Raspberry Pis are popular because they're small, don't consume much power, and are extremely versatile. However, the default method of booting oneβfrom the microSD cardβis best avoided if possible. Here's how you can do it.
Not all of your storage is the same, and you shouldn't treat it as such. There are many advantages to tiering, and organizing said tiering, over just dumping everything on your storage in no particular order.
Cloud storage can get costly, so an alternative for many people is to just grab any important memories and store them in a hard drive to revisit in the future.
NASes are not for everyone. They can be expensive, and oftentimes, they provide features that, frankly, a lot of people don't need. A NAS is what you get when you want your own cloud storage of sorts, but if you don't need the cloud part, a DAS can be a better option.
The ability to swap operating systems on a whim is one of the best things about single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. You can write a new operating system to a memory card whenever you fancy, and keep a small collection of cards handy whenever you want to change.
A loud NAS is uniquely annoying, much more so than a regular PC or laptop, and that's simply because it's always on. When you have a sound machine that runs 24/7, you either learn to ignore it or grow to hate it, and a noisy NAS is essentially exactly that.
These days, SSDs are so durable that many people will never have to deal with SSD failure. But there's another side to that coin: when SSDs fail, they often do it quietly, and you may not notice until it's too late and your data's already lost.
Just 10 years ago, thumb drives were commonplace everywhere. You probably carried one around in your keys, or you had one in your backpack. Things have changed a lot, though.
TerraMaster is best known for its network attached storage (NAS) devices, but the company also makes some external storage enclosures. TerraMaster has now revealed the D1 SSD Pro, which turns any NVMe SSD into a super-fast Thunderbolt 5 external drive.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) seem to come with so many rules and caveats. Don't make them too hot, don't write too much to them, and don't fill them up all the way,
Times are tough for those of us who want to buy a new SSD. You don't have to aim for the fastest drives availableβall SSDs are overpriced right now, and chances are that it'll only get worse. That makes it harder to replace or upgrade your existing drive, which is why it's time to get creative. This inexpensive gadget might be able to help if you're not happy with your current SSD, and even if you are, it can help it live longer.
Supply shortages and big price increases for RAM and storage have been a major drag for enthusiasts and PC builders in recent months. And while we haven't yet seen large, widespread price increases for memory-dependent products like pre-built laptop PCs, smartphones, and graphics cards, most companies expect that to change this year if shortages continue.
In the meantime, memory manufacturers are riding high demand and high prices to record profits.
In revenue guidance released this week, Samsung Electronics predicts it will make between 19.9 and 20.1 trillion Korean won in operating profit (roughly $13.8 billion USD) in Q4 2025, compared to just 6.49 trillion won in Q4 of 2024.
Weβve been waiting a long time to see how DirectStorage performs in the real world. Forspoken is the first game to support it and it was released this week after a multi-month delay. Now itβs in gamersβ hands and we finally have some numbers to pore over, thanks to some benchmarks a hardware testing site in Germany has posted. Theyβre not for loading times but for overall performance. As it turns out, offloading asset compression from the CPU to the GPU does impact gaming performance. Your mileage may vary, of course, but in the first tests, itβs up to an 11% penalty in frames per second.
The tests were performed by PC Games Hardware. To test DirectStorage 1.1, it set up a test bench with a Core i9-12900K and an RTX 4090. On the SSD side, they tested three models: SATA, and PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. Oddly, the testers didnβt say which models of SSDs they used for testing. Regardless, DirectStorage doesnβt work with SATA, so weβre able to glean the effects of the asset decompression happening on the GPU instead of the CPU. The tests were run in 4K and showed some clear results.
In an unexpected twist, the SATA SSD offered the highest fps, coming in at 83.2 on average. When switching to the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD, the average frame rate was 11% slower at 74.4fps. The PCIe 3.0 drive was just as fast as PCIe 4.0, averaging a single fps more on average. Since they only tested at 4K, we donβt know if this situation is the same at lower resolutions. The good news for gamers is the 1% and 0.2% fps averages were essentially the same across all three drives. This would indicate that the player would not notice any performance spikes while playing.
Previously, it was reported that DirectStorage can lead to a huge increase in data transfer speeds. In that test, it was Intelβs GPU that was the fastest, beating out pricier GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. Clearly, more testing is needed across the GPU spectrum. Weβd also be curious to see what a PCIe 5.0 SSD could do with Forspoken. Sadly, those drives are not quite ready yet. Also, keep in mind this is just one data point. Another YouTuber named Bang4BuckPC Gamer also has a SATA vs. PCIe 4.0 side-by-side, and in the majority of the scenes, the performance is the same. Sometimes, though, the NVME drive is noticeably faster than the SATA drive.
At this point, we need to see more SSDs and GPUs tested to see what the performance penalty is (if any). Though 11% is a higher number than expected, the gameβs frame rate was still well above 60fps and it looks very smooth in the video. We also donβt think the RTX 4090 is the best GPU to test this on, as someone with that card never really has to worry about fps in any game, even at 4K. Weβd be curious to see what the impact is on Windows 10 as well, as it has a watered-down version of DirectStorage.