NZXT PODCAST - #203 - THAT'S How You Install an SSD?! (Ft. Jimmy from Sandisk)

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

On this week's episode of the #NZXT Podcast... We have Jimmy from Sandisk talking about the specs of the new WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe SSD! He even shows us how to install the SSD on our N9 X870E motherboard!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 203 of the NCC podcast, the official podcast of the NCC community. This podcast is recorded live on Fridays at 10 a.m. Pacific Center time on the official NCC Twitch is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike, and with me, as always, is Ivan. How are you doing, Ivan? How I do, baby boo? Happy Friday. Excited for another wonderful episode of the NZXT podcast. But before we get into it, I want to make two quick announcements. So announcement number one, if you are tuned in live right now on twitch.tv slash nzxte, you're in for a treat. You get access to a giveaway, actually early access to a giveaway because it's going to last all week. But the treat is that if you stick around to the end of the show, you're going to get some bonus entries.

And if you're wondering what we're giving away, we're going to give away a brand new WD Black. S-N-80-100 NVM-E-S-D paired with an N-Z-T-N-9 X-870E motherboard. A round of applause in the chat because that's an awesome prize. So that's the first announcement. The second announcement is we're giving away something else too. If you go to nzxte.co slash intel giveaway, we're giving away a free PC with our friends at Intel. So, uh, sign up for that and you get bonus entries into that giveaway if you're an

NZXT club member. If you have no idea what the NZXT club is, go to nzxte.co slash club and it explains everything you need to know about it. Basically, the TLDR is the more you hang out with NZXT on things like the podcast, the more poochy points you earn, the more poochy points you earn, the better odds you get at winning prizes. So hit on over to the club and sign up. if you haven't. So without further ado, let me introduce our special guest of the day. Jimmy. How are you, Jimmy? Good, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for having me the second time. This is your second time on the show. Yes, yes, second time. Glad to be back. Yes. And for those who did not tune in the first time, can you introduce yourself and let everyone know who you are and what you do?

Yeah, yeah. So my name is Jimmy Gomez. I work, I now work for, I used to work for Western Digital, but we split into two companies earlier this year. So we can talk a little bit more about that, maybe a little bit later. But I am a product marketing manager, and I specifically work on what we call our client SSDs. That's kind of the phrase we use. But the best way to think of it is I work on the SSDs in laptops, the consoles, gaming handhelds, desktops, and more specifically, I work on our gaming SSDs. or our high performance ones.

So right now, all those are called WD Black. And, yeah, so I got my WD Black shirt, got some product here. I got a little, this was like the media kit. That's the big box behind me. So the SSDs aren't that big, but that's like a blown up version of the box for SNA80100. But yeah, so I do a lot of the messaging and creating, working with designers to create the website. hey, like, I want to buy an 8100. So that website you see when you Google us or when you search for us, I help in the vision of,

okay, these are the images we want. This is the messaging that we think, you know, you guys, the audience that it resonates with and things like that. Also, like maybe having a little bit of a hand on the product videos and then doing stuff like this, where I can come and talk to, you know, end consumers and gamers on our products. or sometimes I'll do this similar thing, but more in a, you know, call it a business environment, right? So I'm talking to, you know, like Ivan and Mike's parent company, right? I'm talking to NZXT and explaining them, hey, here's our new products, here's what's coming, stuff like that. So since Bali 321 TBD, that's kind of a burn to give away a WDSD instead of Sandisk.

and St. George the Great is in the chat saying, I'm confused, aren't they the same company now? So can you just explain what is the difference between Sandisk and WD Black and what that's all about? Because for those that don't know, I guess it could be a little confusing. Yeah, yeah, no, this is definitely confusing, especially if you're not very tuned into,

call it the business world or even the stock market. But basically what happened at the end of February of this year. Well, let me back up a little bit. So back in like 2016, Western Digital bought Sandisk, right? So that means they bought, in all the employees of Sandus, they bought all the technology that Sandisk made. So Western Digital before just makes HDDs or hard disk drives, right? So spinning disks.

