It will also be interesting to see how the temperatures of the installed NVMe SSDs behave. After all, the installation space is very limited, and these SSDs tend to run quite hot.

To illustrate the respective changes, I conducted measurements without a SATA caddy (including a fan), with a caddy and fan, and finally with a caddy, fan, and a homemade aluminum passive cooler.

A Mega Fastro MS200 with 2 TB was always installed in M.2 slot #2; this tends to run very hot (especially the controller). A Samsung 970 Evo Plus reaches slightly lower but ultimately similar temperatures. A “Drive Temperature 2” doesn’t seem to exist, which is why it’s missing below.

Laufwerkstemperatur 1

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

Laufwerkstemperatur 3

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

Laufwerkstemperatur 4 (Probably the controller)

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

Laufwerkstemperatur 5

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

Laufwerkstemperatur 6

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

Laufwerkstemperatur 7

The three values in the table, from left to right, are: Minimum, Maximum, and Average. The values stated are in degrees Celsius.

The effectiveness of the thermal pad and aluminum heat sink, in particular, cannot be denied.

Der Beitrag <h5>Mini-PC Server #10: </h5><h3><b>Temperatures of NVMe SSDs under various conditions</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me what the problem might be when all browsers stop working. More specifically: Whenever they tried to launch either Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox, they only got an error message saying they didn’t have sufficient permissions. It was a strange error – why would permissions suddenly be missing after years of trouble-free operation?

After some back-and-forth, we managed to install a new version of Mozilla Firefox with step-by-step phone instructions and finally installed AnyDesk using a working browser, which allowed me to take a look at the problem myself. That’s when a surprise came to light: The PC has been running Windows 8.1 Home, 64-bit, just as it always has!

Having gone without any updates for quite some time (end of life was on January 10, 2023!), the problem ultimately came down to expired root certificates. Continuing to run 8.1 wasn’t a viable option anyway, so I performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 10 22H2 remotely via AnyDesk. That took hours because the factory-installed 3.5″ WD hard drive with 1 TB capacity* is still the boot drive. The already very underpowered fourth-generation dual-core i3 is further severely hampered by the now very limited 4 GB of DDR3 RAM in the form of a single memory module. All in all, a significantly outdated system, but one with the potential to be upgraded very cost-effectively. That’s exactly what I did today, a few days later.

After a deep clean, everything looks so much brighter:

Upgrades

The PC is used solely for viewing photos and occasional web browsing. So there’s no reason to switch to the very latest and most expensive hardware. For a reasonable price, you can still get a lot out of this 2014 Acer Aspire, here’s a comparison of the current components and the planned upgrade:

The UEFI was already up to date; I checked that before taking anything apart. The reason is that newer processors within the same generation are usually only supported by updated microcode in the form of a newer BIOS or UEFI version. The planned i7-4790 is actually a refresh within Haswell-DT, so it’s even newer than the original i7 release models and incompatibilities cannot be ruled out.

Here are the components; everything except the CPU is from my own stash:

Processor replacement

This is incredibly easy thanks to the FC-LGA 1150 socket:

For thermal paste, I used the tried-and-true MX-4 from Arctic* and 99.9% isopropyl alcohol* to clean the components. I added the two new RAM modules, and lo and behold: POST was successful, and it’s running. Everything is recognized correctly in the UEFI. Now I just need to shrink the partitions, clone the hard drive to the SSD, and put everything back together.

Success?

For comparison purposes, I ran Cinebench R23 and the PassMark Performance Test v11.1 on the original hardware at the beginning and then again after the upgrade. Both tests were run on the same Windows 10 Home 64-bit system. This makes it easy to see the performance gains:

The performance gains are consistently very substantial and extremely noticeable. In particular, the integrated graphics unit – which is slightly more powerful in the i7 than in the i3 – benefits further from dual-channel operation with two memory modules (instead of just one as before). However, due to the patches addressing Spectre and Meltdown as well as other factors, the results do not quite match the reference scores. Here are the Cinebench screenshots:

Next, the PassMark results – though, due to a lack of internet connection at the time of testing, these are only available offline:

Last but not least, here is the HWiNFO overview of the respective configuration:

Der Beitrag Acer Aspire XC-605: A Late Upgrade in Times of Skyrocketing Storage Prices erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

FAT32 is essentially the “standard file system” for many devices, especially embedded and older ones. The Nintendo Wii, for example, only supports FAT32-formatted SD cards, just as many media players (car radios) can only read USB sticks with the FAT32 file system. It has been supported by Microsoft operating systems since Windows 95, but with some limitations – Wikipedia lists these very nicely.

