LIVE - AOOSTAR Mini PC AMD Ryzen 5 5500U (6C/12T, up to 4.0 GHz) that is also a NAS and a Router???

thank you [Music] [Music] wow everybody and welcome into my latest live broadcast it's Friday the 21st of July 2023 my name is Carrie Holzman which most of you in the chat room already know all of this information but if you're new here welcome in today I've got a pretty interesting little mini PC to show you and it's very different in many ways that you may not realize obviously it works as a Nas but not in the way you might be thinking so we're going to talk about that and uh again I want to give a little shout out to uh we lost a member of the original member of the hacking Community yesterday or that night before two nights ago Kevin mitnick died at the age of 59 of pancreatic cancer he'd been battling that person over a year anyway and I wasn't aware of that and I was quite shocked to learn of his passing I was very fortunate to be able to meet him and he was a super cool dude and um wish we had an opportunity to do more to work together more however um they say he passed peacefully in his sleep so I guess suppose that's the best you can hope for in that scenario and uh what a surprise I had no idea he was even sick so I just wanted to acknowledge a man's life here in a minute which seems unjust but uh if you don't know who Kevin mitnick is there were a number of movies such as War Games remember sort of based on his activities although he denies ever hacking into no red but uh anyway it's a fascinating story if you don't know who he is and he ended up when he got out of jail he ended up becoming a white hat hacker meaning that he was helping companies from getting hacked instead of hacking them and became very successful he has a book out telling his story and uh yeah he will be missed he was a one of a kind in original um onward and upward with other things today I want to say thank you for the Super Chat contributions that came in before the show Sarge Tech with a five dollar contribution says this is my subscribers only mode I suppose we've been doing all these live videos that are public with what we call subscriber mode only and what that means is if you want to participate in the chat room which we very much encourage you must first subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed you just hit the Subscribe button it doesn't cost anything and uh this keeps this has done a very good job of keeping out the Bots and much of the trolls I think that has been a a solution I wish I had thought of much earlier but it does appear to be very effective that's why it's on Paul O'Brien contributes five euro he says hi Carrie and Marlena can you thank your sister Linda for me the mouse pad is fantastic the quality of the material and the design is cool yes my I I will tell her I've forwarded your message on to her if we go over to my screen share here I'll tell you what he's talking about for those of you who didn't catch me talking about this sort of as an afterthought in some previous shows uh let me do this right in the beginning and say if you go to kerryholzman.com this is the merch store my sister runs the merch store okay I have I have very little interaction with it other than you know she gives me updates from time to time and these are items that we sell that are shippable all over the world and she just had new mouse pads made she designs these herself she finds a manufacturer and it meets with her quality standards this is the new design she's ordered 50 of those and when those 50 are sold well she might order more or she might change up the design again so they kind of become like collectors items if you're a fan of the channel so you can get all the different designs but they work as a monitor cleaner you can actually use the material to wipe the monitor your computer screen and uh they're the same material the same manufacturer is the previous generation with previous design you see they're twenty dollars and that includes free shipping to anywhere in the world and there's some other items that you might be interested in she's doing these um Zippo lighters I had this idea something that would last a long time and be useful and it occurs to me people have Zippo lighters they can pass them on in Generations so that it's a little expensive I realize the Zippo lighter is like 20 bucks but these are basically engraved by hand so no two are alike and even if she uses the same design it won't be exactly right it won't be exactly the same rather as a as another one with the same design because they're all done by hand as a result they're very limited in addition this is a one of one okay there's this is only the first one she's ever done she's got about a dozen more to work on as time permits and I've encouraged her to be creative so you'll see fifty five dollars remember that has the custom etching and includes shipping anywhere in the world at that price so we're not nickel and diming it with sales tax shipping and handling and all the other nonsense so that is a one of one when that one's gone then she'll have no other choice but to get back to work and etch another one anyway uh just a shout out there for the kerryholzman.com merch store and of course there's some paper coasters and Shrink coasters and other items that you can check out stickers and such and if you have ideas for Merch uh be sure and let us know what you think we're not going to carry you don't really want to carry any t-shirts unless we can find a manufacturer who can handle the transaction and do the shipping all by themselves because it's way too labor intensive and expensive to order shirts in various colors and sizes have them shipped to us then we have to sort through a large order figure out who ordered what and then get individual packaging for somebody who orders one shirt or somebody who orders five and then address them by hand and then take them to the post office to have them weighed depending on where they're going in the world there's just that's a ton of work so having a manufacturer that can make a quality shirt and will handle the transaction and the shipping and customer service is our stumbling point on that but anything other than clothing if you have ideas let us know and who knows maybe we could turn your idea into a merch store item Colin Hunt contributes five pounds thank you Colin Collins been a member over 12 months now Victor calendar with two pounds says hello from London well thanks for joining us Victor welcome in my friend Ron varnish says hello Dwayne Blackwelder said he has to attend a funeral today well I will I will give you an excuse I'll give you your your pass you're good I'm sorry to hear that you've lost a friend and um we'll look forward to seeing you back here in the chat in the near future Planet cryos contributes five dollars in Super Chat Planet crowd says good evening Carrie and chat what would you think about gaming mouse pads that's what I use I would buy one of those well what are you defining as a gaming mouse pad what's different about it is I have some ideas but I don't know if what you and I are thinking about is the same thing hello to Matt Zoloft joining us from Sweden see John science rocks Gary Tatum Andy Kane Ben Laird joining us from Scotland Douglas Purcell Avery ramsdorf lrcx Sherry McFarland Scott says hello Luke greenia says hello and Scotty says hello positive Gene and Piney Woods says hello and a bunch of others whose names I would spend the next 20 minutes reading so don't be offended if I didn't shout you out hopefully everybody gets a shout at it throughout at some point at the show or if you hang out long enough in the next show show after and of course if you ask a question in the chat that I read aloud it's another way if you want to hear your name said all you got to do is participate there's Marco joining us all the way from Italy who says ciao welcome in Margot hope you're doing well my friend of course he's doing well he's in Italy we're on day 21. of temperatures of of a minimum 110 degrees so breaking records here in Phoenix in that regard consecutive days in a row I think today is going to be 22. I think we will go through the entire month of July without having a break from every day hitting 110 or above that's what it looks like it's going to happen so air conditioners working overtime and let's just hope it doesn't break or are we going to be in a world of hurt let it grass with a two dollar Super Chat says he has a gaming mouse pad that's 35 inches by 16 inches so the problem with that could be the potential cost of shipping um I'll mention it to my sister and see what her thoughts are Marco says he's doing well adding Italian food on me getting chubby that nappy there's our friend Frankie bee with us 4.99 Super Chat he says hello all keep up the good work thank you Frankie and rice star man with that 10 super chat says man this work thing is a real drag here's a late fee submission right up thank you Roy star man so what do I have this is a very generic looking very plain box isn't it this company reached out to me I have never heard of this company in fact let me bring up the amazon web page for this product before we open the box if I can figure out how to use obs here we go so the aostar Mini PC it's an AMD ryzen 5 5500u that's a 6 core 12 thread processor that can pitch up to four gigahertz in frequency it has 16 gigs of ddr4 RAM with 512 gig nvme SSD it has Windows 11 on it and this is a three in one Mini PC it acts as a software router a network attached storage with two bays and of course it's a Mini PC so it does those three functions Mini PC software router Nas with some caveats it has Wi-Fi 6 and dual 2.5 gig Lan well it would have to to be a software router you need at least two Lan ports one and one out there's a 60 coupon that brings this price to an incredible 339 dollars that seems too cheap doesn't it well let's talk about it um look at the pictures here as you can see it's a pretty simple white looking box on the inside as it is on the outside this is what the PC looks like and the top of it has two Drive sleds that you can use if you want to you don't have to it's got that internal 512 gig solid state drive in there and uh you can put two drives in there and set them up as network attached storage it does support three displays at the same time three display port outs and um basically in the video notes below this video I have a link to this Amazon page which of course if you make a purchase I make a small commission from legally obligated to tell you that I don't know why it should be pretty obvious but the commission I make is very very low it's like a dollar or two all this information here I've more or less just copied and pasted into the video description I haven't really corrected it much except for obvious errors there are some grammatical errors and a few spelling errors uh this is a machine that comes from China where they don't speak English natively so um you know we we give them some consideration on that it's not that they're dumb some people might be like well whoever wrote this is Dub no no no they're very smart people they just don't English is not a it's not their first language so in any event let's talk about what this is and is it good or is it bad I mean first of all right out of the gate what do you guys think of this idea now we'll talk a few things about when we talk about Nas you probably think of Synology or qnap or Asus or other Nas manufacturers this when when I set up a Synology it has its own operating system it's not windows it's analogy Zone operators same with qnap and same with Asus they have their own operating systems that are specifically designed for Nas and Nas like functions this on the other hand is really just a windows 11 computer with two Drive Bays that I'm guessing and I haven't done anything with this this has all been saved for this live unscripted video so we can experience this together we'll figure it out together and I'm guessing you can put two drives in it they do not have to be NAS Drives part of the thing about network attached storage drives they do cost a bit more because they have special technology where they're bumped right up against each other and their vibrations a magnetic actions can affect the next drive over along with the accumulated heat as you can tell from the picture these drives are on opposite sides so they don't have that proximity issue of being so close together and because it's a Windows computer essentially what you'd be doing is just turning on file sharing and I'm guessing I hope I'm right that you can go into the BIOS and set those two drives up as a RAID 0 where you take two volumes and stripe them together as one large volume for performance which I think would be foolish because you're not going to see any performance benefit over a network or what it should have is a RAID one configuration with raid one being whatever one drive does the other Drive mirrors so if there is a drive failure you have an exact copy up to the millisecond of whatever was going on on the other Drive sometimes we would use Raid 0 when we needed larger capacity but that's not really an issue today with 20 22 terabyte drives available it doesn't really make any sense unless you've got old drives laying around and I don't know I just think if it's network attached storage I wouldn't be using old drives laying around but you know you do you so essentially what we've got here is a Mini PC with built-in solid state ryzen 5 very common configuration found in many PCs but they've added those two Drive slats which you can use as I mentioned you can just use one drive sled if you want to or ideally you put the two drives in of matching capacity ideally say make and model for the best compatibility and fewer headaches and and just use regular desktop drives you could use nasterize if you wanted to as I mentioned the NAS Drives generally do cost more and you're going to just configure file sharing in Windows and you're going to set up your Nas that way it doesn't have any of the nas features like video camera you know security camera recording and you know all the apps you can download for file backups and FTP and setting up your own web server and all the other stuff kubernetes uh containers all the stuff a real nice so when we're throwing this term Nas around it's a little bit fast and loose because yes you are creating storage that you can share on the network so it is network attached storage in the truest sense it's matching that definition but it is not what you would consider or what I would consider I can't speak for you what I would consider a true as um and truenance is a