I did the 1TB internal swap with a $90 SSD. Not too difficult, though the instructions on copying data to a USB were a bit tricky.
Most USB drives wont fit in the front ports - use the back
Make sure you get the FULL firmware package (it was difficult for me as a first timer, as the instructions featured the upgrade firmware much more prominently - can’t remember exactly how), which contrary to the documentation now takes a larger Thumb drive than they say (1GB recommended, but not enough space for a full firmware now and which was the only one I had which could fit the front slots before I remembered the back and switched over) as of a couple of months ago.
I picked up Spiderman recently because everyone raves about it. Seems like a pretty bog standard open world game with lots of icons in it: a carbon copy of Batman: Arkham City or Infamous or Saint’s Row 4 or… Is there really anything that distinguishes it?
In open world structure? Not really. But the swinging is a way more fun method of traversing the world than any other open world game, and the combat system mixes up the Arkham formula in interesting ways.
You have no idea how quickly I added “barely an inconvenience” in my mind. Those are still the best movie-mocking vids on youtube. Quick, not necessarily mean, and generally actually funny. Ya, ya, ya.
Its version of Manhattan is closer to the real Manhattan than even Grand Theft Auto 4’s Liberty City was
I thought the villains, heroes, sidekicks and other characters were really well presented. After almost twenty years of Spider-Man movies (but not reading or caring about the comic book character) I thought I had seen everything a Spidey story had to offer. But the writing is sharp. The core of a do-gooder trying to do good but being stretched way too thin is captured perfectly. Even the sea of icons of sidequests on the map reminds you: you can’t be everywhere, Peter Parker! You’re letting your Uncle Ben down! There’s a little more room for light, love and laughter than Arkham City, anyway.
(The corollary to the first point is that, while it is really cool to swing by Alias Investigations or Doctor Strange’s place or Baxter Tower, NYC suddenly seems really empty without those heroes’ actual presence. Especially when bad stuff happens to the city and they’re presumably all chilling on a beach somewhere.)
I think it takes all the best elements of the Spider-Man movies (up to and almost including the anarchic elements of Into The Spider-Verse, which was released later) and lets you play them with some unique twists in an open-world setting.
If you don’t care about Spider-Man, then yeah, there’s not too much new here. Though I don’t think Infamous featured a Stan Lee cameo.
So, I upgraded the drives in my NAS recently, and ended up with two 3TB hard drives I didn’t have a plan for. While looking online at enclosures for 3.5" HDDs and noticed there are dual disk external RAID enclosures you can buy. Since I’ve also been running out of space on my PS4 which had a 2TB internal drive and a 2TB external drive, I decided to experiment with using one of these external RAID boxes to expand my available space.
This is the model I ended up buying after reading a ton of reviews:
I installed two 3TB HGST drives and configured them for RAID 0 and plugged them into my PC first to do a quick speed test. After partitioning and formatting in Windows the CrystalMark results showed sequential reads of about 325MB/s with writes at 125MB/s. Obviously not SSD class, especially for random reads/writes but I also don’t want to spend more than $800 on an SSD in this size class.
So after that I plugged it into my PS4 and formatted it as external storage. It was a long process, but I moved all the games on the internal drive to the RAID box, and then switched back to my original external storage and moved everything from there to internal storage. That took like 10 hours all together. But this is how my system sits now:
So I’ve doubled my available storage and games on the RAID box get a bit of a boost in load times. Again, this is just a stopgap until high capacity SSDs are in my price range, but I’m hopeful I can carry this forward to the PS5 as my Backwards Compatible/Cold storage drive.
