Tag: ssd

Important correction on Samsung 970 Evo Plus revisions (WHL #106F1)

“Houston, we got a problem….the fake news detector just went off!”

THE WHAT?

In all seriousness, my previous post contained a factual error. One that I discovered after spending my own money to specifically buy two 970 Evo Plus SSDs of the new revision. Two brand new ones to be precise (wouldn’t really call it NOS, but eBay is currently full of unopened late 2023 drives for very close to street prices, not sure what’s going on), so the seller only posted pictures of the package with fully intact seal. And when I opened it earlier this week…well, two “old” ones popped out. […]


The Samsung 970 Evo Plus – and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus (WHL #106)

! ! ! IMPORTANT: ALSO READ WHL #106F1 FOR A MAJOR CORRECTION ON PACKAGING. ! ! !

Quick PSA, as this isn’t common knowledge and I only stumbled upon it after purchasing FIVE disks for my future RAID array…: There are TWO revisions of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD!

Sadly, I’m too lazy to either wipe off my marker or digitally remove it, so it’s not too hard to spot the difference:

Well, the two drives in the center are the newer ones, despite having date codes 02/2022 and 10/2023, while the others were made in 08/2021 and 05/2023 (!). […]


Blueendless External SSD Hard Disk NVME Enclosure 10G Online Reading Writing Speed SSD Case For M.2 NVME SD Docking Station (WHL #104)

Ah, well, it’s December already, the time for some larger hardware changes (when people have some spare time in case things go wrong, which they often do – and some even have a higher budget at that time).

Storage. Once again.

So I was pondering about my options. Yeah, the 836 Supermicro case with its 16 LFF bays is terrific, and I like the options in terms of computing power and hard drives (including the cheapo options of “small, but very many”) very much. But it’s inconvenient to use when powering off after access, or terribly expensive when running it 24/7 (electricity is 0.3€/kWh!). […]


Brand New Portable SSD 1TB 2TB External Hard Drive Type-C USB 3.0 High-Speed External Storage Hard Disks For Laptops/Desktop/Mac (WHL #95)

AliExpress and their stupid game rules finally made me (inadvertently) buy* something that I heard about at least 13 years ago…a full-sized USB hard disk that only houses a tiny USB stick!

*Ackchyually, that is not quite correct. Like with the NVMe drive of WHL #92 that took me a long time to get refunded (and it only happened via PayPal, since AE to this day strongly believes in returns to fake warehouses in Afghanistan), this one also ended in a dispute and now I get to return it in exchange for a full refund. This time, though, to a warehouse in Germany, so I unfortunately cannot keep it, but now that I know how to find these…

But first things first, this is the fake USB drive that I remember seeing all over the interwebs:

Funny back then, but it probably consisted of a fully working USB drive, just a very small one compared to the expected HDD. […]


SSD M.2 NVME to PCI-E 4.0 X4 Riser Card Replacement PCI-Express X4/X8/X16 M Key Adapter Card Computer Accessory (WHL #72)

More computer stuff this week, but with parts directly shipped from China.

With the somewhat recent upgrade from a socket 2011 to a 2011-3 desktop board, I also made the switch from Windows 7 to 10. Not that I like any of those, but more and more software will only work with the latter, and some specific tool that I wanted to try basically requires 10 or defaults into a non-hardware accelerated mode that is simply pointless to use. As I had a Win 10 diagnostics M.2 drive handy, that was my starting point.

Thing is – since I cheaped out on the board revision for a significant discount, it does not support v4 CPUs (which I’m fine with), and it also does not support NVMe booting (which would have been nice). […]


The strange formatting of Oracle-branded HGST SSDs (WHL #71)

A little tale from the world of enterprise computing (again). Well, I needed something to do alongside filing my taxes, and I recently received a bunch of hardware, so there’s that.

I ordered, after long and unfruitful discussion and some eBay detour that also didn’t work because of, well, eBay, a couple of replacement hard disks of the spinning rust type, as well as SSDs to support them. The original ZFS RAID volume that kept *ALL* my data crashed via some obscure file system bug, and since I’m not a paying Oracle customer (not that they would help me out – everything is plastered with “restore from backup” notes), I finally migrated to Ubuntu and OpenZFS. […]


Samsung USB 3.1 Flash Drive BAR Plus MUF-256BE3/EU (WHL #45)

Wan Hung Lo #45 – Christmas Turd Edition!

Yeah…wasn’t planned to do that, but just like with the much more expensive “proper hardware” item from last year, the BenQ EX3501R that caused m u l t i p le revisits, I guess I found something worthy of in-depth reviewing. A simple USB flash drive.

Let me explain. I’m in the market for some 200GB+ device, as I’ve come to the point in the upgrade cycle where my 128GB Sandisk Extreme Pro (wank, wank) is no longer capable of holding all data that I want to carry around. […]