I have an optical drive + a 2.5" SSD and a 3.5" HD in mine and it’s not so bad, it is indeed miserable to work in but once it’s good it’s good, my CPU is pretty much never audible overclocked with the stock cooler, maybe the stock PSU makes it a lot better idk
I do have this tendency to try to have everything both ways by sheer force of will, whereas everyone will be like “don’t you want more overhead to make your life easier” and I’m always like “it should work, it says it works, let’s be efficient, I’ll make it work”
and I always make myself nuts but every time I have the option to try the alternative it’s just boring
anyway swapping in 3x3 wifi was definitely the worst thing I ever did in this case
A PSU where you can remove unnecessary cabling (or not attach it in the first place) is such a treat in a cramped environment, you probably want this type of PSU.
M2-SSD + 2.5" is the only sensible way to go nowadays, 3.5" takes up way too much space… but if you have legacy drives around, there’s no choice, ymmv but take a look whether you can find some adaptors that save space.
I think M2 still needs some time to mature. Yeah, if you have the money, it can be faster. But for most people, you’ll get better value from a regular SSD.
Also, M2 drives can get hot and they usually are not placed in great spots for ventilation. Such as, the underside of a motherboard. I’m hoping future drives run cooler, as a rule. Regular SSD don’t really have heat issues.
I thought that for a while too but disk is actually speeding up a lot faster than CPUs nowadays and it doesn’t look like that will stop anytime soon. it does obviously have limits beyond which many people aren’t going to notice for their respective workflows (the fastest disk I have or have used is a BX100 which is still blazing as far as I can tell) but I don’t think it’s actually an unreasonable thing to spend on. like if you look at Macbook PCIe SSD benchmarks from the past few years they are unbelievably good and that makes a massive difference to all parts of your workload, it’s another Apple thing where they’ve improved so orthogonally to the rest of the industry that a lot of x86 PC diehards just don’t notice.
also I know I just talked about how I’m the one who builds sweatboxes but I really think heat is like a solved problem unless you’re using very low-quality components or you utterly fuck up ventilation to the point where, like, the whole machine is shutting down on the regular. I know I got on my high horse about thermal design for GPUs up above but that’s really just about how much power you can get out of a given form factor, not cooling itself, because they’re indefinitely scalable and the cooling is solved one way or another.
oh yeah for gaming it doesn’t matter, you can game off a hard drive and barely notice
my beloved Z77 ITX mobo has an mSATA (pre-m2) slot and as much as I love the idea of putting more shit in there I think it actually abuts the CPU slot to the point where there are almost no mSATA drives that would actually fit, plus it would be absolute hell to get at, I’d have to take everything out of the machine to reach it
I want an itx motherboard with an m.2 slot, 2 u.2 slots and I can use all 3 at once if I want and the pcie slot to support bifurcation and no soundcard or sata ports wasting space
Posting here to remind myself to figure out which one of my RAM sticks is bad and remove it from my desktop so I have a stable machine until I get off my butt and buy new RAM. I hate spending money on computers. At least it’s DDR3.
actually I guess I could get an mSATA 860 Evo, they still make them, and use it for games and just keep videos on the hard drive and keep using my BX100 as a boot drive
the 1TBs are a little too pricey though and I’d fill up the 500 with games too fast as is, I guess I’ll wait
I love how all of my technology plans are increasingly predicated on a 2012 mobo/CPU lasting uhhhhh however long it takes a Titan X to be obsolete, until like 2027 I guess
did you know I still don’t have any USB C gear and consider it a point of pride?