whole other piece of software now as for the software router what does that even mean well essentially what it means it's got two Network ports on the back of it two ethernet ports any computer that has two ethernet ports can be used as a software router and what that means is you could download a piece of software some freeware router software which would be an operating system designed to turn your computer or Mini PC into a router and we call it a soft router or a software router I think those require too much maintenance and too much time to set up to be worth my time but essentially you would not be using Windows you would reload or partition off the drive to set it up to be booting from a a router operating system and those are free Linux based you know PF sense other stuff like that and they certainly don't require this much power speaking of this much power most Nas devices from Synology Q nap Asus would not have a processor anywhere near as capable as this processor which kind of makes sense that you could use this as your workstation well at the same time being a file SharePoint for everybody else in your office or in your building as the file server which would have no impact on the user of the computer unless you need to reboot if you're rebooting you're going to kick everybody off the server I'm calling it a server but you know you're going to kick everybody off the file share until the machine comes back up again so if they were working on something they would lose it uh this is true with a regular Nas as well obviously if it's rebooting the thing is is with the Windows operating system you're going to get those Windows updates regularly as well as driver updates that may need a reboot and if that's happening during off hours late hours that's fine it's not interrupted but however or disruptive um with Synology and other Nas manufacturers that can all be automated to recur in the wee hours of the morning uh on days that your office is closed you wouldn't even know it was happening so this is a little more Hands-On it's also priced a little cheaper than a typical G Drive network attached storage device so you can see I'm I'm on the fence about this one because it's both very cool and very capable and also oh a little bit more a little bit more time needed to set it up and maintain it so it really depends on if it fits your budget if it fits your needs and you know you could also set this up as a RAID 0 in raid one just to have expanded storage on your own Mini PC who says you have to share it fully optional you can configure it however your your heart desires a few other contributions have come in so let me say thank you to Charles vandola with a two dollar Super Chat and a thank you to Andy Windridge who contributes 11 Euro he says hello Carrie just a small contribution to the channel thank you Andy thank you Charles and Mark Gaines joining us from Northern Ireland with a five pound contribution says good evening Carrie Phoenix was on the news here about the heat also check your email well thank you Mark Slaughter my friend and yeah we'll check the email here and we'll get to unboxing this oh it looks like I missed a couple of things oh it's all advertising I should have never signed up for that Pizza Hut loyalty Club Mark Gaines sends an Amazon gift card for 25 right on thank you Mark and I'll delete that Pizza Hut email um all right well should we get to unboxing should I get camera girl out here and put her to work I said should I get camera girl out here and put her to work you get my my most sincere my most sincere admiration and respect I like your undying devotion is that is that light off did the battery charge okay so you're gonna leave it plugged in yeah okay and we'll go over to what is that called close you ready yeah come on over and here she comes so is the color really better on this camera what are you guys in the chat room thing color difference between that camera and my main camera I've been sort of fixated on that Sony camera I've been looking at it's 2 800 bucks and I'd hate to spend it only to end up with pretty much the same quality should I be bothered or do you guys think I'm wasting money is this image that far superior that I should replace the Canon camera with the Sony everybody say yes you want me to spend money Thomas back in Stow says it looks great new greenia says he loves this camera yeah that's this camera see when I get a different Sony camera I don't know if Sony's color technology it's just it works out very very well for my needs if we were doing this outdoors in the daylight I'm sure any camera would be great Edgar says buy the camera Pete Peter says this is sharper John Williams says the color is great everybody's does anybody not like this camera maybe that's what I should have asked this camera we tried using this as a main camera but it shuts down because it overheats so what I need is a Camcorder for these long live videos and Sony hasn't made a new camcorder in like four years and the one they're selling that I'm interested in is I think a z90v and it's 2 800 on Amazon despite the fact that it's been out four years or longer and I'm hoping it has similar image quality I'm not sure though but at least with Amazon if I don't like it I can send it back so in any event I appreciate the feedback on that subject and still kicking the idea around I don't know why I haven't tried a Sony camcorder before you think this thought would have heard to me years ago before I got the big cannon so the big cannon sits in the other room because it needs it needs some color to fine-tuning and I just every time I start with it I get all excited and I start messing with settings and I end up swinging so far the wrong way I just want to put it back to default and then put it back before I ruin it but uh he says he sees a yellow Hue who's that put a water cooler on the camera says Douglas delman says it's a little sad not to use the other's camera potential yeah I agree I mean the Canon camera should be far superior if I had the time to really configure it Nick poverman suggests the Nikon z30 for live streams but it's it can't be a DSLR these dslrs when shooting will likely overheat so because my live streams go two or three hours we need a camera that can withstand being powered up you know for that period of time without shutting down and overheating also the Sony cameras every time we power them down the vlogging cameras which is what we're using here the lens retracts and closes versus a camcorder you set your focus and you set your your your Framing and regardless if you turn the camcorder on or off that lens never moves position and that's good for continuity so just a few things that people don't think about when you see a lot of YouTube content creators mentioning their favorite vlogging camera they're not making two or three hour long videos so and there's a lot of people that go outdoors and of course these cameras look great outdoors so for my needs they're pretty unique I've not found another YouTube channel that really I'll tell you I made a mistake and I watched the studio scenes of Marquez Brownlee is that his name and Marquez has 10kbhd yeah MKBHD YouTube channel has multiple RED cameras a company called red he's got a hat he's got a robotic camera arm he's got two of them that cost over a quarter million dollars a piece and the cameras he's got he's got multiple radio he must have two or three dozen red cameras and those you have to buy the lenses separately everything's all a card on those all very very expensive so I was drooling watching his setup and I was also very impressed with his knowledge of the camera equipment and lighting as well as uh you know his knowledge on smartphones and Technology he just eats this stuff up and it's very natural for him and he understands the aperture and he understands the all of the ins and outs of uh photography and cinematography which is impressive to me because I that that's a whole different career set it's a whole different skill set and uh anyway it's pretty interesting video got me thinking shouldn't have watched it that's what happened my friend Ron said his dog got a clean bill of hell and he only weighs 125 pounds catching up to me there's more than me Charles thinks this camera's color is good but maybe the camera is a little too bright that the camera is moving around also changes perception oh that's a good point since this is handheld and speaking witch I probably should get some work done before camera girl's arms get tired foreign there oh I don't have to cut the tape I already already cut the tape Chris Smith joins us and says hello welcome in Chris all right well we have the Mini PC we have a little thank you card here no idea what that says oh if you have any questions all right and then they've included this for everybody to enjoy and we've got I guess power supply in the Box it's packaged as such that is a big Mini PC it's a nice little they put it in kind of this fuzzy okay so that's what you get in the box now if we look you'll see it's pretty plain we have a power button right there nothing on the left or the right and come around back and we have already typical what you might expect from any Mini PC ports two USB twos two USB threes display ported HDMI port USB type c and two Lan ports and our power plug Barrel Jack style connector there what does this up here oh that's a speaker output on the bottom bands lots of fan oh this should be interesting to open this up and look at it because there's no seam on this which would imply this would slide out be like a cylinder looking at the top you've got a pull handle we pull that up it's got a couple magnets up here that keep it closed tight and the center part is just a vent on your left and on your right Drive sleds okay which are optional you do not have to use them as I mentioned do not have to use NAS Drives in this because technically it's not a Nas it's actually just a Mini PC with two three and a half inch drive base um I'm gonna guess the screws to open this up or underneath the rubber feet I'm guessing oh that's that's neat here's a really great idea can I just say it looks like this side is glued down and this side is just a plug that you can lift up so you can put the screwdriver in there and access the screws without having to remove the feet see the other side's not coming up I just got lucky that is really a clever idea I appreciate that let's open it up before we turn it on I don't want to get too involved and then have to take it apart so let's take it apart right now and see what it looks like because I am curious and since we've got camera girl close close at hand here we'll put her to work with those close-ups and see how they've designed this I have to imagine it's probably just like any other Mini PC with some kind of cabling connecting it to the two three and a half inch Drive Bays but still curious how they engineered that is there a color selection other than white no it's uh you could have any color you want as long as the color you want is white now what do I do to get it out it doesn't seem to be anything up oh oh hey okay that works nice that looks like a standard 120 millimeter base fan it's drawing air in this side and pushing the air up which is ideal so that it cools those drives off that makes perfect sense I would have done it the same way and you can kind of get a look down in there see how that's put together it looks to me like uh something holding this in or does it just come out I suppose we'd have to take these Drive bays out thing I'm sure but and oh look at here we have four screws up at the top that's very easy to get to one oh those are fast and easy to take out two they're machine screws which I like so you don't worry about stripping them out or tighten them they're more or less impossible to over tighten let's just say if you put that much effort into tightening them you get what you deserve or you're not going to do it accidentally all right three four five and six right there they're all the same so we don't have to worry about putting them back precisely and this is the top piece and we can take a look down in there see how that's built right and then what do you think does it it's got to pull out from the bottom a force anything just a little bit of wiggle and pull just to get it the Iowa where it's such past anything that might be holding us up I think I've got all the sperms out of it pull this apart yeah so if I grab the edges and pull it then that comes out and here is what your PC looks like how is that for different see I'm always trying to bring you guys something different here on the channel that you're not going to see anywhere else or very rarely we're in dual Channel mode there's a ddr4 3200 speed there's our nvme drive and look we have space for another another m.2 drive here whether that's Envy me or SATA I don't know yet there's our Wi-Fi card which is very easily swappable and we can upgrade the RAM we could replace these with 32 gigs each if we wanted to for a total of 64 gigs of RAM now if you look to this side you see this connector if I turn this this way you'll see that is your SATA connector for your three and a half inch drive and there should be a matching one on the other side right there if you're wondering what this black wire would tape on it that is your Wi-Fi antenna and you'll have that black wire in the gray wire for your you always have two antennas right there's the black and gray wires right there with the black wire going towards the center Just for future um reference there's our CMOS battery and this fan only has two wires which suggests to me that it's just always on with no speed control you'd need at least a third wire to have the fan speed up or slow down as needed ink as things have changed we've got our power button right there we can see the top of the heat sink come around this side and we can see our ports and underneath this big heatsink here is our CPU our AMD ryzen 5. overall a pretty simple design it's very clever what do you think of that very very clever right that is unique it's the rotisserie computer all right now let's see if I can put it all back together so the power switch is here pretty simple little power switch you can see that could be easily broken when these uh these parts break and these plastic parts when they age that is a a failure point I would be concerned about but I suppose you could always just take the button off and stick a finger in there if and when that day should ever come on the other hand if you're using it as a Nas you're probably going to power it on and leave it on okay so how did this go back in all right open words are on