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TheMightyEthan
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I missed out on the goodbye coin so got these instead:


 


5468-55d115da3a454.png


 


which is a set of two coasters. The coins certainly didn't last long until they sold out but I'm sort of glad as it made the decision for me and while I liked the idea of the goodbye coin it would just sit in a cupboard so is a bit of a waste.


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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I'm not sure on Seagates range, cos in my experience they're one of the worst after Maxtor and since Maxtor has gone bust (and then bought out by Seagate). But I know Western Digital do a range of specific hard drives:

Black - Top end stuff, higher RPM, larger cache, higher power use, might as well get a SSD though

Blue - Standard hard drive, nice amount of cache, regular speed

Green - (which I picked up) Useful as a back-up drive, slower, larger, will go to sleep more often but means it's quieter and less power hungry

Red - Designed for NAS, which means it'll last a fair while for back-up purposes and be good for multiple access.

Purple - designed for continuous writes for CCTV use and similar. 

 

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/- here's a bit.

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How is a NAS HDD different to a normal HDD?

 

By "normal" do you mean desktop? Desktop HDDs are only rated to run for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. NAS HDDs are meant to be ran 24/7.

 

I'm not sure on Seagates range, cos in my experience they're one of the worst after Maxtor and since Maxtor has gone bust (and then bought out by Seagate).

 

Seagate desktop drives are shit. So are WD Greens (what I'm replacing) and Blues.  Class is what matters and unfortunately WD has a convoluted setup where they have a bunch of different desktop drives. Brand loyalty is a joke. Hell, WD Reds aren't even 7200 RPM and actually aren't that good for multiple people using it at once. Only the Red Pros are. Reds are best suited for media. One of the reasons I'll be switching between HGST and Seagate for my NAS.

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  • 2 weeks later...

61QdPAB0xjL._SL1000_.jpg

 

The 500GB version is $139.99 on sale at Amazon today, so I finally pulled the trigger and paid for it using credit card reward points. Going to migrate my OS and newer PC games over to this for the improved load times. Considered getting the 1TB drive for $269.99, but I couldn't cover it with the amount of reward bucks on my credit card. 

 

I'm hoping it will also help with pop-in in open world games, too. 

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I really like how fast my Win10 laptop with an SSD boots. My desktop takes a few minutes to fully get up and running, even after I disabled a lot of the programs that would launch on startup. It was also just time to get a new main HDD. 

 

MBM - I think there are some posts in the PCs for dummies thread about how to migrate the OS and games to a new, smaller SSD even if all the programs on your current HDD wouldn't fit on the new, smaller drive.

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  • 1 month later...

BZKBSnb.jpg

 

So I got a Steam Link. The Steam Link itself is totally fine by my standards since it streams great while wired. Some games though seems to act weird and might downright crash. Overall though it is pretty sweet to have my Steam library along with my desktop in my living room.

 

Though I do got 2-3 1 gripes. Gripe one is really the whole UI where a connected mouse is needed. I don't think just having a controller connected will do however I guess this isn't a huge lost since there is certainly more than enough USB/Bluetooth connections for a M+KB.

 

 

 

Gripe 2/3 might be unique to me due to some quirkiness of my home network setup.

 

In brief my home network setup is hacked together. My modem is connected to wireless router #1 in my room. This provides wired and wireless internet access to one half of the house. Then router #1 is wired to router #2 to provide wired and wireless internet access to the other half of the house. For the life of me I cannot get a unified SSID between the two routers without router #2 not being able to connect to the internet and be stable. So the routers are running under different SSIDs. I guess technically they are two different networks even though router #2 internet connection is reliant to a wired connection to router #1...?

 

The Steam Link is connected to router #2. My computer is connected to router #1. They cannot talk to each other, wired or wireless (Steam Link to router #2). While I can totally unhook router #2's wired connection to the Steam Link to get it connected to my computer but then I lose wireless connection/strength to half of my house. If I have guests over and we're playing with my Steam Link and they want (a strong) internet access, they're hosed. I'm hosed since data reception at my place, especially in the living room where the Steam Link is at, sucks.