One of these limitations is that Windows only allows formatting with the FAT32 file system for drives with a storage capacity of up to and including 32 GB when formatting via the GUI (context menu in Explorer). Above this, only NTFS or exFAT are offered, both of which are incompatible file systems for many devices.

This is incomprehensible, as significantly larger volumes are supported depending on the selected sector size (up to 2 TiB with the universally compatible standard sector size of 512 bytes!). However, the limitation of individual files to a maximum of 4 GiB cannot be circumvented.

There are several ways…

…to format a drive as FAT32 in Windows anyway. For example, using the command line, where there is no 32 GB limitation:

format S: /FS:FAT32 /Q

format S: /FS:FAT32 /Q

The most convenient way for me so far has been to use a small program from “Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd“: small, free, standalone, and available with or without a GUI.

A description of the application can be found here, and you can download it directly from the developer as a console version here (archive.org). My preferred GUI version is described here (direct download of the EXE, archive.org).

Usage

The application is very easy to use – connect the drive to the computer, ensure that there is only one main partition (Control Panel -> Administration -> Disk Management) and run “guiformat.exe” (as administrator, like requested).

Select the appropriate letter from the drop-down list, set the sector size (for a total size of less than 2 TiB, select 512 bytes to ensure maximum compatibility) and format.
Done!

The file explorer also displays everything correctly as expected:

Der Beitrag Format drives with a capacity of over 32 GB as FAT32 under Windows erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

Thanks to the many available 3.0 lanes, an above-average number of NVMe SSDs with full bandwidth can be used. Due to the high prices at the upper end of the capacity range, I was keen to experiment with two SSDs and, when I saw a very good offer from Mindfactory at the time of purchase, I was tempted to buy something that was quite unfamiliar to me:

Two MS200s from Mega Electronics (MS200200TTM), a South Korean manufacturer like Samsung that uses Micron or Intel NAND. These PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs with 2 TB capacity were repeatedly offered at bargain prices for a while, and the data sheets look good: fast DDR4 DRAM cache, high TBW, good write and read performance – everything as desired.

I’ve read quite a few comments about “Mega Fastro Kaputto,” and the 1 TB version is said to have been prone to failure – but I haven’t noticed anything unusual with my model so far.

It’s important to mention that the MS200 is double-sided and therefore doesn’t fit into every M.2 slot. You have to be careful with mobile devices or expansion cards, and this also plays a role in the compatibility of passive heat sinks. For example, only single-sided M.2 SSDs fit on the expansion card I use.

NVMe-SSDs

• Two MS200 with 2 TB each from Mega Electronics, on the motherboard under the passive heat sinks of the board
• Two Samsung 970 Evo Plus with 2 TB each*, on an x8 expansion card (x4x4 bifurcation*) including JEYI passive heat sinks
• One Samsung 970 Evo Plus with 500 GB*, also on the motherboard

⧉ MEGA Electronics

⧉ Samsung

⧉ JEYI

SATA-SSDs

• Three Samsung SM863a Enterprise SSDs, each with a capacity of 480 GB
• One Samsung 840 with 250 GB for a parallel installation of Windows 11 Professional

⧉ Samsung

⧉ Samsung

HDDs

• Two WD Red drives, each with 4 TB*, 3.5″, SATA – RAID1
• Two Toshiba drives, each with 2 TB*, 3.5″, SATA – RAID1
• One Seagate Barracuda with 500 GB, 2.5″, USB 3.0 internal data HDD for Windows 11
• One Toshiba with 1 TB, 2.5″, USB 3.0 internal – Images and SMB

⧉ WD

⧉ Toshiba

⧉ Sabrent

Der Beitrag <h5>TR-Server #4: </h5><h3><b>Storage – Ola NVMe!</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

After high-capacity hard drives and subsequently SSDs and RAM of all kinds had risen sharply in price due to extreme demand from AI companies, this unexpected news came at the beginning of December:

SSDs und DRAM: Crucial ist am Ende

Anyone who has been involved in the hardware sector for some time knows that Micron and Crucial, in particular with their extremely popular (but unfortunately long since discontinued) MX500 SATA SSD, were a real force to be reckoned with and often the only real alternative to Samsung. It is a real shame that the consumer brand “Crucial” is now leaving the stage. Competition stimulates business, and now there is one less supplier.