And we don't really see a lot of those in consumer products anymore. But back in 2016 or even earlier, right, Western Digital's been around since the 70s. So they bought Sandisk, absorbed all of their technology, and then started to rebrand Sandus products from Sandisk whatever to WD, in this case, WD Black, WD Blue, WD Red. Well, some billionaires and people with a lot of money were like, hey, we think you could make more money if you break up. So we got married and then we broke up. we got married in 2016 and then we broke up in February of this year

and so now we are two separate public companies so there is Western Digital and we split by technology so Western Digital is now back to only making HDDs right so again as a consumer like you guys watching here

you probably you may be if your PC's kind of old like I know I have an HD in mind but I built this I built this computer like over 10 years ago and then I refreshed it five years ago. So that that HDD is from 10 years ago. You don't really see those in consumer products anymore. But where you do see it is the cloud.

Basically, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, meta, Apple, right? Like the cloud lives on HDDs. They buy millions of those things a year. And so Western Digital, that's what they make now. That's all they focus on HDDs. Sandisk, you know, always made what we call flash products or USB drives, microSD cards, SD cards, SSDs, right? So anything that is flash memory, we make that.

So like I said, it's only been a few months since we've split. And because of that, we get to continue using or selling our products, like our SSD products, but under the Western Digital Brands. So WD Black is a Western Digital brand. So yes, I know even don't worry, you guys aren't the only ones confused. even some of the reviewers who, you know, all they do is test SSDs. They're like, wait, what's, what, why isn't this a Sandus brand? Well, because we just split and we didn't have time to create new brands for, you know,

new Sandus brands. I can say, I don't know what they're going to be. I know what's going to happen. It'll probably, you know, we'll see over the next coming months. But basically, yeah, so we're, all the SSDs are now made by Sandisk. So when you, if you, if you do get. 80100 and you look at the back of the box and you look all the way down in the fine print it says 2025 sand disk right so it's it's kind of a little subtle right now um but yeah so what wd black

is a is a western digital brand that sandisk is still using to sell their SSD products for the time being right and like i said this will all likely change at some point so they got married They broke up and now Jimmy's splitting custody, I guess, with... Yeah, no way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This weekend's with mommy. No, it's... Yeah.

Well, thank you for explaining that. I hope that clears the air a little bit to the people who are confused. Yeah, I'm also curious, Jimmy. I know you've been at, you know, W.D. Black and Nelsandas for a while, but how did you get your start in the tech industry, specifically with product marketing? because it seems like a really interesting career field there. Yeah.

So I'll try not to be too long. So my journey to getting into, you know, call it the tech industry and then more specifically product marketing, if I go back to when I graduated undergrad, actually, so I studied engineering and undergrad. And I was always, I studied, it was called general engineering, but that I guess my major doesn't technically exist anymore. But either way, I took all the regular normal engineering classes, and then I got an opportunity to have my own specialization or concentration. So I actually concentrated in business because I was always kind of on the fence. Like, do I want to be just an engineer? Do I want to be an engineer?

Do I want to go onto the business side of things and kind of utilize my engineering background? So I ended up going into engineering. So I worked as a mechanical engineer in automotive industry. So I used to work on like big trucks, like big diesel engine trucks. If you ever see an international truck, whether it's a school bus or like an 18 wheeler, I worked on those for five years. And it was kind of during that time, I was like, okay, like I'm learning, but I'll be honest, my coworkers were going home to build their cars.

And then I was going home to build my PC so I could play more video games, right? So it was just kind of one of those where my passion didn't really align to what I was working in. and as I was kind of coming up, or I guess maybe like three years into that job, I kind of realized, well, I don't think this is what I really want to do anymore. My best option might be to go back to school, but I don't know, you know, what's the best? Like, I kind of figured, well, I can get my MBA, so master's of business administration. And it was, I did a lot of research on like trying to find the right school, trying to understand what are the different career paths that you can go into. And it was during a lot of that like homework, if you will, I learned about product marketing and or product management. And it was, well, you know, these are roles that usually they want you to have an engineering background.

They want you to have some kind of technical experience, whether it's in school or professionally. And I was like, okay, cool. So I think I have an idea of like what kind of role I could do. And then then I learned like, well, you could like work in gaming, right? and whether that was trying to work for, you know, like an Activision Blizzard or like a big publisher EA, right, or try to actually work at a game studio. And then the third option being hardware, right? Like you have, you know, everything you need to build a computer.

