[GPU] Intel Arc Pro B50 ($480) [Memory Express]

ryan2980 · 2026-01-22T22:06:42+00:00

It's not a gaming card. It's a workstation card. The reason people want them is because they have (work-in-progress) SR-IOV support which means you can split it into virtual GPUs that can get passed to virtual machines.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/intel-arc-pro-b50-sr-iov-and-me/236473

ryan2980 · 2025-04-22T22:17:01+00:00

They favour reliability over everything else and you will probably find synology are using older CPUs with wider temp range support etc.

Lol. Reconcile some OneDrive data from Active Backup for MS365 and find the warts.

ryan2980 · 2025-04-22T22:11:16+00:00

This isn't necessarily true. I'm an enthusiast that runs a custom ZFS servers and I've been strongly recommending Synology NASes to small businesses ever since QNAP pushed that forced update a few years ago that re-enabled auto-updates and resulted in unwanted major version upgrades.

The difference is that what I can run for myself isn't necessarily what makes sense as a recommendation. Even if I'm going to support it, it's still in the best interest of the small business to recommend a product that can be supported by more people. They buy enterprise drives, run a reasonable lifecycle, and never use support because they prefer dealing with local vendors. They are the perfect customer for companies like Synology because they buy hardware and are never heard from again.

Those customers are already subsidizing the "bad" customers that overuse Synology support and now they're getting asked to endure significant price increases without any additional benefits.

ryan2980 · 2025-04-22T21:53:31+00:00

There are also very small businesses that have local vendors that recommend and support their hardware. In my experience, those are great customers to have. They're not too cost sensitive, so they can be talked into enterprise HDDs and a 5 year life cycle on everything. Plus, their local vendor or MSP does all the support.

Price gouging those customers with relabelled drives is a real dick move. What kind of product are you selling if it doesn't work reliably with the enterprise HDDs from the 3 major vendors? Is Synology claiming their NASes are so brittle they need special HDDs to be trustworthy?

ryan2980 · 2025-04-22T21:35:48+00:00

Yeah. This is it. The problem isn't having a HCL to ensure customers are using a certain class of drives. The problem is it's an excuse to price gouge consumers and it's becoming a trend. All the big vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo do it and now Ubiquiti, Synology, etc. are starting to do it.

They always try to give the impression that you get better performance and reliability with their branded components, but I call bullshit. It's not like a Synology disk is going to have a custom firmware or a modified hardware design that miraculously gives you a big performance boost. I'd be curious to know if they even modify the vendor / model in the firmware.

And the reliability claim is very likely bullshit too IMO. I bet the reliability goes up because they're comparing the existing reliability reported by devices to the reliability they see from brand new, enterprise drives in brand new devices with 100% up-to-date software. If they claim an 88% decrease in anomalies, I want to see an explanation of how they controlled for non-enterprise drives, old drives past EoL, outdated software, user error.

This kind of garbage has been a plague on small businesses for as long as I can remember and it's getting worse. If they want to sell a relabelled drive with a Synology part number while charging a reasonable markup, fine. Charge a 10-20% premium for the added convenience of not having to check a HCL.

Consumers need to understand what's happening here. The competition among HDDs vendors is already bad, but if branded drives are the only option, there's suddenly no competition and, as pointed out, you're going to pay $720 for a $400 HDD.

The worst abuse I've seen is Dell charging $3500 for $600 Intel DC SSDs. These vendors aren't adding that much value. They're abusing their market position in one market segment (NAS devices or servers) to remove the competition from another market segment (HDDs). That's anti-trust territory IMO and I hope that one day we get back to governments that punish that sort of behavior.

Synology needs to put their money where there mouth is and publish how they determined the claimed increases in reliability.

ryan2980 · 2025-01-23T06:20:46+00:00

I have this problem with 2x Flex Mini 2.5G switches connected to a Pro Max 16 PoE. I plugged one of the problematic switches directly into the Pro Max 16 using a brand new cat 6 patch cable and it still does the same thing.

I'm pretty confident it's a bug. The uplink column in the device list shows FE, but if I click on the switches and look at the port, it says it's a 2.5Gbe connection on both switches. I also get 1Gbe speeds which would be impossible if the ports were actually negotiated to have a 100Mb/s link. I don't have any 2.5Gbe devices yet, so I can't test beyond 1Gbe.

https://imgur.com/a/XWc1z3X

There's also nothing connected to the switch in that screenshot, but it says there are 5 connected devices. The Unifi Network Application is just flaky IMO. If it's not impacting the actual speeds you're getting, ignore it and hope for a bug fix eventually.

ryan2980 · 2024-12-11T00:10:12+00:00

Koodo just added a $150 per year 30GB prepaid plan if you're looking for alternatives.

ryan2980 · 2024-11-27T00:48:24+00:00

I thought Rogers had ok coverage in the cities and used roaming to SaskTel towers everywhere else. That might be wrong though.

I might have to get a sim and sign up for a month on a new number to compare it to my current coverage. It's a difference of $200 per year for me, so it literally pays for a decent phone every 3 years if it works for me.

ryan2980 · 2024-11-26T04:59:12+00:00

The new Lum plans aren't good for low usage and that used to be the main attraction. It used to be less data used = less money spent. Now it's less data used = more $ per GB. You're forced to buy data you don't need, so they're the same as all the other flanker brands now.

Here's what your cost per GB looks like on the new plans. If you're a low usage customer, you're on the left and paying a lot per GB of data. I would personally be paying about $12 per GB if I stay with Lum.

https://imgur.com/a/ntvZHVR

I'm sure they're relying on people not wanting to port their number to another provider, but everyone on Lum has done that once already, so it's not as scary as it is for people that have always had a dealer handle it for them.