This will only fuel the rapid rise in prices even more. On December 14, 2025, there was another piece of news that has since been denied, but which I find even more worrying:

Samsung stoppt Produktion von SATA-SSDs: Leaker warnt vor bis zu 18 Monaten Preisdruck bei SSDs

Samsung has stated that these rumors are false. We will see whether this is true or whether Samsung is just trying to control the narrative in the first half of 2026 at the earliest. Since Samsung has always been my number one choice in the SATA sector, it would be tragic if production were to end. There are also no usable NVMe to SATA adapters that could be used to “re-adapt” the problem.

To make another component that has been totally overpriced for a long time even more unaffordable, the following happened the day before yesterday:

GeForce-Grafikkarten: Nvidia will GPU-Produktion angeblich massiv senken

If this proves to be true, the demand for high-performance DRAM will also be the reason here. The “super” refresh models that were actually expected are also not going to be released. These are all unconfirmed rumors, of course.

Future prospects

There are basically two possibilities:

Either all AI companies prove to be highly profitable, as many investors hope, and prices remain extremely high or even worsen. Then the era of forced subscription-based cloud PCs, which many have been predicting for some time, will draw ever closer—running your own powerful hardware will simply be too expensive.

Or much of what is currently being hyped will prove to be an unprofitable business. This would result in falling prices and a richly filled second-hand market – which would be desirable.

It is very difficult to predict how all this will develop, especially since the global economic situation has been anything but stable for some time now.

Der Beitrag Thoughts on the current situation with data storage devices and RAM erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

There used to be many hard drive manufacturers, but today there are only a few. Three have survived the flood of solid state drives, which are generally better from a technical standpoint: Western Digital (including the formerly independent manufacturer HGST), Seagate, and Toshiba. My favorites have always been WD and HGST, as these manufacturers have proven to be durable and generally reliable. I have never used Toshiba extensively in the 3.5″ range and therefore have little experience with them. I have had some bad experiences with Seagate, so I avoid products from this company.

In one area, hard drives remain unbeatable compared to SSDs: € per TB of storage capacity. This ratio can and could be improved even further by purchasing external hard drives and “shucking” them—that is, removing the internal 3.5″ standard drive with SATA interface from the respective manufacturer and using it elsewhere, for example in a NAS or storage server. Depending on the purchase price, this is a relatively inexpensive way to obtain new hard drives with large capacities.

The disadvantage is that in the event of a defect, the warranty may not be honored, and external hard drives generally have rather short warranty periods. Almost always, “lower-end” or inferior model variants of retail versions are now installed, often with special, slowing firmware (“white label”).

Nevertheless, the price difference compared to a single hard drive has been so high in some cases, especially in recent years, that it has been possible to overlook this.

What always remains?

Everything except the hard drive itself. So the enclosure, the circuit board to convert SATA to USB, and the 12-volt power supply. If you’ve “shucked” a few hard drives, you’ll accumulate quite a bit over time. I’ve collected various models of external hard drives from WD, 13 enclosures in total.

One day, I wanted to reuse one of these enclosures by installing a 6 TB hard drive from HGST*. If you’ve taken these enclosures apart a few times, reassembling them is a breeze. After connecting it to power and a computer, I was disappointed to find that the hard drive wasn’t recognized!

What?!

Yes, seriously. Western Digital has ensured that the actually quite generic controller boards in these enclosures only work with Western Digital hard drives. Especially since HGST has been part of WD for quite some time, not even that works. I tried installing a WD Blue – it worked right away.

After a frustrating search, I found posts from other users who were just as frustrated. But there was light at the end of the tunnel: there are models that work with everything out of the box, then there are those that require a small modification to work, and those that allow you to flash different, open firmware.

And that’s what this post is about – how to ensure that the controller accepts all hard drives. I can speak for three types of external WD hard drive enclosures.

First, the problem I stumbled upon:

The enclosure was from a 4 TB hard drive, type WD MyBook* – model number “WDBFJK0040HBK-04.” Purchased around 2015, refurbished. After doing some research, I was optimistic that I would be able to make full use of this enclosure.

Western Digital used an ASM1051W from ASMedia (an ASUS subsidiary) as the controller, apparently with a data connection to an external SPI chip from Winbond.

⧉ WD

Hobbyists have discovered that if the controller cannot communicate with the SPI flash, it behaves like any other generic ASMedia chip as a fallback. Jackpot.

There is little to lose, so what needs to be done?
Simply cut the connection to the rest of the board at pins 1 and 2 of the Winbond SPI chip. To do this, I carefully cut through the two pins from the side with a pair of electronics side cutters and then used the blade of a utility knife to gently lift the now-separated contacts until I could see a gap with the naked eye. Theoretically, pin 1 would have been sufficient, but this way is safer.

