Geekzone giveaway: Crucial P1 NVMe SSD (m2)

Forums › Off topic › Geekzone giveaway: Crucial P1 NVMe SSD (m2)

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80652 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41036

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#242968 21-Nov-2018 22:59

It's giveaway time and now we have a Crucial P1 1TB SSD to give away to one of you lucky folks, courtesy of Crucial!

How to Enter: You just need to reply here with a horror story related to storage - how your dog ate the floppy disc with your school project, or how your ZIP drive failed with the Click of Death and you had no backup copies. Or perhaps a good story on how your gaming improved when you installed a new SSD - anything goes. Double entry if you post a photo (upload the image to Geekzone and use the BBCODE provided). Be creative here folks.

General rules: one entry per user only in our competition. One winner will be randomly selected. This giveaway is open to NZ residents and closes Friday 14th December 2018 (New Zealand time). Winner will be selected in a random draw and contacted via PM. After confirmation we will post winner's username in this topic. Once confirmed, winners will receive the prizes via post. Winners must be registered Geekzone users by the time this competition was posted.

Email notification: this topic may get quite busy, so if you don't want to receive email notifications when new replies are posted, remember to uncheck the "E-mail me when someone replies to this post" option. An unsubscribe option is always sent with every email.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ... | 15

2576 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1489

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#2131352 21-Nov-2018 23:18

Hmm mine would be driving down to Christchurch in 1986 to purchase a 20mb hdd and it cost me $874.32 , Got it home and had to figure out how to low level format and set it up.

Was used to run my wildcat bbs board.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding : Ice cream man , Ice cream man

PSlover14

207 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 17

ID Verified

#2131353 21-Nov-2018 23:23

About a year ago, I was running a RAID-0 (more like a JBOD to be honest) in my main PC, which stored all of my games and other content on it.

The array was made up of a 500GB Seagate Barracuda drive, a 400GB Maxtor drive and a 160GB Hitachi drive which was all I could afford since I had them lying around.

One morning, I booted up my computer, and a loud clicking sound is emitting from the computer. Fearing the worst, I opened up the side panel and had a listen to see which drive was clicking. It was the Maxtor drive. Since I was an idiot at the time, I had absolutely no backup of the data stored on that array, meaning I lost around 600GB of Steam games, plus around 50-100GB of other non crucial documents.

For most people I'm sure this would be fine, you know, just re-download the games from Steam, but unfortunately for me, I live in a rural area which can only get ADSL2+ internet, meaning that at max my download speed was 1MB/s without anyone else on the internet at the same time. According to a download calculator, to redownload everything I had, it would've taken roughly a week straight of downloading, which at the time was impossible due to my parents having a 160GB data cap, and I didn't want to suck all the speed up for a whole week.

So off it was to school with my laptop to backup the games from my friends steam libraries and copy them back over to my Desktop PC, and since then I have learned to have a backup of big files stored somewhere that isn't reliant on an internet connection, which for now is my 1TB external HDD.

Hammerer

2480 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 802

Lifetime subscriber

#2131401 22-Nov-2018 00:31

I regularly tell people to store their data on at least three separate media. It is too easy to lose two at the same time, just like a second drive can die in a raid array before the first failed drive has been replaced.

I was again explaining this to another hapless user who only kept one backup copy on a flash drive and had both their hard drive and their flash drive fail on the same day. In a tragic irony, I jokingly said that it can even happen to three computers. Later that day I had the first my three laptops fail with a motherboard failure: Wednesday my main laptop fails; Thursday I startup up the second backup, because I might need it, and it fails too boot; Friday, at the start of a presentation, my first backup laptop fails. All three of my computers dead to motherboard failures within three days.

Jase2985

13730 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 6202

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#2131409 22-Nov-2018 05:52

Ive had a few HDD's fail, most were just external ones, and most were small in size with not much data on them.

Im just glad the quality and longevity of them is much better now

Batman

Mad Scientist
30012 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 6217

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2131410 22-Nov-2018 06:05

I spent $900 in 2007 on a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2.

Today it still works and it is still 100X faster than a HDD.

But I need more storage. Please and thank you.

timmmay

20858 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 5350

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2131464 22-Nov-2018 07:34

A few years ago I had data corruption issues on my internal disks. I could see when files were copied checksums failed. I tested the RAM with memtest x86 and it came back fine, so I replaced the motherboard, which didn't help. In the end HCI Memtest found bad RAM, which Corsair replaced under warranty with no issues and fixed the problem.

I was about ready to do this by the time it was fixed.