You have your processors. You have your RAM. You have your SSDs. You have your GPUs, right, your graphics cards. So it was kind of like through these. learnings where I was like, oh, well, I kind of want to go into that, right? Like I leaned a little bit harder towards hardware. And it was through my grad school that I, you know, Western Digital came to campus a few times

and I put in my resume and I got into their internship program and then I eventually went into a three-year rotational program. So I kind of did different roles over those three years. And when I did product marketing, I was like, this is what I really like. And then more importantly, when a position opened up to work on WD Black and our gaming SSDs, I was like, that's exactly what I want to do. And yeah, I've been doing that for three years now. Yeah, I think my, I will have been at, you know, Western Digital now Sandisk for six years in August. Oh.

And can you go over like a day to day over these past couple years? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I feel like day-to-day can absolutely vary. Meaning, like, if I'm launching a product, my day-to-day is like, it's very focused on that product. So like, and I was telling you guys, like, you know, working on the website, right, like what we call the product page. So when you're looking for the drive, so it's spending a lot of time of like, what is the messaging going to be, right? What do we want to say?

Okay, whatever numbers you see on our pages. we have to prove it. Right. So like we, now I'm working with engineering. I'm working with our product manager to get that data and make sure like, hey, this is something that we consistently,

that we can, these are numbers we can consistently get. This isn't just one-offs, right? So you're doing a lot of testing and you're getting a lot of data. And so my data day to day when launching a product is like a lot of like, okay, let's review this, let's approve this. Let's look at these images. What else do we need?

me this data, now I've got to talk to legal and things like that. And then when I'm not focusing solely on a product launch, the rest of my time is kind of a mix of, hey, like, what's going on in the industry, right? So I think that part maybe blurs a little between my personal time and my work time because, like, I want to play video game. So I call it research. I try to do it after work hours, but I too have like our products in my computer. So I try to see how it feels and if I notice anything weird. I'll also just, you know, keeping up with what are, what are Sony, Nintendo Xbox, what are they up to, what games are coming out.

Is there anything new with Unreal, you know, I guess with Unreal Engine 5? So like, I listen to podcasts. I'll go on YouTube. You know, I'll game myself. So that's one part of it. So call it like market research or industry research. And then the other side is kind of doing more of the like internal or our like customer, like our business customer trainings.

Right. So when we have a new product coming, I have to train everyone. I have to train our entire sales organization, anyone who interfaces with some of our, you know, big customers like Walmart or Target or Best Buy, right? So I have to explain to those people, hey, this is what this product is. This is who we are, you know, who we think this product is great for, who it's kind of built for. And like, here's where we stand out against our competition. So it's those conversations.

And then also sharing here's what we call our roadmap. So what products are we going to be launching over the next four quarters or so? No, stuff I definitely can't tell any of you. you guys here. But yeah, that's where a little bit of that, you know, call it maybe the business side of it comes into play where, yeah, it's a lot of fun launching products and figuring out what's going on in the industry and keeping up to date. And then there's also, all right, well, like, you know, we got to sell these things. We got to help the company make money. So I'm training or giving updates and explaining what's coming and what people can expect.

So you've been into industry for a couple years. What has like, I know, you talked about like doing research on like products and seeing what people are launching everything like that. How has like WD Blacks like roll over the past couple years evolved, especially now that it's like a lot of gaming and creative people are coming in using the SSDs? Yeah. No, I would say like, you know, back in actually when I started as an intern, so this was in 2018. 18, W. Black didn't exist, right? Like, that wasn't a thing. That was, I was really jealous. One of the other interns, his project for the summer was to come up with like a go-to-market strategy on how do we develop a gaming brand. And all I could think was like, this dude doesn't even game. Like, why does he get to work on this? And I don't. I was super bummed about it. But yeah, that just kind of tells you that it and kind of, you know, it didn't exist before I even started full time. Right. So like seven. years ago there wasn't a WD Black. And I think what's kind of

evolved is, I think what's really fun is a lot of us who work on the different, on the various WD Black products, especially like on the social media team and creating, you know, the story behind it. We're all gamers, right? So like we talk about what we're

playing. I know our, we have a team that they stream usually every week on Twitch. But it's just like, okay, like this is how maybe we're a little bit more authentic when it comes to, you know, I kind of joke, but it's like, yeah, I'm kind of like trying to sell products to myself, right? Because like, I am a customer, like, I'm almost a target customer in a way. But I think what's like,

what really changed in 2020 was the new consoles, right? So with the Xbox series, S&X, and then the PS5, the, the consoles finally, jumped to using SSDs. Before that, they were using HDDs. And just for context, right, like this new SSD we just launched goes 14,900 megabytes per second. And HDD can go about 500 megabytes per second, right? So 14,900 versus 500, right? It blows it out of the water, right?

