bobkn

One thing I don't notice as having been mentioned: SMR (shingled magnetic recording) vs CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives...

Good.

Do both of those contain ordinary SATA drives? Some external drives use other interior interfaces, so the drives can't be extracted and...

A SATA "NAS" drive is little different from a common or garden SATA drive. It's spec'd for more continuous use, and may make less vibration.

I may be taking this too literally, but the 3800X is a DDR4 CPU. The 9800X3D, DDR5.

Not really. But, for starters: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=50011165%2050011245&d=DAS&Order=1 As I said in post 9, Seagate Ironwolf...

The discussion caused me to check prices. Yikes. I hope I don't need to replace a GPU anytime soon. Or RAM. Or an SSD. I presume that...

I failed to notice that. I did a Google search: "is windows gaming on a VM in linux ever done?". The AI response was lengthy. It's...

Stupid? No. I believe that a typical DAS is external. It may use a faster interface to the PC than would typically be available via...

I'm unclear on why you're running a Windows VirtIO GPU version. (It's a software emulation package, primarily used in Linux...

Sounds like premium components. I'm curious: which GPU? The 9800X3D has an iGPU, but I doubt that a gamer would stay with that.

Disclaimer: I don't use any external drives for online storage. I wonder whether you'd prefer a DAS (direct attached storage)? If you...

This is a bit off to the side, but do you have Armoury Crate installed? Do you have its autoinstall enabled in the BIOS settings?

In my ignorance, I'm surprised that MS modifies a firmware update that it is passing through from Asus.

I've never used one, but I believe that Asus sometimes provides firmware updates to Microsoft. Not sure how one would be applied. I'd...