that side um reaching some resistance here what's that yeah I got to pull apart the other side of it though so maybe if I go like this oh I can see it's the the power switch where they've melted the plastic it's right up against that so that's the part we have to get around and we don't want to damage that so once you're past it it's very smooth the rest of the way yeah and you can see I'm not quite all the way there yet and that's how I can tell as our i o ports are not lining up yet that means still has to go a little bit further there it is it looks like it maybe it's an optical illusion it looks like it's wider on the bottom but it looks like it could could come out from the top put it right it hits that spot it gets a little tough so if you're going to open this dude be patient and be careful with it okay so now I can put the back back on now does it matter if it goes on this way or this way I think it does matter it's got these little pins if you notice the plastic Nubs that are sticking up and they're going to go into these holes right beside where the screws go down and that helps you get it aligned I always appreciate when companies go through the extra effort of doing that curious people go on either way so it doesn't want to sit down this way let's turn it 180 degrees I guess that's where the magnets are attaching to those metal plates can't really tell is it so you have to pull it apart a little bit and then it sits right down in there and if I turn it 180 degrees will it still go in or does it not it goes in either way huh does it matter I think it can go in either way holes line up the pins fit I wasn't paying enough attention I think it's the same either way so the only thing that I'm looking at is I've got a little look here and I've got a little catch down here but it looks like it's pretty Universal because basically the way you put this on will determine the orientation of the of the lid here when we when we put this on so it doesn't really matter if we put it on the other way that we have to Trimble it this way as long as it all sits correctly that's all that should matter so we can now put these six screws back in screw doesn't want to go down there and zero this way so it looks like I don't have it fully I don't have the motherboard fully locked in correctly because it's well no you know what this way it's not quite lining up turn it back the way I had it no that doesn't line up either oh but it does help if I seat it all the way down okay that's going to make a difference now it looks like they're going to reach yeah or not maybe not it's hard for me to remember which way this came out again I don't think it really matters I do feel like something's hanging us up I feel like this site is higher for some reason so I just want to flip it around one last time just to see if it sits down any better because I was just resting it I wasn't pushing it down oh now the holes are lining up perfectly so maybe it does Mark is there an arrow um there are two arrows one points this way on the side closest to you the other one points the other way and those are the release they're putting to the release mechanisms on the drive trays so that doesn't I not so certain it matters which direction this goes in if I'm honest it looks like it'll work either way which is fine by me I don't have to spin these screws for a half an hour Psy just doesn't want to seem to go down foreign if you look very carefully with the camera you can see the little plastic tab it's not seated into the hole so I'm a little curious about that because the hole is underneath it it's just not quite lined up perfectly there it is so apparently that's what I'm hearing clicking are those little plastic tabs and those help keep everything aligned so you're putting in the screws should be effortless if you're struggling with it you're doing it wrong don't use brute force on computer equipment it should all be smooth and cooperative some things like inserting a video card or Ram can require a little more force a little more strength but things like screws I would be respectful of I'm going to put drives in there yeah we should put some drives in it but first I want to turn it on and see what it's like so for now we'll put the drive sleds in there which way does this go does it go this way I think that's the way I can again I can't remember which way these came out either if they went in this way or they went in this way oh I see the arrows align don't they there's an arrow on this and an arrow there and an arrow up here and an arrow up above good to know then this piece here looks like there's we've got a little catch a little hook right there so again whether that's on the right or the left in other words if we had shifted that 180 degrees should not make a difference either way and then we can put the bottom back on and once again does the bottom pair if it's this way or this way or that way I would think it either goes on this way for the aostar logo is exactly the see that there's the glue on the bottom of the foot that's how the foot is designed very clever um or did the aostar face this direction and does it even matter hmm it appears if we look at the bottom of this we've got these two holes on each side of the screws that go on the sides that align with these posts these plastic posts right here and right here so it's really just a question of once again if it goes on 180 degrees different and whether or not that even matters I don't think it matters and this is the kind of stuff you want to pay attention to when you're taking it apart so you don't end up in the position I'm in I'm not exactly sure it looks like looks like it wants to go this way though hard to tell where I'm aligning it it's not seeding properly yeah everything as far as I can tell looks like either way 180 degrees forward or backward seems like it's happy either way so in this case we've got the aostar logo it's kind of on an angle kind of pointing towards the corner so they put the sticker up straight but nobody's going to see it so turn down the OCD for this one artichokie easy to get into overall I'm impressed with the side note it's very logical makes very good use of space without cramping or overcrowding sometimes they put form over function in this case looks like they got a nice balance so We're Off to the Races here okay obviously before we tightened it we did one we should make sure all of our ports lined up they do in this box that was in the box that came in a box that shipped in a box is our power brick I like that the power brick uses a standard PC power cable because I've got a lot of those and that all we get oh we get a little bit more stuff what rolled out of here oh the piece of cardboard that came from that hole we've got our power cable an HDMI cable and screws for installing our drives all right no waste here's our AC adapter shows our model number input voltage it outputs at 19.5 volts with 5.12 amps okay well let's get it hooked up see what it'll do you ready for a break sure okay go ahead and I'm going to step around hook some cables up so power HDMI so many cables that'll go right there and I'm going to leave the internet not plugged in it for our first boot up and setup we need a keyboard and a mouse and I need to power it so I like when they use the standard PC power cables because I have so many of them that design has it plug hasn't changed since I started in this career in 1991. it's the same plug we've been using pretty much since the debut of the IBM personal computer so that's good where it's not good depending on whether or not you're a fan of progress because it hasn't progressed but maybe because we're still using the same voltage source this is our dongle for the Wi-Fi keyboard and mouse which I will plug in and let me get rid of this little plastic bag here and make sure these are turned on so I did that without realizing I did it are you ready to turn this on let's go to HDMI input and I'll put myself in a corner first you'll keep it full screen while you see me hit the power button you'll see that glows blue oh I feel the air coming out of the top of it and now I'm going to put myself in the corner while we wait for it to boot it's perfectly silent I was worried about that fan only having two wires but I hear nothing of course on the other hand my air conditioner is running over time so be something just curious if I could put this on either direction doesn't seem to want to go on that way to go this way let's go through the setup together let me get rid of camera one here for a minute I need to go full screen over here so it was asking Seas I guess I could turn the close-up camera full screen for Carrie so I can see it the way you guys get to see it let's get a better view of the screen than I do okay there's my mouse English yes United States yes US keyboard yes alternative language keyboard no end user license agreement you have no choice you must agree we'll put the username of user and leave the password blank so we get right up to the desktop without any hesitation or delay looking for a password and that way we just bypass that obviously when you set up a share in Windows whether it's any version of Windows you can decide if you want it open or you want it password protected and only those with the password then but access the share versus with the nas you could set up authorized users although I guess you could also set up authorized users with uh Windows sharing settings it's just a completely different process so I guess while that's working I can put camera one back on and let's see what you guys are saying in the chat room Jason Wyrick joins us welcome in Jason Dom long wants to know what shape of Mini PC will they come out with next a ball I'd be afraid someone would kick it talk about rebooting b.h ringer wants to know what's a web developer's favorite tea a camera girl do you know what a web developer's favorite tea is URL Gray Earl Gray see what I did there no of course not Nick Caffrey says hello welcome in uh well I'm watching that I can go ahead and plug the internet in now and we can grab our Windows 11 updates because that's going to take a few minutes so once we get past the setup screen that way we don't have to be forced into creating an online account which you know it's fine if you have one but uh I'm selling computers to customers and I don't want to log into my personal account for obvious reasons very unprofessional to do that so we always create a local account and Microsoft's making that more and more difficult and as you can see the way that uh aostar has configured this we did not have to run the the bypass nro command sometimes we have to do that depending on the installation of how the system integrator has decided to configure the OS all right so uh let me go full screen one more time over here screen or carry and we'll go over to Windows update all right over here and over to the bottom and We're Off to the Races on that and we'll go ahead and turn this on and I also want to adjust the power settings I don't want this thing going to sleep if you have this set up as a file share you definitely do not want the computer to go to sleep when you're not using it or the file share will become unavailable to people but you can have the monitor turn off you know and make sure the computer does not sleep so I would turn this to Never As far as turning off the display that's at your discretion for today I want to set it at three hours so it doesn't turn off on us while we're waiting for things to install okay so while that's downloading and doing its thing oh I guess I can get rid of this stupid icon down here so I'll type in uh search history there we go search permissions in history scroll down where it says more settings when I flip this to off you'll see this down here turns off there it goes just a pet peeve of bite it's like uh it's like a billboard advertising something and it's my desktop not Microsoft's and I'll decide what's on my desktop thank you very much okay so while we're downloading these updates let me go back to the chat room and pick up where I left off Shane Perkins says it reminds me of a 5G home router Greg Adams says I wonder how much airflow is going to happen out the Tau top with all the plastic blocking the airflow um you can definitely feel it it's apparently adequate I think the answer to your question is it's enough it's specifically designed to have two three and a half inch desktop drives in there it wouldn't behoove you to put Western Digital black or high performance drives there because your internet or your network connection I should say is going to be your bottleneck you just be wasting money and those obviously would generate more heat but just the fact that the hard drives themselves aren't going to be too concerned about heat like a solid state drive would be more concerned about that however um it's all been engineered and designed and tested for this functionality so the airflow it has is the airflow the manufacturer has through testing determined is required they don't want to put Overkill in there just adds more cost to the unit is it the air purifier computer it does kind of look like a an air purifier doesn't it we'll have to wait and see if Dyson makes one it's Sarge check says it's listed as a Linux operating system Windows 10 Pro or windows 11. so basically if you wanted to use it as a software router you would use a Linux based operating system such as I mentioned and of course if it if it runs Windows 11 it runs Windows 10 so that kind of goes without say so overall those are the operating systems where you're not going to have any driver issues in other words if you put any of those operating systems on that were just mentioned having drivers for all the devices on the hardware enclosed is not a problem if you put a different operating system on you're on your own as far as finding any drivers or creating them yourself in that regard so I'll pick install all here that get to work oh we can also check for driver updates too go down to Advanced options optional updates because there's only one Windows update three driver updates we'll grab all of them and download and install do it all at once okay so well that is running let me go back over to the chat pick up where I left off here Mike McRae says hello from Aberdeen Scotland where it's a nice and cool 54 degrees Fahrenheit Frankie B says this reminds me of Apple's AirPort Extreme router see that for sure Andy thinks it looks like a copy of an old MacBook Pro or not MacBook but a Mac Pro trash can uh I I can kind of see that it's whisper quiet and if I turn it around this way you know it's not a light