For The Nerds

[ControlNode]

Well, on my computers I ended up retiring the old FX8350 since it's not going to support Win11 and uses a lot of power. Moved the B550/3950X/RTX3060-12GB into the case the FX8350 was it along with an upgrade to 64GB of ram using sticks that are certified for the board to support running all 4 slots for 128GB and connected all of the drives drives still in the case to the "new" motherboard. I installed Proxmox VE on the NMVe drive, first VM was TrueNAS (NVMe) to manage the 3x 6TB drives passed directly into the VM and configured as a 12TB drive with redundancy. Last machine on the NMVe is a workstation for working on code that I also passed the RTX3060 directly into. I have 1TB SATA SSD that will host the other VMs I ran on the computer. I need to update the boot files on the Linux machines to work with the VE changes.

Next year I plan to move the GPU to a 1x slot, reconfigure the PCIE16_1 to bifurcation (x4x4x4x4) mode and install a 16x to 4x Oculink card and connect that to a 4x NVMe drive mount that goes into a 5.25" ext drive bay and setup another ZRAID1 with 4x 2TB drives in there to host all of my VMs from and remove the SATA SSD so that I can have all 5x hot-swap 3.5" bays of the case (Thermaltake Level 10 GT) and the BD optical drive connected to the motherboard 6x SATA ports.

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[TJC]

I told myself I'd grab the Samsung 980 Pro SSD if it fell below $100.

It's now $89.95 with a $10 coupon

I was running a 970 Pro which is a Gen 3 PCIe SSD and it was pretty fast.

And now the Gen 4 PCIe 980 Pro. Pretty much double across the board. Everything launches incredible fast now.

Worth it.

Now I get to gut my 2019 iMac and replace the Fusion drive with the 970 Pro

Congrats on your score! Not a bad price for Samsung 1 TB! Amazon has the 990 Pro for $89.99. Slightly faster read speeds 7450 vs 7000, and write is faster yet at 6900 vs 5000. For your use with your 2019 IMac you may not see the difference.

My latest project is building a diagnostic laptop to support my new Ford and Mazda autos. I am going to partition my Thinkpad T450S (with touchscreen) 1TB SSD into 4 - 256MB bootable partitions.

1 - for Linux Mint
2 - Win 10 for Mazda MDARS diagnostics ($50 for 72 hours)
3 - Win 10 for Ford FDARS diagnostics ($120 for 48 hours (increased from $50 last year))
4 - Win 7 ForScan $20 annually and other USB tools / esoteric printers / cameras

All of the Windows partitions will be stripped down to only the required tools needed to run the diagnostic tools. All connectivity blocked except to the Ford and Mazda tool sites.

The ForScan partition will be air gapped. Linux will be used for general purposes and to update Forscan. I'll save the completed partition images on the server making the rebuild work simpler and less time consuming.