don't have any spare M2 slots at the moment on my itx mobo, and I do happen to have a spare Sabrent enclosure lying around. My 1TB drive that I'm currently using for the storage of my source files is also pretty much full so I'm looking at upgrading to the 4TB drive in the enclosure, and then turning the 1TB in my PC to a games drive.
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Sep 8, 2023 14:59
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:Thanks for the response! Davinci would be installed on an SN850 non-x, so almost top of the line Gen 4. I hadn't actually realized that Davinci would be importing the source files into a cache and then using that cached file in the editor, but that makes no-duh sense now. I guess I have to look into the settings and see where it's putting its cache. As I said, totally (beginner) hobbyist and still learning how to even use Davinci. Nah, it's not pulling the entire source video into the cache. That would be way too big. The caches are storing lower-bitrate versions of sources and previews to use on timelines etc. But you're still hitting that external drive for the main view, so scrubbing around the timeline will be lots of non-sequential reads from that drive. Davinci seems to call this "render cache" and there are about a million guides and youtubes about the settings & managing it, so knock yourself out! Shrimp or Shrimps posted:I could definitely upcycle the drive yes into a new system down the line, but I don't have any spare M2 slots at the moment on my itx mobo, and I do happen to have a spare Sabrent enclosure lying around. My 1TB drive that I'm currently using for the storage of my source files is also pretty much full so I'm looking at upgrading to the 4TB drive in the enclosure, and then turning the 1TB in my PC to a games drive. Up to you then, I can see the case for either option.
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Sep 8, 2023 15:19
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Thanks muchly for the replies, Klyith!
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Sep 8, 2023 15:27
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is this good
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Sep 8, 2023 22:23
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Instant Grat posted:is this good It's not great. But also the available spare is 60, meaning your drive has already used up 40% of it's spare space, after less than 9TB of writes. That's also bad, it shouldn't be running through the spare space that fast. If it was just the M&DI errors I might let it slide, with a note to self to keep checking back. But both of those in combination is deeply concerning. I would look at trying to get it RMA'd. Dunno how good Team will be about replacing a not-yet-failed drive. Maybe run a full chkdsk on it to try to look for more errors. Since that's your C: drive you'll have to do it with a reboot.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:46
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Oh poo poo, hadn't even noticed the spare situation. Looks like it's time to get another drive then. Relying on an RMA would leave me without a working system for however long it takes Team Group to replace the drive, so I'll just buy a new one and use an eventual RMA replacement as a game drive in my laptop or something. Looks like the cheapest replacement right now is the Adata Legend 700. Any reason not to grab one of those?
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Sep 9, 2023 03:31
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Klyith posted:It's not great. But also the available spare is 60, meaning your drive has already used up 40% of it's spare space, after less than 9TB of writes. That's also bad, it shouldn't be running through the spare space that fast. The values are in hex, which actually means it's 96% spare remaining.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:16
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Instant Grat posted:Looks like the cheapest replacement right now is the Adata Legend 700. Any reason not to grab one of those? I have seen some youtuber making pc repair shorts and the dead SSD is always Adata.
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Sep 9, 2023 06:27
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:The values are in hex, which actually means it's 96% spare remaining. Dang that's right! Ugh, I don't have a windows pc with nvme drives, so I can't sanity-check by opening crystaldisk. I'm used to it giving the translated results for sata drives. And smartctl gives a nice percentage value. Instant Grat: Um, I'll change my opinion from "RMA now" to "watch with caution". Integrity errors do not always mean lost or corrupted data, but if they keep trending up it means you can't rely on the drive. Do a chkdsk, and run crystaldisk once a month to check in. If they stay at that value for the next several months, then you can probably put it down to some burn-in errors and go back to ignoring them. And like, have backups, but you should have backups regardless.
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Sep 9, 2023 13:44
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Thanks a bunch for the advice. I actually started a CHKDSK /R a while ago - it's been stuck in the same spot for a couple hours, so I'll give it a while longer and see if it doesn't eventually resolve itself. I got Backblaze, so the worst that can happen is having to spend an afternoon reinstalling poo poo and redownloading documents and settings to a new drive. E: As is always the case, complaining on the internet is the cure-all. CHKDSK started moving again as soon as I posted this. Instant Grat fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 13:53
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Well, that was an adventure. After CHKDSK finished, I rebooted into a weird state where explorer was constantly restarting itself and something clearly wasn't right. Rebooted again, and got stuck in a loop of infinite BSODs with the issue labeled as "NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM". Eventually I was thrown into the Windows recovery menu, found the option to open a command prompt, unlocked the drive (thank god I have my Bitlocker recovery keys in a password manager), got confused for a bit because the recovery command prompt had switched my drive letters around, used diskpart to find out that the drive had the letter "D" in there, ran a CHKDSK /F which finished in less than 30 seconds, and now things work again. Media and Data Integrity Errors are, predictably, up now - sitting at 1F8 (504 in decimal). I'll keep an eye on them, and if they go up any further, I'll just get a new drive and clone to that. Available Spare is down, too. From 60 (96) to 5D (93). Instant Grat fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 14:16
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Instant Grat posted:Well, that was an adventure. Oh yeah, that is a drive with problems. Lmao that I was right despite misreading the hex.  When you get a new drive, I would actually advise doing a clean install. With data on that drive having problems, you can't 100% trust that some random windows components aren't corrupted. And if you have personal data that you care about, I'd move it to a different drive now. As much as possible try to act like that drive is mildly radioactive -- not instant death, but a source of long-term cancer. For a new drive, I would advise spending a couple extra bucks for the WD SN570. It's a faster drive than the Adata 700, is TLC rather than QLC, but also IMO there's a quality/reliability upgrade from the companies that make their own flash vs those like team and adata. Particularly at the low end of the market where they might be cutting corners.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:56
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The extra speed doesn't matter too much, since I'm limited to PCIe 3x2 (HP pre-built with lovely proprietary budget motherboard), but I suppose TLC and theoretically better reliability would be worth the extra $10~
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Sep 9, 2023 17:13
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If you want really cheap, the Intel 670p is only $35. Also QLC, but the Intel QLC drives have been very reliable.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:32
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Should I be thinking about replacing this as C drive anytime soon? Also how the heck does my games drive that I got half a year after C drive have this many more power on hours? 
Sininu fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Sep 10, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 18:25
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Sininu posted:Should I be thinking about replacing this as C drive anytime soon? Um, those dropbox image links don't work for anyone but you.
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Sep 9, 2023 18:29
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Klyith posted:If you want really cheap, the Intel 670p is only $35. Also QLC, but the Intel QLC drives have been very reliable. I'm in Denmark, so the options from cheapest on up look like this
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Sep 9, 2023 18:59
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