show you just have that blue power light other than that that's all there is curious why one side of this sticks up higher than me or is it maybe it's not that that really matters it has no function no bearing on functionality machine yeah there's a there's a little tab here and a little hook on this side so that's clearly this yellow handle is going to go towards the front of the machine unless of course and screw this and turn it 180 degrees so it looks like it works either direction so I like that it's easy going Gary says it seems kind of limited as a router with only two ports well it's uh not going to have a built-in switch right that's a lot of times when you think of a router you're thinking of a consumer-based router most Enterprise routers are just going to be one in one out and then you run that through a network switch so even if it had ports on the back for you know essentially a built-in switch there's never enough and you know we're trying to keep the things small most people aren't going to use it as a router anyway and most people already have a router so anybody that would use a soft router generally speaking are going to buy a network Appliance those Network appliances usually and quite typically only have two Network ports on them again the few reports they put on them the smaller and less expensive they can be there are devices that have more than two ports on them for Network appliances however this is a very common configuration for a software router so they don't know how many ports you're going to need and more than likely no matter how many they give you it's not going to be enough you're buying a switch one way or the other if you wanted for example Wi-Fi you'd have to add an access point it's not going to work with Wi-Fi as a router just so you know Mr iot Tech said this could be perfect to put proxmox ve on it sure yeah if you want to do home automation things like that and you're familiar with proxbox I've never used it myself but uh I know enough about it to to know that I'm not missing out on anything that I'm trying to accomplish here but uh plenty of YouTube videos and other sources of information using Google on proxmox if you want to learn more about it Dan Nilsson says he loves it no RGB don't worry you can always add RGB to it you could just buy some fairy lights and run them around like a Christmas tree if you want you know a waste of money Peter says you could drill holes on the side for airflow well then you'd be second guessing the engineers who designed it and that's probably not going to work out well for you in fact you'd probably impede the airflow if you were to do that there's a reason why the holes are existing only at the top and that's to ensure that the airflow moves only in One Direction that it's going to pull the air in from outside from the bottom push it up through the PC around all the components CPU Cooler and if you put drives in there it'll go around those drives below those drives run that cool air by them and then out the top any air escaping from the sides will be lost cooling for anything above that so I would I would not second guess the thermal design by the manufacturer now if you are having heat related issues I would advise you to come on in here in the chat and talk to us about it I'm sure we can find a better solution than a caveman hitting it with a with a drill that's just ridiculous now I'm going to grab another cold Gatorade this one's gotten warm on me if you guys have any questions this is a good time to ask while we're waiting for these updates to download and install and hopefully this won't take too long and then I've got a couple of desktop hard drives I'm going to put in there we'll format them we'll also take a look at the BIOS and see if we can configure raid in the Bios because if we can't that's going to be a showstopper for me Nick C says hello chat from California hey welcome in Nick Cheryl Cockerham says I wonder if they installed software like Drive Bender I don't think they're including any software whatsoever you're just getting an operating system and then you would configure the rate array ideally through the BIOS as you would any normal you know the systems that I build always have them well not always but they quite frequently have a raid option in the Bios I'm anticipating that's what this will have but we'll cross that bridge here in a moment that'll be coming up oh thank the folks at aostar for sending the unit to us for review they are not paying for this video and I did not buy this computer sent solely for the purpose of reviewing it no money has exchanged hands no contracts have been signed I am not obligated in any way to say anything or to avoid saying anything there's no publication due date and they do not know what I'm going to say because this is alive and it's unscripted quite frankly I did not try this out I wanted to keep everything authentic raw and genuine here on the live video so you get my real reaction and any misunderstandings that that I might have when I'm reviewing something at this point being in business professionally over 30 years if I'm not understanding it then it's badly designed so so far We're Off to the Races everything's very obvious and very logical from my perspective as a technician and I'm fully expecting there to be some raid options in the Bios is this PC going to change your gateway address if you were to use this as a router then you would need to replace windows 11 or you'd have to boot to like a flash drive or another you know like let's say we put another m.2 in there we can change which drive we want to boot from but we cannot simultaneously have Windows 11 and also use it as a software router at the same time that I'm aware of um the only time it would change your gateway would be if it's if you're changing your modem your modem is your gateway and regardless of how many routers or what routers you use they will always be using your modem to communicate out to the internet hence the term Gateway so the answer is no it does not change your gateway regardless yeah malinski says do your UPS drivers have air conditioning in their delivery trucks no they do not I am not aware of any delivery service that has air conditioning in their trucks except for DHL where they drive the minivans the delivery vehicles themselves generally do not have AC so it depends on the vehicle when you see those big trucks from Amazon they usually don't have AC they might have a fan but Amazon's been testing out some delivery trucks made by rivien we've got quite a few of those and I think those have air conditioning I know the back of the truck is the worst part to be in but UPS trucks and you United States postal service trucks and as far as I know the FedEx trucks unless again they're the little minivans or cargo vans those would be the exception but the big UPS trucks the big brown trucks no no AC you'll notice because they leave the doors open if you see the driver closing the door when they get in it's probably because they have AC at least in the July weather here in the states anyway Patrick said what is the plan for this Mini PC Nas after the review I like how you think I have a plan I I don't have a plan yet kind of making it up as I go along and uh no idea why do you ask Douglas says USPS are supposed to be getting AC soon uh it's my understanding that the only time a delivery driver for UPS or USPS gets AC is when their vehicle gets replaced those Vehicles may not be replaced for many many years so it's not like overnight you know everybody gets a vehicle with AC in it as the vehicles retire their end of service then the vehicle that gets replaced with should have AC in it and so slowly over the course of the next couple of years will the entire fleet have AC that's the way I understand it any so one thing that concerns me about anybody that orders medications via the mail and I don't know why this has not been brought up to Congress or I mean it seems to me they always tell you to store your medications in a cool dry place and when these trucks are not air-conditioned in the warehouses may not be air-conditioned in the back Ralph product is or you know the shipments are I wonder how it affects the potency or the efficacy of the medication under the heat especially if it's been in the mail delivery driver's vehicle all day and you're one of the last stops unless your mail arrives very early in the morning quite often I get packages the packages are very hot on the outside and even hotter than what's packaged inside so yeah I would not personally order my medications over the mail in the summer time for that very reason and I'm surprised they're allowed to Douglas Burchell says insulin has to be kept refrigerated Gil Garcia says he gets his medications delivered through the mail it doesn't affect the potency of the medication I'm not quite sure you can tell me that guilt unless you can scientifically show me the potency of medication what you're telling me is you're getting enough medicine that's working that it's not negatively impacting you that doesn't mean that the medication is not working to its full ability it's just you're reaching a point where you're like you can feel the medicine kicking in but I'd love to see the science on it and of course some medications are more what's the word some medications are more sensitive to heat than others so it's not like just because you have medication that's not affected by it that doesn't apply to all medicine Mark Jones wants to know since when then the government care about People's Health here in the US yeah I see what you're saying Patrick said it'd be a nice birthday gift to myself in a couple of weeks well happy birthday to you Patrick and I hope you enjoy the free PC that you were sent from the channel very few people got one of those and of course we want to make sure everybody has an opportunity to receive a PC from the channel here in the USA before we have members receiving two or three I don't want to show any favoritism that way but the good news is these are very inexpensive there's a coupon code at Amazon and it certainly would be something that's very very affordable especially even if you just use it as a Mini PC and you don't even use the two drives as a network attached storage they are um um they're available if you want to upgrade to it you know you can put a couple drives in it maybe you have some drives laying around Patrick wants to buy it from me oh I don't I don't sell the units that I get for free I I have a problem with that ethically so I would suggest if you want to if you want one order it from Amazon then you have first of all faster shipping and the shipping's free cost me probably fifty dollars to mail this secondly you have the ability to return it if for any reason you don't like it Amazon has that 30-day return window where it costs you nothing to return it so uh well I appreciate the thought but no I'm I'm not looking to I won't be selling any of the of the units that are sent to me for free now if I bought a unit for review and I don't want it anymore I would sell it but um one of the problems that I can run into is if you have a problem with a unit that you bought for me that was sent to me for free you might find out when you contact the company for warranty that they have no record of this unit being sold you have no way to they're going to say we don't we don't know what this is it's our product but there's where's your sales receipt and so I they likely wouldn't support any warranty because it's a review unit and was never intended to be sold to an end user so you know if you never have any warranty issues but you do need to keep that in mind as well the folks over at beeling sent me an email recently that they've redesigned the bottom plate on the gtr7 with more vents and it helps the cooling and they said we wanted you to know we'll send you a new plate it's a great send it to me and they said okay what's your serial number and what color is your unit I send them the serial number and I told them it's green and they said okay can you take a picture of the barcode for us okay so I take a picture of the bottom of the unit so they can read the barcode and send it okay now what color is the unit well I already told him it was green and then when you look at the picture you can see in the picture that it's green and they said do you have a receipt for this we need a receipt I said no I don't have a receipt because I'm a YouTube reviewer and the content um the unit was sent to me for review that's why there's no purchase receipt okay no problem we'll get it we'll get it out to you and apparently they've got a new bottom plate for the GTR six as well I'm not aware of any overheating issues I don't know why they did this the gtr7 still has the video issue that as far as I know hasn't been resolved so it seems like they're fixing a problem that I'm not having and ignoring a problem I am having what are you gonna do but again the unit was sent for review so I don't really have any place to complain if they want to send the bottom that's fine keeping in mind that the bottom contains your serial number and all your information on your units so I don't know if they include a sticker or they place the stick around but you can't peel that sticker off the unit you've got now put it on the new bottom so I'm wondering if that's why they wanted a photo of it so they can reprint the stickers so it matches and you don't have to send the old bottom back you can just toss it in the trash and I thought that'll make a good follow-up review to see if this makes any difference and uh they're supposed to be sending that to me I should probably go ahead and order one for the GTR six as well just because there must be a reason for it it's costing him money to send these out for free Dom long said if medications need to stay cold they should be mailed in or packed with dry ice that's all well and good except uh depending on how long it's been in the truck it's about 50 50 for me when I get packages packed in dry ice or in ice packs that it's all melted by the time I get it so we never know how long it's staying in the truck and how hot it is in that truck and how far it's shipping from so I do not order any like meat sticks things I like to munch on in the summertime through the mail like from Vienna Beef in Chicago I'll save that for later in the fall through the spring so this time of year I just won't order food related products generally speaking and even things like shampoos and things of that nature vitamins they can be physically hot to the touch by the time um bring them in and that's the other problem if the mailman's