Then I put everything back together again and lo and behold:

Success. I then ran tests with a Seagate and a Toshiba hard drive, and everything works. I then modified the remaining three cases of this type that I own.

The model that runs by default

There are obviously several revisions of the controller boards in the various models. Next, I disassembled the housing of a WD Elements with the model number “WDBWLG0080HBK-0B” that used to have 8 TB. The controller installed there was a JMicron JMS579 with SPI flash from Winbond. This combination can be problematic or unproblematic. In this model, the hard drive from HGST ran without any modifications.

⧉ WD

However, there are reports that some versions with this controller do not work. If this specific controller is installed and only WD hard drives are recognized, flashing open firmware should remedy the problem.

JMS579 – Flash firmware

First, I came across this post:

From there, I continued to search until I found a “turnkey solution.” This originally came from a Chinese forum in Chinese and was translated into English by a helpful user.

This archive contains everything you need to reflash a WD enclosure with this controller (the English tutorial is also included as a PDF):
Download at Mediafire
Download at Archive.org

Conclusion

It is truly incomprehensible why the hardware is deliberately turned into potential electronic waste. There must be limits somewhere, and I cannot imagine that Western Digital’s public image is positively influenced in any way by such a design.

I was able to make all of the non-functioning enclosures in my possession workable by flashing the firmware or modifying the SPI flash.

Unfortunately, there are also reports of newer revisions for which there seems to be no solution at the moment. The WD MyBook Duo* enclosures generally do not appear to be modifiable. It’s a shame, as I own several of them – still in operation with WD hard drives.

Der Beitrag External 3.5″ hard drives from WD and their deliberate incompatibilities erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

Since Windows XP can only handle MBR partitions, the boot drive is pretty obvious: it has to be a SATA SSD with 2 TB capacity, which is the maximum for MBR. Four of the eight SATA ports on the motherboard can handle SATA III, the other four only SATA II. Two of the fast ports come natively from the chipset, the other two are powered by an Asmedia add-on chip. It therefore makes sense to use these two fast native ports for the largest possible SSDs.

For all other drives, you should always keep the MBR limit of 2 TB in mind. NVMe, as a more modern data carrier, would be possible with a BIOS modification and PCI Express expansion card, but this is not really an option due to a lack of support from XP and potential problems with Windows 7. In addition, all graphics card slots are covered, so there is no room for more.

Once again, I installed an SSD from Samsung, specifically a Samsung 870 Evo with 2 TB capacity*. When it comes to data storage devices, I try to use Samsung SSDs wherever possible. So far, they have all worked well without exception and none have ever broken. I cannot say the same for other manufacturers. When it comes to hard drives, I’ve always preferred Western Digital or HGST.

I also wanted to install a DVD or Blu-ray burner, along with an internal card reader. This is typical for computers from the XP era. Therefore, one of the eight ports was used for the burner.

Hard drives?

I installed a relatively wild mix of hard drives that I had on hand anyway in order to make full use of the space and possibilities. In the end, I chose the two SATA SSDs on the fast native ports, two 3.5“ hard drives, two 2.5” hard drives for space reasons, and another 2.5″ SSD.

I will list the exact configuration later in the “Hardware Setup” section.

Der Beitrag <h5>Retro-XP-PC #8: </h5><h3><b>Storage</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

An often overlooked option:
Any mobile device with a built-in optical drive can be equipped with an additional data storage device instead. CDs and DVDs are no longer really used these days, and more storage space is always useful.

This is so easy to do because optical drives have long used the “Slimline” connection internally, and since 2.5″ data carriers such as optical drives only need 5 volts to work, they can be easily adapted to function. In principle, this Slimline connection is a greatly shortened version of the standard SATA connection.

Lenovo, for example, originally designed the so-called “UltraBay” for this purpose. With even more possibilities. This type of adapter* should fit into almost any standard notebook with an optical drive:

You can install any type of 2.5″ SSD or hard drive there, but you have to pay attention to the standard height.
Hard drives are also available in thicknesses greater than “normal”!

Der Beitrag More storage space in legacy mobile devices erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

For reference and comparison purposes only, I try to test all Secure Digital memory cards (SD / SDHC / SDXC, including Mini and Micro) that come my way using CrystalDiskMark v9.0.1 (64-bit) with default settings and collect the results, including model data and similar information, here.

Large to very large memory cards (=> 128 GB) in particular are permanently installed in devices and are therefore only listed here when the opportunity arises.

