Tyler Morgan

I burned through three PCIe 5.0 SSDs before I learned my lesson about cooling. The first one thermal-throttled during a 200GB file transfer. The second one crashed mid-game load. That is when I started testing M.2 heatsinks seriously, and I have put 30 hours of benchmarking into this guide for . PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives … Read more

When my internal drive filled up mid-edit on a 4K multicam project, I had two choices: a NAS or a DAS. I went with direct-attached storage and never looked back. If you edit video at home, you already know the pain of running out of space, watching timelines stutter on a spinning drive, or waiting … Read more

I lost an entire trip’s worth of RAW photos in Patagonia when my portable hard drive slid off a hostel bunk and cracked open on a tile floor. That night taught me something no spec sheet could: not every portable SSD is built for travel. Some survive drops, rain, and the inside of an overstuffed … Read more

Upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to a SATA SSD is hands down the single biggest performance boost you can give an older PC. I have done this swap on everything from a 2009 Dell tower to a 2014 budget laptop, and the change is dramatic. Boot times go from 2-5 minutes to 10-20 seconds. … Read more

When I sat down to edit my first 8K timeline, my Thunderbolt 3 RAID simply couldn’t keep up. Footage stuttered, exports crawled, and the drive thermal-throttled halfway through. That’s the day I started hunting for the best Thunderbolt SSDs for video editors, and I have been testing them on real client projects ever since. After … Read more

I built my first home media server in 2017 with a borrowed tower PC, four noisy drives, and a tangled mess of cables behind the TV. Three iterations later, I run a dedicated NAS (network attached storage) box that streams 4K content to every screen in the house without breaking a sweat. That journey taught … Read more

After 90 days of testing 8 NAS units in our home media lab, our team found the best NAS for Plex media server setups in depends on three things: your transcoding needs, storage ambition, and tolerance for tinkering. We pushed each device through 4K HDR streams, multi-user load tests, and container setups to find the … Read more

Looking for the best NAS for Jellyfin home servers in ? You have come to the right place. After spending three months stress-testing eight NAS enclosures on our home lab bench – running Jellyfin in Docker, hammering each unit with simultaneous 4K HEVC transcodes, and measuring power draw at idle – we have a clear … Read more

If you have spent any time streaming 4K files through Plex, you already know how painful buffering can be. I built my first media server with whatever spare parts I had lying around, and the experience was rough — stuttering, dropped frames, and a hard drive that sounded like a jet engine. After testing dozens … Read more

For most small businesses, the Synology DS1525+ is the best NAS you can buy in because it pairs 5 drive bays, 10GbE-ready networking, and a software ecosystem that has been battle-tested by thousands of IT admins for nearly two decades. We spent 60 days putting eight contenders through real office workloads – file shares, video … Read more