putting your mail in a mailbox that's here in Arizona upwards of 200 degrees inside that mailbox and you're at work all day well that's just baking for hours and hours until you get the mail it just continues to potentially damage the item that's in the mailbox likewise if they put a package at the front door at least the front door is shaded so that does get some heat relief since uh the sun doesn't set where the front door is the sun rises where the front door is and so by the time the mail delivery comes the sun's either already straight up or on its way down of course the sun doesn't go down here now until after eight o'clock at night I think it's dusk around I don't know a few few minutes before eight o'clock in the evening so it's a little weird to wake up and it's already 105 degrees outside crazy where's Garrett said the dry ice would melt it does evaporate quite rapidly the hotter it's like anything cold the the hotter you keep the environment the faster that dry ice will evaporate all right looks like we're doing another reboot here John Williams said I'm heading out for dinner my wife said she's buying dinner for my birthday which is tomorrow have a good night and a nice weekend happy birthday John Williams I hope everybody else's happy birthday to John Williams hope you have a wonderful dinner Sarge text said the dry ice would gas out yeah I guess that would be a proper term wouldn't it sometimes I gas out but that's not temperature related Mark Jones says he has the Asus Mini PC and it's great yeah Asus is generally known for making very good quality products we reviewed the Asus pl63 and ended up giving that unit to um Bill Wiggins and uh I think it's keeping him busy it was a nice upgrade for him and should keep him busy and keep him current for at least the next eight years it was decked out very very well he paid for the upgrades to 64 gigs of RAM and two terabyte Samsung 970 Evo speaking of which that's back on sale again today over at Amazon there's a couple of things I wanted to draw your attention to at Amazon one is the Western Digital four terabyte sn850x is a 269 dollars today wait a minute is that right did I say that right 269 seems like a really good price let's go over to Amazon here let's look together um I'll start Windows update again and then I'll go to Amazon one thing at a time right sure thing at a time um a little screen for me so I can see the desktop the way you guys at home get to see it you'd think I'd have the best picture of anybody right quite the opposite all right we're going to check for updates here and then while it's loading and we go over to Amazon and I'll type in uh or terabyte sn850x now when these Western Digital drives are at 299 or below I think it's a really good deal so the fact that the SSD prices are still coming down happy about that check this out 269 that reads up to 7 300 megabytes per second as a Gen 4 nbme Drive made by Western Digital fantastic the Samsung 970 Evo two terabyte plus Drive check this out is now 96. and 36 Cents so it's about three dollars and change less than the cheapest price I've seen it at without any coupon code or anything that's just the everyday price free shipping is included and that blew me away even 64 gigs of that memory I like to use on these mini PCS check this out 64. if I can type 64 gigs of sodim edr4 look at this it's two sticks 32 gigs each or ninety four dollars just a penny shy of ninety four dollars they've been around 97.98 so that look when you're buying six or eight of these kits at a time it's Darner getting ready to get me one for free that's 3200 speed and I haven't had any of these go bad yet I've been very very happy with products from Team group including their solid state drives and of course the team group um let's look at four terabyte nvme Beijing has their unit here for 220 which reads very similarly up to 7 300 like the Western Digital silicon Powers got a four terabyte for 159. but look at the read speeds they're not very good for Gen 4. and we should see one in here from Team here's one from Levin this will be a very slow drive 145 dollars for four terabytes are you kidding me you see what the read speeds are on it up to three thousand oh that's very very slow at least in Kerry's world it is silicon Powers got a unit with a heatsink on it for 204 that's four terabytes and the team group four terabyte drive the one you see me use a lot of 185.99 I have seen this down to I think Newegg had it on sale for 160. I love how affordable this is becoming ad link was also a very good drive that I tested but again you're at 5000 megabytes per second which is a good 50 percent slower than what a gen Ford well if this is doing 5000 and we can do 7 300. and seven uh the difference 2300 is almost half of five thousand that's why I'm saying it's almost half of the performance so you are getting a bit what you pay for nettech well that's two terabytes and I've never heard of the company I can't speak for the HP nvme drives have been good drives but again they're not Rockets I mean this one says up to 7 400 megabytes per second so maybe it is a rocket maybe I've misspoken but 250 dollars but you're right into that Western Digital price range and this Western Digital black is the same as the other unit only it has a heatsink and it's specifically designed to work in PS5 the Seagate fire Cuda is still more expensive than everybody else I don't know why I don't think it's that good so there's some really good prices that are continuing long after Prime day with regards to RAM and with regards to storage in fact the ram I'm buying I usually get a kit of a 32 gig of ddr4 if I spell it correctly and what you'll see me use a lot are the team group but let me ask you a question would you rather pay 49 or two sticks of 16 or would you rather pay 105 or two sticks of 32. so I will usually go with 32 gig most of the time on desktop memory look even silicon power is beating that price they also make some really good memory this is all 3200 speed Ram it's good Ram under 50 bucks for 32 gigs that's 2 6 of 16 gigs each ddr4 3200 speed this is usually what I buy when you see me building the computers here this is the ram you see me using I was paying a little under 60 dollars for it now it's down to just a penny under 55 dollars and it's got the heat shields built into it and that's my go-to Ram of choice personally so I just want to put that out there and there's links well there aren't links for these products however if you use any of my Amazon hold on let me turn my HDMI if you use any of my Amazon links in my video notes and search for the product within Amazon I get credit for the sale I make it you know on a product that cheap Maybe 40 cents in commission maybe maybe 50 cents and if that confuses you and you want to make a purchase from Amazon you can email me and ask you ask me to create a shortcut link for you if you want to make sure I get the commission from the sale but um individually each individual purchase generally speaking doesn't pay me much but add it all together well they can add up to sometimes be more than what I make from YouTube and the more YouTube is to is lowering um the price they're paying Amazon it gets more and more popular and it's starting to flip-flop the other way where Amazon is paying me better than YouTube and Amazon doesn't require any effort on my part I don't do all this for Amazon so hmm working smarter or working harder I don't not exactly sure let me go over to my full screen here and see what's going on downloading five percent okay is that taking so long it's a big cumulative update what I've seen these updates do is it'll jump from five percent to like a hundred percent for some reason um I've seen this where it's it's not updating properly so we'll let that sit and continue and then I will do what I can to answer your questions well we wait for this update to finish and then I'll throw some drives in it we'll go in the Bios and see if we can figure that as a raid one array which is what I would recommend Jason weirich said I always use your link except for one cheap item the other day I appreciate it Jason just so just so we're clear I have no idea who's making purchases when I look at my earnings on Amazon it shows me what was sold what day and what time and for how much and based on that how much commission they owe me for that sale I don't see who bought it or where it's going I don't know if it's a neighbor or somebody in Hawaii I have no idea I think my Amazon links will work universally worldwide now you don't know if you're watching in another country you can try it then send me an email let me know what you bought and I can look on my earnings list see if I find it but keep in mind the earnings list is updated once a day so everything I see today is what happened from yesterday and up to 30 days before so if you make a purchase of something and you want to see if I got the commission and you're outside of the United States um you can drop me an email if you're curious and let me know if I see whatever the product is on the day you purchased it I can confirm whether or not that's working I think I've set it up I'm just not sure yet Edgar says I never got your email um email about what Tom long said if I were you I wouldn't tell Amazon or they might cut back on how much they pay you well how much they pay me is based on how much I've sold right so it's not that Amazon would be cutting back it's that I've sold more product or people have purchased you know tens of thousands of dollars worth of product each month and if that becomes hundreds of thousands of dollars and of course the commission is and Master it with how much was sold I mean Amazon can almost not pay me less at this point if I'm only making one or two percent they'd have to make it into a fraction of a percent so yeah best we not talk about it or give them any ideas otherwise what's the point 4.99 from John sciencerock says he's really enjoying the discussions today right on thank you Edgar says address I I don't know if you're speaking in code but I have no idea what you're talking about so if you can tell me what the subject matter is about and what you were emailing me for and what you're expecting from me I'm confused are you saying you're you sent me your address I don't think people understand the sheer number of conversations I have with people through Facebook messaging and Twitter and email and there's three different email accounts Plus what's going on with my customers what's going on with potential sponsorship offers so that when you say how was that thing that I sent you the other day I have no clue what you're talking about you have to be very specific how was the name item that I sent to you or we discussed on Tuesday the 13th or whatever it is you know so I have some point of reference or I can go back and look through the email and figure out what this is all about it can help me to help you by just being clear and if you're referring to anything you can't hint at it it's not gonna way out well for us David Martinez says Carrie I do the same thing I buy something on Amazon I use your link well thank you David I do appreciate it as I mentioned it's an anonymous way to support the channel so I have no idea who's using it unless you tell me and I do appreciate when you use it it doesn't cost you any differently it's just that a small Commission of the total sale is kicked back to me once every 30 days and then Amazon holds it for 30 days since people have a 30-day return window they don't want to pay me a commission on an item that ends up getting returned so if you buy something today I'll receive a commission on it in about 60 days whenever that once a month occurs you know Edgar says your email address so I ask price for something like you're asking for my email address you didn't get an email from me sorry I no idea what you're talking about Chris Smith says I used your Malwarebytes premium link and used it for two devices did you save money and if so how much because I'm not exactly sure what the discount is I've gone through a Commission Junction for the acronis discount in Malwarebytes discount and it's not very clear to me what the discount is or is there a discount I'm not they're showing me what a commission on the sale is but I don't see how much the sale is isn't that bizarre this is why I've avoided Commission Junction in the past if there's a piece of software you think I should be getting a discount on for viewers let me know and I'll look and see if it's on Commission Junction and I can apply for it Douglas Michelle contributes two dollars he says it's a great show and great family here I love the content well we love having you Douglas thanks for joining us and being a part of this community Michael Lovell says hello Carrie and chat from Happy Valley Oregon thanks for joining us Michael glad to have you here Jim kj3n says speaking of email check yours okay Jim David Isis says say 15 I know that's what it says curious is that what you're getting until somebody actually uses it I just don't know what the reality is so I'm curious why did my screen go oh it's okay um email Nick Caffrey sends 14.94 cents via Paypal it says great content clearly communicated by a man who cares about what he does rare I suppose it is these days oh Jim okay yeah I was gonna get back to you about the uh Jim's got a YouTube channel and he's doing a great job with it and you know we reviewed that Ace magic laptop and I thought maybe Jim might want to review it and then he emailed me and then I got pulled off in seven different directions at the same time as usual sometimes it helps Jim if he just if you don't get a response in two or three days just kick another email to me that says reminder telling me during a live show is pointless because by the time I end this live show and the number of questions I'm going to get between now and the end of the show and the number of things I'm going to talk about is going to push your thought that you just reminded me about all the way to the back and then once I've closed down the show then I have to shut down the equipment but the batteries on the charger there's this whole process I have to go through so that we're ready for the next show or that the equipment's going to be ready so the best way would be you know if you don't hear from me in two or three days just send an email it just says hey just a gentle reminder you know and uh that'll probably be the best way it's been an exceptionally busy week I don't think there's anything I could have done anyway this last week it's been crazy that's if you notice there was no show on Tuesday or Wednesday and that's because