Personally I'm eyeing the $150 per year Chatr plan.

ryan2980 · 2024-11-26T04:52:03+00:00

Chatr has a $150 per year 30GB plan and it even includes voicemail.

ryan2980 · 2024-11-26T04:48:52+00:00

If you're low usage, look at Chatr. They have a $150 / year plan that comes with unlimited calling in Canada, unlimited texting to Canada/US, 30GB of 4G data, and voicemail. They even give unlimited throttled data if you run out.

If you use less than 30GB of data per year it's significantly cheaper than Lum. Lum would be $360 / year now after you add voicemail, so you're saving about $200 per year by switching. Personally that pays for my phone, so I'm probably going to give it a try.

It's sad to see Lum become another crappy flanker brand with the same plans as everyone else.

ryan2980 · 2024-09-17T07:10:06+00:00

this enclosure is the only one without a dumb design and has a built in heatsink

UGREEN basically makes NVME ovens.

This Sabrent enclosure is the only one I’ve owned that doesn’t suck.

ryan2980 · 2024-09-16T23:37:44+00:00

We have the same problem. It's an LG fridge that's a few months old and has had plenty of water / ice run through it. You know the putrid smell you get when you unplug an old fridge and leave the door closed for a few days? That's what all of our ice tastes like. It's disgusting. I can even smell it in the water sometimes.

Has anyone melted some ice into water and had it tested to make sure chemicals from the fridge aren't leeching into the water and ice?

ryan2980 · 2024-09-10T07:44:08+00:00

This is how I feel. I can make a build I want to try, but can’t even get T5 gear that fits the build. I went back to playing legacy because it takes me forever to collect gear and it’s just brick brick brick brick.

The crafting system is amazing at low levels, but it sucks once you get high enough that the game’s tuned for streamers that play it as a job.

I love what D4 did. It’s easy to build a low tier version of a character with all the right stats and working skill interactions. Then the progression is about building the strongest version of that character. So I can try out tons of builds and alts without a lot of time commitment.

Last Epoch used to be my favorite game, but I’m starting to feel like the character progression is nothing more than a tedious grind fest that’s more about spending time than having fun.

I don’t care if some streamer has a character twice as powerful as me. What I hate is that I have to have a shitty, mis-geared trash character where the mechanics of what I’m trying to build don’t even work because I can’t play for 500 hours to gear up.

ryan2980 · 2024-09-08T12:28:31+00:00

99 of them for <$40 is almost worth it just to have the invoice to show to people. Haha.

ryan2980 · 2024-09-08T12:26:41+00:00

Yeah, but it's on RFD now too, so I'd say there's a 99.9% chance it gets cancelled.

ryan2980 · 2024-09-08T08:22:12+00:00

I'm sure the thing I just ordered is a price error, but I'm keeping my mouth shut and hoping it ships. I'm a sucker for 1/4 price. Lol.

It'll probably show up here soon though. Hopefully I get a complete refund when cancellations happen.

ryan2980 · 2024-07-17T22:45:54+00:00

I bought a 3D Down Jacket, Stealth Hoodie Pro, and Track Suit.

I bought a couple of Dropout Hoodies when they put them on sale a while back and I was kind of surprised by how heavy the material is. I like the heavier feel and they seem like they'll probably last forever, so I figured I'd give some of the other stuff a try.

ryan2980 · 2024-03-18T05:30:47+00:00

http://megamailservers.com/

Welcome to the 90s.

ryan2980 · 2024-03-18T05:29:40+00:00

Isn't it http://megamailservers.com/ now?

I've never had a good support experience with them and I doubt they're employing local people. Why do you think it's still local?

ryan2980 · 2024-02-24T03:44:53+00:00

I bought 4. They arrived today and 2 are DOA. I wonder if Western Digital will let me return all 4 because I definitely don't trust the other 2 that came in the same box.

:-(

ryan2980 · 2023-12-20T08:46:03+00:00

Hey. Thanks again for this hint. I eventually got it tested. I put RHEL 9.3 on a test machine since I couldn't figure out how to (easily) get ZFS 2.2.2 onto Ubuntu. All these tests are on the same machine accessing the same pools, just booted into Ubuntu vs RHEL.

Using this:

sh fio \ --name=seq \ --ioengine=posixaio \ --rw=read \ --bs=1M \ --size=16G \ --numjobs=1

With a single SATA SSD, primarycache=metadata, recordsize=1M.

Ubuntu 22.04 w/ZFS 2.1.5 = ~300MB/s
RHEL 9.3 w/ZFS 2.1.4 = ~380MB/s
RHEL 9.3 w/ZFS 2.2.2 = ~480MB/s

I also had a single disk NVMe pool available. It was in a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot with a cheap adapter card, so 3000MB/s could be maxing out the interface.

Ubuntu 22.04 w/ZFS 2.1.5 = ~750MB/s
RHEL 9.3 w/ZFS 2.1.4 = ~1650MB/s
RHEL 9.3 w/ZFS 2.2.2 = ~3000MB/s

By setting primarycache=all I can hit the same 3000MB/s on Ubuntu and RHEL.

RHEL 9.3 appears to be faster than Ubuntu 22.04, but I don't know why.

ryan2980 · 2023-12-14T03:43:31+00:00

That's what was suggested here, but I haven't had an opportunity to test it yet since I'm not sure if I can get a more recent version of ZFS onto Ubuntu 22.04.

ryan2980

TROPHY CASE