 

I'm sure I'm just not configuring my network correctly... if someone can configure a university to have a singular SSID and have a network that spans the whole campus then it should be possible at my house.

 

 

 

tl;dr: The Steam Link is mostly great for my needs but some network problems on my end might hinder its usefulness thus justification for its purchase. See following post for my revelation and spoiler for my problem.

Edited by MaliciousH
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I'm sure I'm just not configuring my network correctly... if someone can configure a university to have a singular SSID and have a network that spans the whole campus then it should be possible at my house.

 

I'm not a network engineer and overall it confuses me*, but I'm pretty sure there's a vast difference in cost and hardware between a home router and a university network. Like Ford Focus to Formula 1 orders of magnitude.

What I am thinking is maybe a line to follow if my memory serves me is: pursue DMZ

 

Oh and obviously post long term thoughts in Steam console thread. Not that I'm overly interested in it atm since I'm find gaming at my PC, gota TV hooked to it anyway.

 

 

*I did manage to jerry rig something up when I was at uni to allow my PS3 to connect to the campus network (this is in days before wi-fi was pretty ubiquitous).

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Holy shit, I just got it working because I cleared up a misconception on my part:

 

d-link-router-640x360.png

 

The wire from router #1 to router #2 goes to a LAN port (blue), not the WAN port (yellow). Sure the wire from the modem to router #1 goes to the WAN port but from router #1 to #2, it's from LAN-LAN (blue to blue). Previously in my head I saw the WAN port as the "In" port and the LAN ports as the "out" ports. It's kind of correct (reason why my jerry rigged network worked) but not really when connecting up a network. My jerry rigged network actually made a network within the network.

 

From what I understand, the differences between the WAN and LAN ports is really subtle to laymen like me and most people I know. Same plug and shit, so whats the difference right? My jerry rigging made a client bridge when I wanted a wireless access point. God fucking damn, this problem that has vexed me since middle school has been conquered. Since I could always get the client bridge AKA my jerry rig working, I assumed that it was either my hardware or provided software that didn't enable me to pull this off.

 

The only odd thing now is that the switch between routers is not seamless. There seems to be an area in the house where wireless devices get confused and refuse to work until you turn the wifi in your device on and off. No biggie because I got this shit to work (at 3 AM)!

 

And for sure I'll post some long term thoughts about the Link later.

 

tl;dr: WAN port =/= "In" port and LAN port =/= "Out" port.

Edited by MaliciousH
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Yeah, WAN = Wide Area Network (aka, The Internet, as well as say campus intranet and such), LAN = Local Area Network (aka home/office network).

 

The big difference being how it deals with IPs. The Internet has like all the IPs (even more with IPv6), but LAN is usually on 192.168.0.#, from 1-256 (which obviously limits the amount of devices, and we've counted and at home we're only like at least a dozen at anyone time up to a good two dozen and beyond if we have a party). It uses "subnet masking" which I only know enough of to say that to make sure that if your phone for example requests access to this site, your phone gets the site and not your roomies. In your case your 2nd router was acting as a phone would and making requests as a 192.168.0.# IP, and not making requests as your home IP.

 

I largely avoid networks and printers though, they're the work of the devil.

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You should also be able to go into the firmware settings on Router 2 and change the WAN port to behave as a LAN port, that way you still have the same number of ports.  That's how mine's set up at home.

 

Now that you've got them both on the same subnet the wireless issue should be as easy as just giving them the same SSID and password.  That's also how mine is set up at home and it behaves just like the campus networks you're describing, where it's transparent from my end which router my device is actually connected to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

41%2BcyeIQuSL.jpg

 

My laptop's trackpad buttons don't work as well as they used to and I don't want to use a wired mouse with a laptop so I picked this up for 20 bucks, which was a pretty good deal as it usually costs 40.  It's comfortable, the dongle is tiny and unobtrusive, and it has extra buttons that I like to use for navigating webpages.  Not too shabby.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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