I didn't have time and you know if I am missing out on doing a show during the week something must be going on that's important so um but yeah we definitely will need to discuss that because I'd love to see your review on it David ice says he got malwarebytes for 38.24 and it says 44.99 without the discount so let's see 4.49 would be 10 percent so 15 percent would be another third of that it's gonna be about seven dollars and fifty cents that's 15 okay so it's 15 off very good thank you for letting me know Alan Linda says I purchased that a couple of days ago right on well I appreciate you Alan and it looks like Windows updates are still happening here spikeman wants to know should I invest in ddr4 2933 RAM for my current desktop or wait until I do a platform upgrade and make sure to get ddr4 3200 or ddr5 I don't know it's like asking me if you should get desserts and and if so should it be the ice cream or the cheesecake these are questions you have to answer on your own nobody can answer these questions for you you're going to have to make that decision for what best fits your particular wants needs desires and budget of which only you know the answers to it Mark Jones contributes two pounds he says this is a little something in appreciation of your wisdom somebody thinks I'm smart idea I'll tell you how dare you thank you Mark cheers mate it has rebooted oh no no it hasn't I'm looking at an old feed I see I my YouTube studio for some reason has been lagging and so when I'm paying attention to the chat room I'm seeing the YouTube Studio feed which showed the computer rebooting but that was like 20 minutes ago looking at the actual feed it does appear that the unit is stuck so maybe we'll just do a uh unexpected reboot start shut down and restart no idea what that was all about thank you for bringing that to my attention I didn't realize I was watching a delayed feed Mark Jones says I sent you a little something Carrie is that any email I'm guessing I guess I can check my email while I'm waiting for these updates to install um not being an email at this point yet Jim kj3n said at this point I'd plan on ddr5 but that's me so the problem with planning on ddr5 of course is that the prices are likely if they continue moving in the direction they're moving if you're buying something you don't need today you're going to pay more for it than buying waiting until you buy it to when you need it so if you wait until you need ddr5 likely it will be you will pay less for it than you would pay today of course the market can go either way but if Trends continue and every indication suggests they will continue at least through the end of the year and I could be wrong you could spend more money than you need to trying to be prepared whenever you wait until you actually need it you could save some money not to mention any issues with warranty you know your warranty starts the day you buy it so I wouldn't buy something and hold on to it until you know so I was prepared for the future you'll spend more for it and your warranty starts to tick so two reasons not to do that James Prezi with a 20 Super Chat thank you James says I tried to clone my HX 90. Mini PC Drive to a new Samsung 980 Pro using the Samsung data migration software and it failed twice I'm going to use your discount in acronis to clone the drive so I can continue setting up my Mini PC that's interesting I wonder why it failed Douglas says funny camera woman hilarious I am hilarious someday you'll figure that out you're a pretty smart fella you'll have to let me know that works out James I it never amazes me that people will not follow my steps right I do all these detailed videos step by step here's how you do this and they say hey I just tried cleaning my drive and it didn't work then you find out well you didn't clone it the way I showed you but you thought you were going to get the same results now I'm all for people experimenting and trying it out on your own and you know look when it does work I don't hear about it right typically I only hear about things when they don't work but I've never shown how to clone a drive with Samsung magician I've never made that video and when I do it because I'm paid and I'm in business I need to use a paid piece of software that has support so I can get the job done not being held accountable by the customer so the great thing about acronis though is it's more than just a cloning tool it's a great Backup Tool you can set it to automatically update your backup on a schedule whatever suits your needs you can make those backups external you can put it up in the cloud and you always have a cloning tool available to you usually people when they do a clone they think you know I won't need to do this again for a long time and then some friend or some situation arises that they never anticipated and oh they're doing another clone again and acronis is one of those pieces of software that can come in handy more often when you have it I used to talk about I would go to clients especially in Sun City in the retirement communities and they'd still be using like Net Zero or Juno dial-up I'm like this is still in business you're still using dial-up well I don't use the internet for much so I don't want to pay for Broadband or I go well the reason I suspect you don't use the internet that much is because you have dial-up it's like going over to somebody's place and they don't have a car say how come you don't own a car well I don't really go anywhere well neither would I if I didn't own a car it's sort of like manifesting your own destiny I've I don't go anywhere therefore I don't have a car equates to I don't go anywhere because I don't have a car if you had a car you'd probably go more places more often and much the same way these people that were justifying keeping their free dial up from Juno say I don't use the internet for much why would you it's discouraging and painful can you imagine trying to watch a YouTube video on dial-up good luck so with a tool like a Cronus it comes in handy in so many different ways that you might say well I don't really think I need it I just want to buy you know just want to use it for one clone and I don't want to use it ever again but when you have it you might realize just how much more you could use it now that it's an option for you so something to think about anyway Andy keynes's dial-up makes me feel old yeah and it should uh let's see Ben layer joining us from Scotland with a two pound Super Chat contribution right on thank you Ben Austin says do they still offer dial-up well it's been a couple of years since I've been on location at a customer or like you know residential location since the pandemic but you know as of about three or four years ago that was still people using it I was surprised so I imagine I'll just try it let me know how that works for you I wonder where I can find a modem I can dial up modem cyber Trails yes a local ISP here you were originally hired by the power company to support their their ISP their dial up ISP whatever happened to cyber trails sold off to who uh as of today it's still around yeah what purpose does it serve it's not dial up anymore is it yeah interesting oh I think they serve areas that are mostly underserved by Broadband is it rural areas yeah they were using like microwave dishes for a while as I recall okay we're gonna try this update again see if we have better luck this this and Tim teal says hello welcome in Tim what sort of speed would you get with dial-up well I'd say uh 28.8 33.6 but the FCC never allowed a 56k connection over the phone so 53k and that's only receiving upload was still limited to 28.8 I think so the whole 56k was actually a lie you can Wikipedia that if you want to learn more about the details now you're making me feel old bikeman said his first internet provider was AOL oh I got you B yeah I used for many many copy sir that was and then of course there was Prodigy oh yes that's right um trying to think who the other one was announced there's one we're forgetting we're seriously dating ourselves sounds like a nice date I wonder why we're having issues with this particular update so zero percent I'll tell you what I'm not gonna worry too much about this update I don't know what's going on if it's Microsoft servers or what's happening there but let's just move on we can let that update in the background anyway let's go ahead and shut this down it's Windows 11 Carrie get my bearing straight and then we'll go back full screen on camera one and I think I think camera girl needs to be put back to work I'm here you know what I'm gonna have to shut the computer off to do this aren't I yeah I did shut it off I'm looking in the Network lights on the back blink because of uh the potential for Wake on land settings and it led me to think I left the machine so with the machine powered off the lid here oh now you're gonna boss me around yeah okay all right we'll go over to close up camera come on over now I have been collecting three and a half inch mechanical drives swear I get about 30 or 40 of them and I sell them for like 10 bucks a piece to get rid of them to somebody local and then I end up building another stack so I think I'm getting close to well well over 20 probably well on my way to 30. so EarthLink there yet okay courteous technology contributes two dollars that he mentions EarthLink Ah that's great so anyway these came out of something I think these came out of a Nas at some point when I wasn't using NAS Drives back in the day and these Drive caddies these little pins that go into the side of the drive and bend this back there we go okay so that's our one drive done these are the Seagate one terabytes desktop drives what's the build date on there oh it's got a date code I'm sure somebody can translate that these are old okay so this one is going to go in this way and all the way foreign you don't want this to cover up your static connector I think that should be obvious right so it's important we get the direction correct or it may have an impact on the performance of your raid okay let's go here and let's go here and this one I've got to look to see what the connector is it's going to go in just the way I've got it down seated and that's it I guess this piece can go back on and now we get to configure it cool all right so I'm going to turn this back on we're going to go back over to our HDMI input and camera girl you can take a break thank you welcome when this fire is up I'm going to hit delete delete delete delete delete on the keyboard over and over and over again and hopefully that's going to get us into the BIOS it did and I can't read it because it's too small so I'm going to go full screen right click full screen projection there we are okay I hope in here well these are two and a half gig each these land connections that's good to know it's information on our internal nvme drive on this Mini PC uh security boot hmm onboard pcie okay that's not what I'm looking for monitor don't care about CPU config I don't care about where is our Santa Drive settings hard drive configuration okay we had two matching drives that's just for security where is the configuration this isn't good we did this so they sold us a device to use for Nas look at fun one fun two and fun three it stands for okay seems to be for storage but uh I can disable the um the boot ROM for the Lan I never boot from the land Ram configuration Graphics configuration SATA configuration set a controller auto shutdown Ras support okay well we can enable or disable the set of ports I guess for security reasons SATA controller does not show rateability hmm well that doesn't seem ideal tell me this is a Nas device and not give us a RAID controller you know I'm thinking when I get really quiet there's a lot going on in my head when I get quiet yeah that's me thinking I see nothing so I guess it I would have put it here huh just check it I wouldn't have put it in there but you never know I want to be thorough of course it says TPM on it so we're Windows 11 compliant it's where it should be where was this under fch common options oh yeah duh whatever that means SATA configuration option nothing for raid hmm oh are you art yeah you want a Serial port x g b e whatever that is enable or just oh that's the ethernet controller okay okay well it looks like we're gonna have to do a software raid that's going to be my guess if he says maybe raid software that you can config during the installation of Nas software well it's not promoted that way it's promoted as basically file sharing in Windows but yes if you wanted to put on free Nas or you know have the unit operate strictly as a Nas that's clearly an option a concept of the way that it's promoted is that you can use this as your desktop Mini PC well at the same time running a network attached storage across your network so it can do two jobs at the same time to dedicate this much power and memory strictly for Nas only is way Overkill so there's probably a way I think I've ever done it this way before but if we um go back over to the HDMI input full screen how would we do this um check start with data continue check select pressing let's just cheat a little bit here and we'll say set up grade in Windows 7. go into Disk Management and create a vhd ah virtual hard drive okay okay let's give it a shot go to Disk Management those drives are wiped out completely wiped out actions shaded to select something first create a virtual hard disk Nation so maybe I have to format the drives first I have never set up a raid this way I would use a proper RAID controller or Raid configuration in the bios so this is obviously going to be a software array browse virtual disk files oh so it wants to create a file it's a very different way to do this okay well that wasn't really what I had in mind hmm so I guess we can create a virtual hard drive on each drive and then attach them together to appear as one that's really clunky huh well the bottom line is as we can see from the screenshot here that we have essentially put in two hard drives like you would in any other desktop computer they would require partitioning and formatting you'd have Drive D and drive e what I was trying to do is to match these two drives they would be seen as one and doing it the other way I've never done that before I don't really like the whole concept of it and I'm a little disappointed that we don't have the RAID controller in the Bios if you're going to advertise the device as being a Nas at the very least you need to do is have a RAID controller in you know in the hardware somewhere in the Bios that I can enable that raid and pick which drives I'm going to have in the array and