Windows 7 vs Windows 10

[shaina]

...and this would be when you stick in a odroid or Pi server to do all the crap for you off a 2.4A USB adaptor

setup your Sabnzbd, Deluge and a samba share... also mini-dlna for audio streams in my case and you can offload all your download and share issues onto a box that costs £50, is silent and handy to stick up in the loft/attic

Sorry buddy but you lost me at Pi
What do you want me to Download with?? And how do i attach storage?? Right now i use a PC to download and what i keep i move to a completely separate PC/Server??(and the PC's are connected with a usb line and it FTP's all the completed stuff after i rename them)
I should have mentioned as well that the Usenet provider i do use only offers 300Mbps speeds as well but that is not the issue Gribley, the issue is when it is extracting and doing this automatically with SAB, it is hogging or bogging the Hard Drive usage, the CPU doesn't get past 20%??, and i should say it downloads a TV show in say seconds (less than a minute), but depending how many things i am downloading the extraction part is where all the usage is coming in...


So what are you trying to help with??

PS. Speaking of being a Pi lover as long as i have known you, have you every tried streaming a BD50 movie (80bgig video and sound rip)?? and how did it play if you did??

PS. And i am not sure if you read my other posts, but I never had or noticed this issue because i always used multiple programs Altbinz, Quick par (if it was needed), and win rar, and none are internet based either, now SAB is?? and it has to be set to auto extract or it won't work on some downloads right?? and i don't bother looking anymore on which ones will or won't work on Altbinz, it started to become a pain in the ASS!! when i looked in the folder and it didn't download all the pieces for it to be extracted manually with winrar....

[Gribley]

...and this would be when you stick in a odroid or Pi server to do all the crap for you off a 2.4A USB adaptor

setup your Sabnzbd, Deluge and a samba share... also mini-dlna for audio streams in my case and you can offload all your download and share issues onto a box that costs £50, is silent and handy to stick up in the loft/attic

Sorry buddy but you lost me at Pi
What do you want me to Download with?? And how do i attach storage?? Right now i use a PC to download and what i keep i move to a completely separate PC/Server??(and the PC's are connected with a usb line and it FTP's all the completed stuff after i rename them)
I should have mentioned as well that the Usenet provider i do use only offers 300Mbps speeds as well but that is not the issue Gribley, the issue is when it is extracting and doing this automatically with SAB, it is hogging or bogging the Hard Drive usage, the CPU doesn't get past 20%??, and i should say it downloads a TV show in say seconds (less than a minute), but depending how many things i am downloading the extraction part is where all the usage is coming in...


So what are you trying to help with??

PS. Speaking of being a Pi lover as long as i have known you, have you every tried streaming a BD50 movie (80bgig video and sound rip)?? and how did it play if you did??

PS. And i am not sure if you read my other posts, but I never had or noticed this issue because i always used multiple programs Altbinz, Quick par (if it was needed), and win rar, and none are internet based either, now SAB is?? and it has to be set to auto extract or it won't work on some downloads right?? and i don't bother looking anymore on which ones will or won't work on Altbinz, it started to become a pain in the ASS!! when i looked in the folder and it didn't download all the pieces for it to be extracted manually with winrar....

A picture is worth more than explaining I guess:Untitled.png

Ignore the pumpkin just happens to be there.... happy Halloween.

So to the left is my web server (an original Pi Mk1), to the right is the odroid C2 doing all my downloads and in the middle is a really cheap USB HDD hub. Using an old 750Gb drive that I had sitting around.

The thing hums away to itself perfectly without any hassles. I`ve not tried to stream BD off it but realistically the only bottleneck is the USB connection which I guess could cause a problem if I really pushed it. But then in that case they odroid make some nice hardware with SATA interfaces, just not needed it.

SAB and Deluge are all webby interface based on the home network, the boxes as you see are all headerless so SSH and webby is the way to chat with them. SAMBA is installed to make it easier to pull files back to the real PC when needed but also has the the purpose of opening a share to the USB drive for my various KODI boxes.

Also all stuff through that box runs via OpenVPN and my ipvanish account with makes me all warm and fuzzy

[MacGyverSG1]

I can tell you i just built it as a budget machine, hens going AMD instead of Intel (my server is Intel), and if i get x amount of years out of it, i will just build another frugal machine that does the basic needs i use it for. And being honest i'd rather put my money towards Audio and visual equipment.