All tests are performed on my workstation, which is based on an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero (AMD X570 / AM4), using the USB-A 3.2 Gen. 1 port on the front panel: Adapted by a very fast USB 3.1 Gen. 1 card reader from Kingston, the MobileLite Plus (UHS-II).

As with the USB sticks, I chose the test sizes and file systems as follows:

The results are sorted in ascending order, starting with the lowest storage capacity.

SD / SDHC / SDXC

Capacity	Manufacturer	Description	Read (MB/s)	Write (MB/s)	Screenshot	Date
128 MB	Lexar Media	SD128-100M 1204261 AO411034 MADE IN U.S.A.	7.55 7.53 4.72 4.55	4.19 4.19 0.30 0.30		2025.06.24
128 MB	Nagiwara SYS-COM	Model No. HRC-SD128M	3.56 3.56 0.51 0.34	1.47 1.47 0.17 0.16		2025.06.24
128 MB	Sigma	SD128MBM04S0437 Made in Taiwan	8.39 8.38 5.13 5.10	6.90 7.12 0.16 0.16		2025.06.24
512 MB	SanDisk	AX0620202617D Made in China	11.95 11.95 4.24 3.97	5.24 5.45 0.05 0.05		2025.06.24
1 GB	Intenso	“SD Memory Card”	15.72 15.72 6.12 5.66	4.40 4.40 0.02 0.02		2025.06.24
1 GB	Hama	“Secure Digital Card” S442TN01G E0BB 0646	10.48 10.48 4.52 2.14	2.73 2.73 0.03 0.03		2025.06.24
4 GB	Müller	SDHC	19.70 19.71 6.36 5.80	7.74 8.38 0.02 0.02		2025.06.24
8 GB	Netac	NT202006 SDHC Class 10	41.06 41.49 6.83 6.76	7.76 11.74 0.86 0.94		2025.06.24

MiniSD / MiniSDHC / MiniSDXC

Capacity	Manufacturer	Description	Read (MB/s)	Write (MB/s)	Screenshot	Date
1 GB	Memorex	G01GNMC690053	12.15 12.34 5.95 4.27	8.58 10.69 0.05 0.05		2025.06.24

MicroSD / MicroSDHC / MicroSDXC

Capacity	Manufacturer	Description	Read (MB/s)	Write (MB/s)	Screenshot	Date
2 GB	SanDisk	MicroSD Made in China	19.91 19.92 3.41 3.38	3.77 3.77 0.55 0.55		2025.06.24
2 GB	SanDisk	MicroSD Made in China	11.95 11.95 4.39 4.31	4.39 4.40 0.03 0.03		2025.06.24
2 GB	?	MMAGRO20UECA-M8 D FDDO41PA 019 Made in KOREA	15.94 16.14 1.56 1.38	5.45 6.28 0.08 0.03		2025.06.24
4 GB	Toshiba	Class 4 C04G TAIWAN	23.90 24.07 7.25 6.47	9.00 12.76 0.99 1.09		2025.06.24
8 GB	?	Class 6	6.08 6.08 2.08 2.06	3.97 4.19 0.47 0.47		2025.06.24
16 GB	SanDisk	Ultra Class 10 5325YKA852NU BL Made in Malaysia	77.66 78.21 6.60 6.28	28.68 23.02 2.26 2.15		2025.06.24
16 GB	SanDisk	Ultra U1 33810G4AX157 BL Made in China	47.12 47.48 5.77 5.32	11.30 11.95 2.59 2.10		2025.06.24
16 GB	Toshiba	Exceria U1 TAIWAN	94.97 96.46 6.89 6.64	7.75 11.52 0.54 0.53		2025.06.24
32 GB	SanDisk	Ultra Class 10 0447XX6521UL BM Made in China	97.72 98.44 8.68 8.61	23.06 24.07 2.40 2.36		2025.06.24
32 GB	SanDisk	Ultra Class 10 0447XX6521W7 BM Made in China	97.75 98.35 8.70 8.62	23.66 24.11 2.36 2.34		2025.06.24
32 GB	SanDisk	Ultra Class 10 0447XX6521US BM Made in China	97.87 98.32 8.66 8.60	22.43 23.05 2.37 2.31		2025.06.24
64 GB	SanDisk	Ultra Class 10 5406DRAXYOMX BN Made in China	97.69 98.12 7.36 6.75	12.36 23.04 1.96 1.93		2025.06.24

Der Beitrag <h5>Performance reference: </h5><h3><b>Memory cards</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.