what kind of an array I want in this case because there's only two drives we just need a RAID 0 option and a raid one option overall it's a pretty simple request and this drive or this Mini PC fall short on that what I could do obviously is I could just format one of the drives and then share it over the network and then just schedule a task to you know at a certain time every day or Whatever frequency I want synchronize the files from the OneDrive to the other drive and keep the other drive off the network so basically I've created a a raid one except a raid one it's always updating instantly every time A Change Is Made versus waiting to the end of the day because then you have a potential but crashes at the end of the day the drive fails and your last synchronization was last night and you've lost whatever you've created for the day so that's not an ideal solution for me Terrell mentions Windows storage pools once again I've read about Windows storage pools I've never used them I'm not a fan of that type of configuration but Gary Tatum said he was reading on the Aerostar store online and it says you have to install Nas software to take advantage of it well I mean you don't have to but if you want a more traditional Nas with nas features then you'd want free Nas or you said some Linux based bootable media to boot to and you have to do the same thing as we already talked about with the router in the meantime as far as being able to share over the windows Network this is almost perfect if they just allowed for a raid configuration in the Bios which many PCs do it's not uncommon these days and I am shocked and disappointed that that item does not exist telling me that this is a Nas and then not selling it as a Nas that I have to go and do something from another manufacturer for this to function as it's advertised is disappointing I feel it's a little misleading in the advertising if I'm honest it's such a simple fix it's such an easy thing to have put a motherboard in here that has that raid capability in the Bios I don't understand why they did this it's sort of like they went halfway and said you do the rest as a Mini PC it seems well outfitted with regards to processor and upgrade ability we obviously have the ability to upgrade the RAM the Wi-Fi card and the storage very easily and that second m.2 Port is also nice to see I guess we can run Crystal disk mark on it and see what kind of performance we're getting so uh let's do that while I'm thinking about it go over here to HDMI input effect screen let's close this window and bring up the utilities flash drive now with regards to having a Mini PC that has room for two internal three and a half inch drives forget the nas like that would be more honest marketing and I can certainly see it appeal to that for some users people that you know want to have a 20 terabyte drive that you couldn't have on an SSD for example and it would be much more affordable okay what was I doing I'm gonna go here over to utilities we'll grab carries 10 optimizer and we'll throw VLC on here like let's do oops that out PC testing software still this Mark it's a very responsive little mini PC so I got no complaints with its function as a Mini PC but I do take issue with calling this a Nas when it's if you want to do that you could make any computer and as I mean you could say that about any Mini PC if you want to attach external storage and then load up Nas software for it so it just seems like it's a bit of a stretch here in the marketing feels just a little bit misleading so what kind of numbers we're going to get out of this internal storage here this is Gen 3 Gen 4 I don't know David Dix at Rock City PC says if you right click on the drive within Disk Management you can create a stripe It'll ask you what other drive you want to use you can select it to make a raid zero yeah but I don't want to rate zero I want to raid one grade zero seems pointless unless I was trying to add faster mechanical storage to my Mini PC for me to use and only me to use I want to share it over the network RAID 0 does us no benefit except for expanding our capacity but then it means we also have no backup so I would want to raid one but it certainly explains the price this is a very inexpensive mini PC even if you took the nas part out of it Sarge text says instead of a Nas it's a note well it's not a nope in the sense of of whether or not it's useful or well built or adequately equipped it's really about how they're marketing it I'm taking issue with the marketing so at 2000 maximum read speed that's a pretty darn slow Envy me drive that's about the speed of a budget gen 3 nvme Drive which again does explain the low price point the unit comes in at search detected this machine came out in April of this year yeah so I guess it depends what you're looking for on a device if you wanted to turn this into a Nas and you wanted to download something like free Nas and you know boot off of freenas and make this a standalone Nas unit it's fully designed for that same is true with a software router if you wanted to turn this into a soft router you could download like pfSense and use this as your software router but these all require some pretty significant technical ability and as a hobby box if you're someone who likes to Tinker um might be a fun little project but for business use or for everyday use really no benefit outside of a normal Mini PC other than the fact that you can add up to two three and a half inch drives which you might personally find useful if you're like me and you've got mechanical drives laying around and you can't afford a solid state drive or you need a solid state drive of a larger capacity than is currently available then obviously going to a mechanical Drive is much more affordable might even be something you already have and obviously your input and output on the data are going to be much slower than a solid state drive but also much much cheaper so it is a bit of a sacrifice but one that you wouldn't have on a normal Mini PC literally any other Mini PC that I'm aware of except if you go with an external USB storage Drive which of course is going to make it even slower potentially no maybe not I suppose USB 3 is going to handle the maximum read and write speed of a mechanical Drive regardless so I don't think there'd be a performance degradation but it would take up more desk space Mr lot Tech says it can be both proxmox ve PF sense and open Nas at the same time but again you'd have to have the technical know-how to know how to do that so as a as a tinkerer at home looking for a fun little project absolutely as a business person looking to sell and support machines there are better devices to use for routers there are better devices to use for Network appliances there are better devices to use for network attached storage this is really sort of a poor man's solution that it is not adequate in performance it is not adequate in regards to um it's form factor it's not Superior there it does have a superior amount of processing power in Ram compared to a router or Nas unit in general its primary function appears to be 80 percent Mini PC and then it seems to me that the nas option and software router function the little kind of throw in marketing gimmick as far as I'm concerned and not exactly sure you're going to attract a very big audience who would buy this as a project box to do that kind of work because the people that would know how to do that do not make up a very large section of computer owners overall all right so yeah the the nvme drive in there is pretty basic um let's go back to Disk Management let me take a look here create and format hard disk partitions I don't necessarily want to do I want to do that and see right click initialize properties they call that storage spaces storage spaces again I have never done this because to me this is like um what a garage mechanic or a Home hobbyist would use we don't use this in any professional business create a new pool all right first time for everything here Carrie on formatted drives okay this is what I wanted select the drives to create a storage pool create pool okay but it doesn't workspace Drive letter D and TFS resiliency two-way mirror that's exactly what I wanted okay well this is it create storage space well that wasn't too bad Uncle Carrie learned something new today that I'll never use but there you have it now we can use this as a proper Nas because we have a storage space let's see storage space is it format it looks good little capacity should be one terabyte because the other Drive is in mirror mode so it's invisible yeah that's what I wanted and then what we would do is we'd go over to sharing and we would share this on the network so that other people on our Network and potentially even give access to it outside the building if we wanted to all using built-in Windows networking tools okay so saved at the last minute I have never ever done that before and I don't know any pros or cons other than it's software based but the idea here to camera one the idea here is that you can be using this say you've got a home office or a small office you have a couple employees and you need to be working on the same files independently but together so in other words there might be PDF files or documentation receipts things like that customer calls you need to pull the receipt up or pull up their documentation to whatever the businesses you're conducting with that customer you want to get up to speed on it all the files are on the network drive so then you would map a drive letter on all the other PCS on the network to go to a specific folder or to go to the whole Drive how you choose to do it whether or not you choose the password to protect it or only allow certain users to access it it's all customizable in any Windows share and it's been that way Forever at least since windows five anyway all right now in that regard it does not impact you if you're using this computer to conduct your own work you're on the phone with a different customer your employees on the phone with a different customer and you've got another employee doing work for another customer you can all be accessing the storage media here without it impacting anybody else the person using this computer would never even know what's happening if this person using this computer needs to restart the computer or this computer crashes and obviously everybody that's accessing the network attached storage at that time will lose their connection until the machine boots back up and if you didn't saved what you were working on well I suppose as long as you haven't closed let's say Microsoft Word you're working on a document you haven't saved it yet and you're in the office in the Next Room over as long as you don't close the document you can wait for the mapped drive to become available and then choose to save it on the other hand if you were in a file and that file was open at the time the machine got rebooted and the Open File was on this machine it's quite possible that that file becomes unavailable and you have to close it out and reopen that file again potentially losing any work you would have done if you hadn't saved it when the machine unexpectedly went offline so you know these aren't typical problems we have with a regular Nas but this is not pretending to be a regular Nas and it will function in that way with certain caveats and restrictions and differences to a network attached storage Appliance so overall it was very easy to create the storage pool I would say even easier than a regular network attached storage Appliance once I realized how to do that thank you to Rock City PC for that little tip and you know as to how reliable or how useful it will be kind of depends on the expectations and needs of the user this kind of networking really doesn't do well when you have more than 10 people on the network once you exceed 10 people things start to get a little bit shaky a little unstable that's where you really want to go for something bigger than a peer-to-peer Network with a network attached storage Appliance you can have you know 70 80 people all in it at the same time so we don't have the limitations of Windows peer-to-peer networking which is limited in order to ensure a level a consistent level of reliability and consistency with performance so these are all things to keep in mind this is not intended to replace a network attached storage Appliance in them in an office where work is getting done and well you could get away with it for some time those limitations including auto updates that might you know if you haven't configured the machine to reboot outside of normal hours could potentially reboot in the middle of a work day and that would not be pleasant um all of that of course can be configured but you've got to be smart enough to know to do it I know this because I've been working with network attached storage devices for it's been two decades if not close to two decades and um I know the routines but if you've never used one before you're going to learn the hard way first time it disrupts your work or you lose some work so for those in the know or for those who aren't doing anything too critically important is a fun little project box it's a great price for what you're getting I will say now that I see how to create the array and how that's going to work for this price no complaints even if you don't use this functionality or you just want to use it as local storage it's still a great deal the software router part of it I'm not on board with it but you know again as a project box it's not a major investment and as far as a a network attached storage device or a router goes you won't find one appliance that does either of those tests with a processor this big so it's more than capable it's equipped very very well to handle those tasks compared to a dedicated Appliance I guess what I'm saying is there's pros and cons and that should be expected it's just not normal it's intended to be different it's intended to offer you an alternative that might be more ideal in your need for how you intend to use it or what your budget is compared to a traditional Nas I mean size Wise It's about the size of a typical Nas If anything it's a little taller I suppose and a lot shallower depth wise you know then let's say a Synology or a qnap on the other hand with Asus and qnap now having nvme NASA's qnap snazz is like this big it's also six hundred dollars with no drives in it for the four m.2 Drive Nas that qnap sells 600 bucks and you can go and buy say four four terabyte get those team group uh or terabyte nvme drives those gen 3 drives about 200 bucks a piece after sales tax so