My motherboard is asus a88x plus , and there is 2 PCI slots so because i am not using any graphics cards, so technically i could do the NVME ssd, but they said on a few web sites it may be finicky with that motherboard.
So i am thinking Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB Read: 550MB/s; Write: 520MB/s Solid State Drive (MZ-76E500B/AM)??
Do you have a better suggestion??

And thanks again for your suggestions and help buddy......

I was never really a gamer, but all I play these days is visual novels, which have minimal hardware requirements. My desktop computer does have a discrete graphics card, but that's because it lacks any kind of integrated video.
Integrated graphics sucked in the past, but nowadays they offer features that used to be a luxury, including accelerated video and even good performance on some 3D games. I agree that for "office" tasks there's little need for something else, unless you have some very old or very new monitor with no connector types in common, or really don't want to spare a few dozen MBs of memory for video. Not to mention you'll decrease your power consumption too.

Funny i was just looking on Canada Computers site for a ssd drive, and just took a peek at the new CPU's, and it seems that most of them now don't even offer built in GPU's, basically forcing you to get separate video cards.
I looked when you said Visual Novels?? Thinking WTF is that!! interesting you are into that, but if i was into that i would have a laptop hooked up to a humongous TV screen, and or being mobile using a Tablet or some sorts A tower PC would be overkill , and still have it hooked up to a monster TV
My one son luvs playing these interactive games where you have puzzles and stuff to solve or like nerd jeopardy, and you use your Cell Phones to play??
I glance at the TV screen as he has his friends over and they play it in the room where my Download PC is in, It is interesting, but i still prefer Donkey Kong or Rory Mcilroy PGA golf.
I always like to look at power consumption, but after a while it is really impossible to get around when you are running a media server and really having TV's running all the time, then you add surround sound with powered subs and shit!!! power consumption just goes out the window!!!

Just about any SATA SSD would do. I would definitely not go smaller than 500GB. Installing it as a storage drive and changing folder locations in SAB for temp download and final save destination to SSD should take care of your slow down issue. The HDD is your bottleneck.

Gribley's solution may work, but a lot more complicated. When I was younger I would have probably done it that way (or something similar) just for the fun of it. Nowadays I find the easiest solution (getting lazy with age).

Almost all Intel CPUs still have integrated GPUs (except for HEDT models and a special one or two). AMD hasn't been releasing many of their CPUs with integrated GPUs for the desktop scene as of much lately (just the low end models). Maybe the high end desktop models don't have integrated GPUs because they wanted to keep the TDP down, or temperature was an issue.

I thought about building a new PC using an AMD Ryzen 1xxx or Ryzen 2xxx CPU, but the motherboards are not so great. One thing Intel has over AMD is much better motherboards (stability and features). From what I have read it is AMD's fault. They don't give the motherboard manufacturers enough time to design and test their boards before they have to ship them. It's too bad, because the new Ryzen 2700 at 65W looks like a great deal. Plenty of processing power at a great price (compared to Intel) and low power consumption (for an 8-core desktop CPU). Maybe the next round of AMD motherboards will get it right.

[Gribley]

Didn`t cost me too much for a 960GB SSD drive a while back (around £100) but really you would be better off with a hybrid drive since you don`t want it as a boot up partition anyway. Got one for a laptop aka 2.5" which was 2TB at around £60

[MacGyverSG1]

The fact that the drive that gets downloaded to is not a permanent storage drive, I would stick to a SSD. I have no experience with hybrid drives. Do they make them in 3.5"? They are good for laptops because they boost speed (over regular HDD) and give you larger storage, but with SSD prices dropping the way they are and most laptops use m.2 SSD and 2.5" SATA, hybrids are not really needed anymore. It's another option though.

[Gribley]

Do they make them in 3.5"

yes I have been running one for a couple of years now.

My in the loft solution is great, I should of done it many years ago but is a learning curve. If you delve into it the results will be worth it but if you are more the "Meh" frame of mind the too much effort just get a new PC.

[shaina]

Ignore the pumpkin just happens to be there.... happy Halloween.

So to the left is my web server (an original Pi Mk1), to the right is the odroid C2 doing all my downloads and in the middle is a really cheap USB HDD hub. Using an old 750Gb drive that I had sitting around.

The thing hums away to itself perfectly without any hassles. I`ve not tried to stream BD off it but realistically the only bottleneck is the USB connection which I guess could cause a problem if I really pushed it. But then in that case they odroid make some nice hardware with SATA interfaces, just not needed it.

