Probably you were looking at the ceiling while trying to read my replies because I did say that I have 3 HD's already. Also I did not ask you to tell your story on how cool you are or for how long you were building PC's. Neither I asked you to teach me honesty lessons. PC builds - lowest paid jobs in IT. So obviously I am not doing it, not sure about you. But anyway it took me 2 days to figure out all build and that's it. I do not need 10 or 20 years for that.
The irony of you suggesting i've not read your posts is something i'll get to later. As to your 2 days, it should have taken less than 20 minutes once you had a clear idea of what you wanted it to do (which you still seemingly don't). I'm genuinely touched about your concern for those who aren't well paid within the industry, i'm not in the industry as of a few weeks ago - I suppose you could say i've retired, but at 36 that's an odd idea, uncomfortable idea for me, so i'm going with I don't need to work and have no plans to do so for the foreseeable future.
"Know CPU hardware encoding/decoding has been a thing for at least half of the time you've worked in IT and depending on the application, it's very effective allowing even humble atom derived hardware to decode and encode 4K."
Not sure what question did it answer that I asked
You asked if a CPU was suitable for a task, if you're going to play the 'I work in IT' card then you will be expected to have a basic grasp of hardware capabilities, unless you're a phone/code monkey, though in fairness most of them are expected to know the basics.
"Have even a primitive grasp of RAID, its different options, strengths, weaknesses and suitability for an environment and/or use, so you'd understand why Optane isn't going to end up in an R5 array with a bunch of drives that are currently manufactured."
I have configured Raid-5 and did go through the failures too. I can en-light you about Raid 5. It's 1 disk failover, 2x speed that you gain, which I already told previously in my replies. Intel Optaine can end up in R5 array, if OS is installed on R5 array. Go and read on Intels website.
Your own post from earlier clearly states Optane can't accelerate RAID. It can reside in the same system, but Optane will only boost a specific drive, not a drive in the RAID array. You remember when you suggested I didn't read your posts? Have you read them?
thanks. well I was looking at optaine FAQ and found out that you cannot accelerate RAID with optaine unless Optaine is "inside" the raid volume where the OS resides:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...nd-storage/intel-optane-memory/000024018.html :
I want to set RAID up on my system. Can I accelerate these RAID volumes with Intel Optane memory?
Intel Optane memory cannot accelerate a RAID volume. An Intel Optane memory volume can reside in the same system as a RAID volume. The operating system must be on the SATA drive accelerated by Intel Optane memory.
Note In a system with this configuration, we recommend using the Intel RST application to manage your RAID volume and Intel Optane memory volume.
I can see from this article that NVMe SSD is probably even better than Optaine hybrid:
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/04/intel-3d-xpoint-optane-memory-review/
For the networking I don't use high end switch or router yet. Just default Virgin Media router at home (which I doubt even has 1 Gb/s ports). And then motherboard I went for also is limited to 1GbE LAN port:
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/PRIME-Z270M-PLUS/specifications/
The R5 'performance' argument went out the window when SSD's became a thing for a home environment, other options such as ZFS (again it's not an easy fit for a home environment), and pooled options are probably better. To illustrate why your 'ebay special' drives are not a good idea in R5 lets consider the options, network R/W is limited to a theoretical 125MB/s, you've made no mention of anything more exotic other than media playback, although the good ship 'Requirements' has made some extreme maneuvers to justify/fit your ebay bargains, media playback will have near zero tangible benefit on R5 vs a normal drive. An encoded stream is still going to play back exactly the same if it's on an SSD or an HDD once it starts playing. That leaves availability as a consideration as R5 is not a backup. You've not specified what you need resilient availability for and the only thing you have mentioned is media and VM's which you later back track on. So what exactly are you trying to achieve with R5 in a 3 disc pool? If it's performance then it's only of benefit locally and an SSD would be better. If it's resilience then think for a moment about the outcome if two drives fail in R5? You loose everything. In a pool based system you loose at worst half your data and your recovery cost is potentially lower due to not being striped. An unraid volume can have disc's added as/when you choose, less so ZFS, R5... forget it, also if your VM router isn't gigabit you're looking at 12.5MB/s and that's going to suck for any non local I/O.
"Understand that a clean shut down doesn't just require you to plug in a cable to a socket and has nothing to do with clicking anything at the time the power goes off, that's the whole point."
If you were reading carefully again I was saying to connect a UPS to a socket does not require much of a knowledge. And I do have APC Back-UPS 700.
You still aren't grasping this are you? It's not the plugging in a UPS that requires any skill, I could probably train my dog to do that though he may need the plug to be lined up first, it's having a system in place that will deal with a clean shut down on your behalf with zero user intervention.
Thanks for info on Un-Raid, I will certainly have a look at this for the sake of interest. But I am not planning to use VM's much - only when I do some study stuff. This was only a side question.
Again that significantly contradicts your earlier post(s) about your requirements.
