Tag Archives: upgrade

tech

Hard drive failures – Western Digital Hard Drives are winning!

Leave a comment

Over the years ive had two hard drive’s fail but one failed before there was even a chance to know the drive was about fail probably before S.M.A.R.T back in 2002/2003.  It was a brand new drive with alot of programming stuff on it.  I didnt think id need to backup a brand new drive oh what a lesson learned.

The first one was at a time where there was no google cloud and no online sync and backing up was a pain in the ass.

The Windows 10 1903 update
When the Windows 10 1903 update “rolled out” it became one of the worst experiences ive ever had to go through in upgrading a Windows PC in almost 20 years.

When i did get the fecking thing to work after two BIOS tweaks it revealed another problem. Everytime windows booted up one of the harddrives would dissapear for no reason.

Turns out after a few software hard drive diagnosis programs, the drive is kinda fu*cked and its a Western Digital Drive.

S.M.A.R.T – Self Monitoring and Reporting and Tool:
This invention in hard drive tech is fantastic, if your having problems with a hard drive and do a scan if there are any problems with the SMART settings then you could be in trouble.

Now the drive is still working but S.M.A.R.T is reporting problems with the drive which isnt a good sign.

Thats two Western Digital Hard Drives dead!

Dont buy Western digital Drives im guessing i bought these drives cause they were the cheaper option and that wraps up this post with this link to a survery of hard drive failures and yes Western Digital is number one.

Hard drive failure survey;
56,224 hard drives later, Western Digital fails most often

 

 

 

tech

Pcie 3.0 vs Pcie 2.0 [ x16 ] Differences – Does it even matter

Leave a comment

I was wondering if my current PC’s motherboard which is almost 6 years old at this stage would cause a performance deficit with a Graphics card with a PCI-E 3.0 interface

This video on youtube from vmreviews seems to suggest that it doesn’t really matter and that the difference is minimal at best. From reading the comments people say its like a 1 fps improvement at best.

Another video seems to suggest the same result;

Motherboard upgrade:
The problem lies in upgrading an entire motherboard for just PCIE 3, it doesn’t make sense. Its difficult to know but the above video seems to show that there’s no real benefit.

Motherboard ,CPU and Ram Upgrade:
This would of course bring a better results but its almost impossible to guess how much benefit it would yield. I would guess a 20% increase in overall performance would be possible? Not something possible and still way too expensive to do.

5 Years on and still going:
My current PC setup has been going for almost 6 years, which to be honest is almost incredable. the only upgrade ive made in the time was to switch out the CPU from an AMD FX 4350 (Quadcore) to an AMD FX 8350 (Octocore) and ive no complaints in performance regarding most current PC titles. This is the longest peroid of time where ive not upgraded my PC.

Im not sure what it says about the state of the PC hardware market where i feel games are being held back by the consoles.