SAB and Deluge are all webby interface based on the home network, the boxes as you see are all headerless so SSH and webby is the way to chat with them. SAMBA is installed to make it easier to pull files back to the real PC when needed but also has the the purpose of opening a share to the USB drive for my various KODI boxes.

That is very interesting Gribley I would give you an "A" for inventiveness, a "C-" for appearance And with your setup, you don't keep things for a long period of time i assume?? Or you move the drive after download to something else?? And i think we had a discussion before about Kodi , and i tried it out and it sucked the big one in my opinion or ease of use for the household. And we have also discussed that i don't stream anything really over wifi to my tv's, they are all wired, so if i am saying this right?? everything goes through internal Ethernet connections, is that better or worse than USB?? i have no idea??

I know i can do this kind of setup you have with a Pivos media box i have (has that SAMBA thing on it), but again i don't use it for that, and actually that is the only box i have in my house that will stream BD50's without a hiccup, but i have said i don't download to many of those and waste space on a hard drive..
And by looking at the setup i assume you have it setup on another PC to tell it to download to the PI?? I use one PC and that is it to download and not any outside links from others in the house or elsewhere.

[MacGyverSG1]

I use Kodi (v17.6) on an NVIDIA Shield TV and Minix NEO-U1. It's great. I use it to play videos and music that is stored on my PC HDDs on the TVs running said boxes. Shield is wired to router, the U1 is Wi-Fi. Plays everything I've thrown at it so far fine. Have not tried 2160p since I don't have a 4K TV. Kodi plays DVD/BD .ISOs fine (and DVD/BD folders). I usually just grab the main .m2ts file and delete the rest (don't care about menus and most extras). Remove unnecessary languages and subtitles if size reduction is big enough.

[anon]

shaina, if you install a SATA SSD (your hardware probably can't handle NVME SSD (m.2), unless using a PCIe adapter card (can't boot OS)) and use it as download drive (or boot drive), SAB and QuickPar would fly. HDDs just can't handle all that reading and writing at the same time. No settings will help out. Adding a video card will not help downloading or extracting shit. SSD!!!

Personally, I don't use SSDs for two reasons:

1. high dollar-per-GB ratio, I'd rather have "bad" speeds but more storage space;
2. Flash memory is almost impossible to sanitize, which means you have to spend extra on a self-encrypting drive or use software encryption, which turns your CPU into a bottleneck (unless it has hardware AES, which mine don't), which ultimately negates the speed advantage of using an SSD in the first place...

But you're absolutely correct on that the speed difference of even the cheapest SSD against a mechanical disk is stunning, and in this case would likely help a lot. Also, point no. 2 is fairly irrelevant on a desktop system anyway.

I looked when you said Visual Novels?? Thinking WTF is that!! interesting you are into that, but if i was into that i would have a laptop hooked up to a humongous TV screen, and or being mobile using a Tablet or some sorts A tower PC would be overkill , and still have it hooked up to a monster TV

Doesn't sound bad, but my laptop's screen can open in a 180° angle, so I'd rather read that way and lying in bed

I always like to look at power consumption, but after a while it is really impossible to get around when you are running a media server and really having TV's running all the time, then you add surround sound with powered subs and shit!!! power consumption just goes out the window!!!

Haha, well, I'm super conscious about that sort of thing. My home would be pretty boring to the average person, but at least my power bill is in the single digits

[MacGyverSG1]

Personally, I don't use SSDs for two reasons:
[*]high dollar-per-GB ratio, I'd rather have "bad" speeds but more storage space;[*]Flash memory is almost impossible to sanitize, which means you have to spend extra on a self-encrypting drive or use software encryption, which turns your CPU into a bottleneck (unless it has hardware AES, which mine don't), which ultimately negates the speed advantage of using an SSD in the first place...

But you're absolutely correct on that the speed difference of even the cheapest SSD against a mechanical disk is stunning, and in this case would likely help a lot. Also, point no. 2 is fairly irrelevant on a desktop system anyway.

The prices of SSDs has come down a lot the last couple of years. A 256GB-512GB SSD is plenty big for a boot drive (for me anyways). I don't game, so don't need a large boot drive. I add large HDDs for storage. Even in the old days I would use a smaller HDD for boot drive. Then add another larger HDD for storage. If your boot drive fails, you don't lose everything. Make sure you backup important files on boot drive to storage HDD, floppy, USB, CD, DVD, etc. Running your OS on SSD just makes things run smoother.