Should I build a new PC?

I haven't considered that. I think it would be a bit overkill for my needs. I'd rather just have a decent sized HDD/SSD in my main PC. Said PC is accessible over the network anyway.

If the data is important, do you have a backup solution in place?

Yes, I just duplicate the drive onto another drive every so often. So any backups may not be 'up to date', but if there were to be a catastrophic failure, it will only be recent stuff that gets lost.

I have nothing else to contribute, but I would like to just say how awesomely you followed up on the DP joke

I thought you'd like it. What is interesting, is that I actually have a DisplayPort cable. I have never used DisplayPort. I think the cable came with my monitor, but I never used the cable because I use DVI.

I originally never bothered with Displayport when it first appeared, sticking with DVI and then duallink DVI for higher resolutions. But DP is actually a great solution as the connectors are quite small and support higher resolutions.

I ended up having to use it as I wanted to connect 3 monitors and only had 2 DVI ports on the GPU, plus a couple of DP and an HDMI.

Easiest for general monitor connecting these days is definitely HDMI though. It's pretty much the standard for most displays now.

I'm using my 75" TV, so DP is not an option, only HDMI.

HDMI is actually identical in terms of signal to DVI, which is good for computer output, plus you can also send audio which is a big bonus. It's also useful for older computers because you can easily buy a cheap DVI to HDMI connector to convert the connection and run it into an hdmi monitor or TV.

If there is one limitation of HDMI it's lower resolutions and aspect ratios. It can be hard to force hardware 4:3 aspect ratios unless it's built into the hardware.

DPs latest 1.4 spec is quite interesting though as it supports 8k 60Hz with HDR.

I've ordered a 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drive and a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus.

I was going to get a 2TB drive but its not substantially more money to get 4TB. That should last me a while. The SSD is a PCIe type rather than SATA so should in theory be faster than my current SATA SSD.

I also got a 32GB Class U1 SD card for £3.99. I didn't realise SD cards had become so cheap.

Samsung EVO SSDs are really good. I've been using them as boot drives for years. Very reliable and fast.

Yes HDDs and SD cards have really dropped in price.

I picked up some 128GB Sandisk Ultra U1 cards for about £13 each recently. And when I bought my last HD the 4TB external WD drives were not much more than the 2TB. I'm glad I did now as it's the external drive for my PS4 and it's already 3/4 full!

Every now and then I think about building/buying a new PC but as I have a laptop from work, I don't have any need and it'd really be a waste of money and effort.

I installed the new Samsung NVMe SSD. Here's a quick benchmark I ran in Gnome Disks:

Attachment 1200

Not bad.

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In contrast, here is a ridiculously slow Kingston USB3 flash drive which I also purchased recently:

I have been assured that a USB3 flash drive should be substantially higher than 5MB/s.

Attachment 1201

A slow USB stick is incredibly frustrating. We had somehow ended up with some 32gig USB2 sticks and it was taking so long to copy things to them that I gave up and made someone else drive to the shop to buy some decent ones.

The speed of your USB stick is indeed quite scary, thinking about which speeds are indicated on their site.

Here's my Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe M.2

https://i.imgur.com/H0zCpdk.jpg

Here's my Patriot Viper VPN100 M.2 2TB

https://i.imgur.com/5aGFMs8.jpg

I'm quite impressed by the Patriot I have to say.

I gather a lot of those Kingston Data Travellers are pathetically slow. I didn't realise that when I bought it. I actually just got one of the cheapest the supplier had. I'll keep it around for use with older machines.

I tried to copy a live Linux ISO onto it yesterday. After waiting over 5 minutes at the initial boot screen I gave up and wrote the image to an SD card in a USB2 card reader.

USB3 memory sticks should easily be getting more than 15-20MB/s. I have some that are around 35-45 MB/s from Sandisk. And read speeds should be 60-150MB/s.

Remember though this is only sequential data, such as one large video file. If you copy lots of little files it really slows everything down.