Hmm the price went up on that 1TB intel 540s M.2 to $329. But! There is the Sandisk X400 M.2 which is also 1TB and even cheaper at around $250-ish.
“The X400 SSD release establishes SanDisk as one of the only companies currently offering 1TB of storage in a single-sided M.2 card.”
I am a little addicted to my 4TB (2 x 2TB HDDs) media storage but maybe 1.5 TB of overall (fast 512gb M.2 boot, “whatever” 1TB M.2 data) could be enough.
I guess it is not the end of the world if the box has two 2.5" external enclosures attached to it, though that will eat two USB ports full time. So it’ll be three dongles to get enough USB ports for the Xbox One controller wireless adapter and so on. It has four USB ports total, 2 in front, 2 in back.
The big variable here is 2TB in M.2 format, and I have no idea if that is even on the radar for companies at this point. So I think I should bite the bullet and assume it’ll be dongle-town USA in my media cabinet for a while. Not like drives are going to get any more expensive if I wait a year or two, anyhow.
I disabled hyperthreading in the BIOS to reduce total power draw under load; 4 cores is already too much, I don’t need 4 more.
I set cooling profile to “quiet” in the BIOS while I was in there
Measured completely idle windows desktop power usage (after full windows update and everything settled down) is 15w, which isn’t too bad, only 5w more than the 10w I had before, so, yay! Boot peaks at around 33w but I haven’t tested full load yet. 30w- 40w seems typical for doing moderate stuff like installing games, or windows updates.
Huh I had not seen this weird combined optical / digital out jack on this box before… I assume it is the same kind of thing Apple is doing in recent models?
It’s a single jack into which you can plug either an optical cable or a normal (analog) headphone cable. It’s basically a headphone jack with a laser at the back. So if you plug a normal 1/8" headphone connector you get analog output. But you can also plug in an optical cable that has a 1/8" connector on the end… It will see the laser and give you digital output.
Most optical cables won’t fit into this 1/8" jack. However Apple sells optical cables that come with an adapter. The problem is that once you put the adapter on the cable, the end is large and heavy enough that it’s easily damaged. I suggest you look at a place that specializes in cables (e.g. monoprice.com) and get a cable with the usual toslink on one end and 1/8" on the other. The 1/8" optical connector is often referred to as a mini-connector.
Gonna order a cable… right now I went with HDMI audio temporarily so my receiver is having a bit of a sad.
Also, if you are looking for a cheap ~500 GB M.2 SSD with respectable stats, I highly recommend these 480GB Phison S10 drives for $130.
Yeah, a Samsung 850 Evo will do a bit better, but not dramatically better. These are surprisingly competent little drives.
I put one in as the secondary “scratch / torrent” drive on this NUC, so I have more room for games and stuff on the fancypants 950 Pro in the first M.2 slot.
I had a little 120GB “MyDigitalSSD” M.2 in my HTPC and it died on me-- completely inaccessible. First SSD that has ever given up the ghost. So I’m staying away from that brand.
I bought a set of three Crucial 128 GB SSDs in October 2009 for the original two members of the Stack Overflow team plus myself. As of last month, two out of three of those had failed. And just the other day I was chatting with Joel on the podcast (yep, it’s back), and he casually mentioned to me that the Intel SSD in his Thinkpad, which was purchased roughly around the same time as ours, had also failed.
Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years … and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:
Super Talent 32 GB SSD, failed after 137 days
OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, failed after 512 days
G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 251 days
G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 276 days
Crucial 64 GB SSD, failed after 350 days
OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, failed after 72 days
Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 15 days
Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 206 days
Since this has a thunderbolt 3 port, I’ll sign up to get notified when the Razer Core external GPU box is available. The god damn thing is $500 all by itself… but that might make a good home for my old 980ti once I upgrayedd to the gtx1080.
Hmm Phison S9 based. Looks like there were some firmware updates as of 3/2015 so hopefully they squashed whatever that was:
Recent Amazon 1-star reviews seem to be tapering off, but do mention firmware updates.
Well, I did recommend it as a secondary / scratch / storage drive, not as primary. We have some Ali Express boxes with Phison S9 in semi-production roles, drive inception dates well after 3/2015, more like early 2016, so we’ll see how that goes…
Wumpus good posts. Are you using this as a HTPC or as a sff desktop? What peripherals are you running (resolution, etc). I’m leaning to replace my PS3 with a Nuc to get a bit more flexibility (Rogers Shomi here in Canada among others), don’t know if I need the Skull Canyon but it’s pretty sweet.
That skull canyon NUC is a super cool tech toy but a very poor value as a gaming PC. You would be far better served with an alienware alpha or building your own.
The nod nod wink wink rumor from Alienware is a new Alpha will be announced around E3. Though they may give up on trying to make it a pseudo console and strip out the front end custom loaders they started with on the initial Alpha.
stusser, that’s mainly because the CPU in Skull Canyon alone is $443 (according to intel’s ark site). Everyone knows you are an idiot if you pay for a very fast CPU since games don’t care about it at all – a budget current-gen dual core Intel CPU plus “the most video card you can afford” is the best strategy.
What I’m looking for here is maximum gaming performance per watt. And I think this box is literally off the charts on that metric… that’s what is exciting about it to me, it’s the first Intel CPU with a legitimately gaming class GPU embedded on-die.
I am using this as a HTPC, I have the following attached to it:
wireless mouse/keyboard combo
wireless Xbox One controller adapter
2 x 2.5" 2TB HDD via $20 external USB 3.0 boxes
fancy 1080p plasma TV from about 6 years ago, via HDMI
I am really warming up to Stusser’s odd obsession with external Thunderbolt 3 video cards, which is also possible here, but wasn’t my intent. (Also, you want to talk expensive? Holy fuck, these external GPU boxes are $500 by themselves!)