you got two four six eight hundred dollars and drive 600 for the unit plus sales tax another 60. so we're somewhere around 15 14 to 1500 dollars this is a fraction of that but then of course we're using mechanical drives which are cheaper we only have two of them instead of four of the more expensive m.2 see what I'm saying it's not inherently bad it's offering an option with limitation at a much cheaper price point and if you're willing to make those sacrifices for that price I just want you to be prepared for what you're buying I want you to have proper expectations on if you decide to buy one of these what it is you're getting and how it would be used so anyway what do you guys think Gary says it makes you wonder how recover recoverable it would be if you ran into some kind of Windows crash well Gary you would never ever consider a Nas or a raid configuration as a backup backups are still required and you would always want to have some sort of schedule while you're taking all the data on your array and putting it onto some external storage whether that's in the cloud or locally or ideally both on a regular basis so if anything were to happen like let's say for example there's nothing wrong with the raid array but your power Rick died and maybe it's not even the manufacturer's fault maybe there was a big storm that rolled in there was a power outage and it spiked the brick and now your machine will not turn on and in fact it could even be damaged so the data's still on the drives however you can't access it let's say for example somebody comes into your building late at night when you're not around and they steal this they take it there's your data let's say there's a fire at the building and everything burns down it's all lost or at the very least the fire sprinklers of the building go off and just saturate everything with water well you leave the unit on 24 7 your date is gone let's say somebody accidentally clicks on a virus and ends up infecting the machine you get ransomware your data's gone what I'm trying to tell you is there's so many more ways for you to lose your data it would be profoundly foolish and I mean profoundly foolish to not back up anything you considered important because well I've got a rate array there's so many more reasons people lose their data that recovery should never be a discussion other than restoring backups any other form of recovery is a failure of proper planning on your part so my attitude through the years was once very sympathetic to people but now no more we all know better now we know we're supposed to make backups it's easy to do and if you couldn't be bothered to take the time to make a copy of the data you claim is so important I'm not really interested in you needing a recovery because quite honestly you did that to yourself you created your own misery and I want no part of it I'm busy enough I have enough stress in my life that is completely and totally avoidable and um fact that you know Brian kometa over there at 300 data recovery is busier than ever when he should be like the Maytag repairman if people made backups like they're supposed to he should not have a business that's sustainable and yet as far as I know he's busier than ever people still continue to obstinately avoid or negate the desire to make a backup or the necessity they think that it's not going to happen to me or I'll do it tomorrow or I can't be bothered or I don't know how so therefore I won't do it whatever the excuse is it's inexcusable and so if you're in a position that you need data recovery without a backup you did that to yourself you chose that path you're not a victim you did that to yourself just so we're clear you conscientiously made a decision to take a risk and when that risk did not pay off it's like you put all your life savings at a roulette table you put it all on black and the ball fell on red and you just lost everything and now you don't know how you're going to eat tonight because you literally put every last penny hard to feel sorry for you Patrick Russo says it'd be a perfect home theater PC for media orders like me you know what that's a good point Patrick it absolutely would be a wonderful home theater PC because number one it's quiet it doesn't have a lot of blinking distracting lights on it or anything like that and the fact that you could put a couple of 18 or 20 terabyte drives in here it can store all your media absolutely yeah you've got a HDMI out and a display port out so you can plug the HDMI right into uh back of a television you're ready to go you could use Plex something like that it's very well equipped as a home theater PC well overpowered I'd say for that job but uh now that you mention it the idea that you can have your entire storage library right here rather than externally on a Nas or something like that it would suit that purpose very well yeah Jim kj3n says it makes you wonder when someone leaves a review of 300 data recovery mentioning they use the service more than once I've talked about that they're one of the highest rated most reviewed data recovery companies in the world if you look they have a ton of reviews on Yelp and on Google reviews sometimes you'll see a review that said uh this is the second time I've used their service and you're thinking it's one thing you have to use the service it's another thing to be a repeat customer essentially all Brian is doing for you is making the backup you couldn't be bothered to make only he's doing it for you when it's too late for you to make it and it's a very time consuming and very expensive form of backup but teach their own you know somebody wants to keep bringing like like it'd be one thing if somebody was a computer technician like myself I have a customer who's Drive failed and they want to know if I can get the data back and I would say well I can send it off to this company 300 data recovery for you and then I leave a review my customers Drive was recovered or whatever and they did a great job and kept me informed the whole time just like the last time makes sense if the last time was a completely different and unrelated customer who also didn't have a backup and I it would make sense for me to keep referring my data recoveries to 300 data recovery in that way because I know they're good and I know they're affordable compared to data recovery companies in general like nobody even comes close to them they haven't been in business a long time and Brian Brian cometta the owner is he's very transparent and very open about what the process is and pricing structures 25 of what most companies will charge you for them like data recovery places like on track and uh Drive Savers they're very expensive so when you see somebody writes that review and says this is my second time using them and it's just a regular customer sign why they would choose such an expensive and slow form of backup and that's assuming he's even able to recover the data not all drives are recoverable if for example the platter inside of the mechanical Drive gets scratched damaged cracks or shatters nobody in the world can recover that oh 1961 says hello hey welcome in Paul I think that is going to wrap it up for us for today Douglas mentions that directions would have been nice yeah nobody includes directions anymore and again the way that their documentation comes in from these Chinese companies is usually very poorly written so um that's why I make the videos consider this video your directions and I want to thank those of you who contributed during today's video so a shout out once again to concordius technology Ben Laird and James Prezi and Douglas Burchell thanks also go to Mark Jones John science rocks Paul O'Brien Mark Gaines Andy Woodridge Charles Mandola Roy Starman Frankie bee one at cryos Victor calendar Colin Hunt Paul O'Brien and the first contribution before the show started from Sarge Tech thank you guys so much for supporting the channel so it can continue to bring you independent reviews an independent subject matter that we want to talk about thanks to aoostar for submitting this unit for us to review I'm gonna check messages oh Frankie B sent fifty dollars via Zell thank you Frankie B Chris Smith sent an Amazon gift card for twenty dollars he said he wanted he wanted a suggestion for a Mini PC for gaming and I'm like well I couldn't tell you it depends on the game and he mentioned the game Terraria I've never heard of it anyway she ended up um telling him that um she saw the specs on the minis Forum um 773 Lite Mini PC that I reviewed here which is an AMD ryzen 7735 with Windows 11 ddr5 32 gigs of RAM one terabyte of storage and has usb4 and that's a lot more power than you were telling me that she needed for that game but that should take care of it for a number of years anyway including other games she might have interest in in the time ahead he sends a 20 Amazon gift card so again Chris thank you for that I appreciate you and thanks for following up thirty dollars from Robert Barnes says please apply toward more informative practical witty one-of-a-kind programming thank you something misspelled here and that's from Robert Barnes thank you Robert Paul O'Brien also sent a 10 Amazon gift card he says thanks again for tonight's educational and informative stream have you managed to set up an affiliate link with the United Kingdom in Germany so whenever we make a purchase you should benefit from it I think my links now will automatically convert so you'd have to try it and let me know if it works for you I'm not sure if I've set that up correctly or not you say that but yeah but nobody as far as I know has tried it I don't see well I haven't looked since you set it up to see if any purchases have been made in other countries but the idea is that the same link should work worldwide I shouldn't have to make a link for each country which is what it used to have to do now what do they call that one link or something but the links don't look any different so I don't know no idea but I just want to say thanks again for those contributions and also to Mark Gaines for the Amazon gift card and Nick Caffrey for the PayPal contribution I think I think I got everybody a shout out to our good friend Peter laycock out there in Scotland who I'm sure will watch this content later I always give him a special shout out and say hello and our friend John Jack Wilson haven't seen him in a while I hope he's still watching quietly maybe I hope he's okay I get a little concerned when I haven't heard from people in a while and uh of course my thanks to you guys all my friends in blue and all my members who support the channel oh there's Bill Wicken says he's enjoying the Asus Mini PC right on good to hear from you I'm glad to know that that's working out for you and if you're a user that has no blue or green in your name it's because I haven't turned you into a moderator which is done over time if I get to recognize your participation in the chat room on a regular basis and you're a kind person you come across as kind in the chat room over time I recognize that and I turn you blue it doesn't really mean anything other than it tells me you've been a regular here if you see a gold badge next to somebody's name whether it's in blue or green that means they're paying 9.99 a month to help support the channel and I get about half of that it's all said and done and that helps me to be able to afford to buy some of the things that I need you know if I replace one of the camcorders and try the Sony it's twenty seven hundred dollars so I won't make that in a year off you know 10 a month memberships that I get five dollars on but but um I'm also keeping an eye on eBay for used units and I don't necessarily know that I need it this camera is fine I'm just curious how a Sony camcorder might compare with video quality camera girl thank you for your work you're welcome well done okay and uh yeah to my members and moderators thank you so much for the folks who are not members or moderators yet I hope you continue to come back and continue to be a part of this amazing Community we've got here remember that the community is very knowledgeable so if you ever have any questions it's not just me answering the questions we have some very helpful knowledgeable people in our community that are here regularly that are always more than happy to offer an opinion or uh what they believe to be the solution to your question or the answer to your question so definitely don't dismiss the value of the quality of the answers coming from our community members many of them are smarter than I am but more experienced in certain areas than I am so absolutely take advantage of it and I think I am if I thanked everybody I think I got it all done thank you again for hanging out with me this Friday I hope you have a safe and wonderful weekend I do not know yet if I'm broadcasting over the weekend or not it's kind of as a time permits kind of thing and uh maybe might be so be sure you subscribe turn on notifications so you can be made aware anytime I go live you can follow me on Twitter you can friend me on Facebook I always post before I go live on Facebook and Twitter so that's another way to be made aware of it and I always make live videos every Friday at one o'clock P.M Pacific time and I always do private members only videos every Monday at one o'clock Pacific time those are the official shows anything else that occurs any other day or at any other time those are just sort of bonus and because I've had so much content and the contributions have enabled me to essentially stack up on a bunch of stuff I want to review I've got my work cut out for me for at least the next month anyway so thank you again for being a part of it for being a part of the show for being a part of the community and thank you for your participation in the chat for those of you oh and think camera drill for the amazing thumbnail used in today's video of course all right that'll wrap it up for me for today I'll see you all again very very soon and until next time bye for now and now I have to find an outro which one should I use I think we're gonna go simple okay bye for now [Music]

Channel: CareyHolzman

Views: 6,362

Keywords: minipc, intel, ssd, minipcreview, minipcreviews, powerful, powerfulminipc, powerfulmini, windows11, hdmi, budgetminipc, most powerful mini pc, most powerful mini pc 2023, most powerful mini gaming pc, mini pc, best mini pc, live, livestream, livestreaming, livestreams, livestreamer, aoostar, nas, nasminipc, sata, nasdrives, NAS storage, soft router, 2 bay nas, router, individual server

Id: Xhgr4FN8ODI

Length: 163min 9sec (9789 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023