Wise move, my friend, wise move.

Replacing the 2TB Firecuda with the 4TB WD Black

Ok, the Seagate Firecuda 530 2TB was replaced with the WD Black SN850X 4TB.

Since I was going to do this with the PC tower in a vertical position (the backside of the Helios case is also a glass panel which I did not feel like removing) I first padded the PSU cover with napkins, to prevent a screw getting lose and falling right into the interior of the ROG Thor PSU.

The WD comes with the latest firmware version (had to install WD/SanDisk Dashboard to make sure) which is a plus given that previous firmware versions had issues with the drive randomly disconnecting (yes, I did my homework first so I knew about this issue with older firmware versions, fixed now).

Benchmark numbers vs the previous Firecuda 530 are nothing to write home about but then again I don't really care as I only use this drive to store games. The real gain is in the capacity, 4TB of the WD vs the 2TB of the Firecuda (and the fact that data through output doesn't slow to truly abysmal levels as data gets stale).

Temperature when idle is a "frosty" 50C (about the same as the other NVMe drives).

So at this point the system in terms of storage consists of:

1. 960GB Intel Optane 905P PCIe NVMe (system drive)
2. 2 TB Samsung Evo 970
3. 2 TB Samsung Evo 970 (#2), both NVMe EVO drives installed on the DIMM.2
4. 2 TB Samsung 980 PRO
5. 4 TB WD Black SN850X
6. 1 TB T-Force SATA SSD (empty)
7. 2 TB Samsung T7 Touch external USB drive
8. 4 TB Western Digital hard disk to store old backups, etc.

Now up to basically 14 TB of sweet, sweet, flash storage.

I am SO HAPPY I pulled the trigger on this one when I did. Price of these 4TB drives have now more than doubled to 600 EUR or higher.

Unfortunately it looks like I might have to take the Firecuda 530 out of the cupboard, my Intel Optane 905p 960GB seems to be failing. Over the last year it has developed four non-recoverable bad blocks and transfer speed on some parts of the drive is down to 200 MB/S (should be 10 times faster than that!).

I know it's way past the 5 year warranty but these drives were very expensive and were supposed to last forever, damn it! It's still at 100% lifetime and with Optane's endurance as a consumer drive it would remain so for many years to come... but alas. What is worse is that there are only a couple of stories on the web of this drives going bad, so it seems like I was one of the very unlucky few.

Since I do daily backups I have been avoiding finally retiring the Optane, as to do that I will have to flash the Firecuda with the firmware that fixes the slow access speeds after a while and format it, then remove one of the EVO drives from the DIMM.2, clone the Optane to the Firecuda, remove the Optane, install the Firecuda in the NVMe slot for PCIe 5.0 drives on the motherboard because there is no other free M.2 slot to put it, set it as the boot drive, re-install the EVO into the DIMM.2, and pray to God everything still boots and works fine after that.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I'm kind of avoiding playing games on my 4090 too because hotspots temps go up to 100C. (30C delta from GPU core). Must be thermal paste pump out, but I am not risking opening the GPU at this point. If it breaks or melts there is no way I can afford another one at current prices.

In fact, I have no plans to buy new hardware any time soon unless I absolutely have to. I did not buy a nVidia 5090 when it came out because it was too expensive for only a 30% performance difference over my Asus Strix 4090 OC, decided to wait for a 6090 instead.

Guess I will have to wait a long time now, and that is assuming I will be able to afford one when it finally does come out (if the end of the world doesn't happen first).