Samsung

Shop now on Samsung phones, tablets, TVs and more (affiliate link).

Andib

1395 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 974

ID Verified

Trusted

#2131473 22-Nov-2018 08:03

Nothing amazing for me, Just the normal click of death on an old hard drive. Luckily it was only my linux isos that were lost.

<#
.DISCLAIMER
Anything I post is my own and not the views of my past/present/future employer.
#>

SaltyNZ

8864 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 9539

Trusted

2degrees

Lifetime subscriber

#2131475 22-Nov-2018 08:03

A, a tale of storage woe. I have one. It even has SSDs in it. For the promise of a chance at a free SSD I shall edify you.

My current PC has M.2 slots on the motherboard and I have a nice Intel 600-series 500GB SSD. It's not the absolute fastest - in theory the Samsung ones are twice as fast, but they're also twice the price - but it's fast enough that the machine can boot from zero so fast you don't notice the spinning dots. However as we all know, games are getting BIG these days and I'd like to be able to have more than three on my computer at any given time so I wanted more space.

Now, there is a second M.2 slot on the mother board but it's not particularly convenient to reach so I had the bright idea to get a PCIe RAID card with M.2 slots, and 2 nice fast M.2 SSDs to put it in it.

In which the screw-up: all the numbers quoted on the RAID card implied it took NVMe SSDs. But of course, there are also SATA M.2 SSDs, and on this particular card the slots weren't keyed to make it absolutely impossible to get them mixed up.

If only I had checked the actual product site and scrolled down a bit first:

But I did not. Insert SSDs into RAID card, insert RAID card into PC, power on PC ... PC powers off immediately. Remove RAID card from PC, touch VERY HOT SSDs, swear to self, throw all in bin.

Don't be me.

Should I be the lucky winner of this one, it's going into the other motherboard slot where it belongs.

iPad Pro 11" + iPhone 15 Pro Max + 2degrees 4tw!

These comments are my own and do not represent the opinions of 2degrees.

redherring

86 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 46

#2131491 22-Nov-2018 08:21

20 years ago I had to explain to around 20 people why their emails were completely gone.

It was my first SBS / Exchange server. I had no idea that the built in backup software couldn’t back up Exchange unless it was offline. It was the first version of SBS, it’s configuration wizard was tied to a phone number that didn’t work in NZ, so I had to set up Exchange from scratch. About 6 months into its life, a tiny clip holding a stick of RAM on the RAID controller failed. The RAID array was corrupted. I restored the server from the backup tape but the email database was just gone. Outlook didn’t even do caching back then so it was just all gone.

Some useful lessons in hindsight, something I will never forget.

Coil

6614 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 2153
Inactive user

#2131493 22-Nov-2018 08:26

My data horror story.

I hate having my files on the cloud and I am lazy at backing up on my PC. I like taking photos of things I do and places I go with my smart phone.
So naturally if I lost or damaged my smartphone I would lose everything on it.

At this period of time I did not have a computer and i had a few files stored on my phones internal memory. Specifically a passphrase for a bitcoin wallet with a lot of bitcoin in it. Some other handy files/programs that you don't just "find".

Yes, That is John Deere yellow.

wratterus

1687 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 678

#2131494 22-Nov-2018 08:33

The first SSD I bought was an 80GB Intel jobbie, I'm pretty sure it's RRP was $599 at the time. It is still going strong in the parent's PC too, although it is far too small now.

I'm currently running 2x 240GB Sandisk SSDs in RAID0 for my PC and that's pretty much full... this would be an ideal upgrade, and my 240GB drives can be re-purposed.

Apple TV

Stream your favourite shows now on Apple TV (affiliate link).

xpd

Geek of Coastguard
14116 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 4576

Retired Mod

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2131497 22-Nov-2018 08:39

No horror story, just more of a history.... picked up an A590 unit for my Amiga back in the BBS days, came with a 120MB SCSI drive. That thing changed my life. 120MB back then was huge :D Then got a SCSI external (NED CDr25) CD Rom to attach to it. Found I needed a newer controller ROM. Thankfully friend (Powerslave from the Heavy Artillery BBS) had similar unit and was happy to swap his ROM over, so my BBS grew.... then I upgraded to a GVP A530 unit, added a GURU Rom and wow.... SPEED!!! (Probably 3MB/s)

The GVP died in 1998, removed the drive and threw it in a box....

So what happened to that drive ?

Nothing, it still works to this day, I fired it up a few years ago and pulled all my Amiga files from it and its sat on the shelf clearly labelled ever since :)

XPD / Gavin

LinkTree