it is significantly faster than an HDD. So now we're kind of just, what I'm seeing is like, we're kind of seeing the industry catch up in a way, where video games before were like, well, hey, we can't make a game, or some people do, but like we can't make a game that doesn't work on consoles, right? When we think back to, um, uh, cyberpunk when that came out and there was all these bugs,

all the bugs were on PS4 and Xbox one because they use HDDs. but then PS5 and Xbox series SNX use SSDs. So that was like probably the best example you can see of like, we have way faster hardware and now the game like doesn't know what to do. Right. And so I think that's now we're like coming to like a, I know it's been five years, but still it's like we're at an interesting point of game developers can now make their games go faster

because their hardware is is getting faster. But now we're even. at a point where, you know, the PS5 and Xbox series go, their SSDs are about, they go about 5,000 or 5,500 megabytes per second. And then again, like this new thing we have goes 14,900, right? So it's already double. Like, this SSD is twice as fast as the consoles. So now we got to wait, again, a little bit for the next consoles to get faster and then for

games to get even faster, right? So with PCIGen 5, it's been an interesting, like, yes, like, you'll get some benefits from gaming, maybe not so much in-game, because the games themselves don't know what to do with all that speed. But when you're talking about, like, creators, whether it's someone who, you know, like a content creator that you would see here on Twitch or just like a working professional, right, all they do is make 3D renderings. Or maybe they work on big movies and they're doing all these, what you can call it? visual effects, that's where we're starting to see where like SSDs can make more of an impact. If you think of Mandalorian, right, like that show, I always forget what the technology is called, but like a lot of that show is just like shot in front of like a giant like curved LED screen that like that thing is basically hooked up to like a mini SSD server. Which is generate and they're using Unreal to generate the background.

So it's almost like they're shooting a show in front of a video game in a way. So that's where I'm starting, like we're starting to see as like SSDs and everything get faster and faster where we see that, right? We see it in movie productions. We see it with content creations because now you can stream and record and like not even worry that you're overstressing your SSD. But yeah, so it's like with WD Black we're trying to like, yes, our. main focus has been gamers, but now we're like, okay, we need to start looking at other avenues where people are using this and where they can actually get a lot of benefit, right? Like gaming is maybe like the simplest use case.

And then now we have all, sorry, headset turned off. I guess you did kind of explain this, but like why do you think storage in particular is such a make or break part of gaming or creative endeavors because it is like it's not just storage there's a lot of moving pieces that go into doing something crazy like the mandolorean but why do you think storage is such an integral part of that yeah no i i have to laugh where i feel like you know before i started working here you know you're building a pc a lot of things are expensive especially a graphics card that's likely very likely the most expensive thing you're going to buy so if you're you're in a specific budget range, people are like, oh, you know where I can skimp.

Like, you know where I can cut. It's my SSD. All right. It's my storage. I could totally cut there. And what I've kind of noticed is like, yeah, sure, like 10 years ago, absolutely. Maybe even five years ago you could have. But now we're starting to get to a point where, you know, someone could be, you know,

maybe they just bought a 4080 or something, right? Like a 4090. They just dropped, you know, $2,000 on a graphics card. But then they're like, ah, I'll just buy this SSD that's $30. Right. And then if you're getting bad performance, you're like, what's going on here? And like, well, you bought a $30 SSD. Like, you need, you kind of need in a way, I'm not saying you always have to spend to get the absolute best SSD.

But like, if you just try to cut costs and maybe not look at it, you'll start to see some performance issues. And that can be a really big reason why of like, oh, well, I bought an SSD that go, like, I'm not trying to be mean, but like the Steam deck. The Steam deck uses a PCIE Gen 3 SSD. The consoles use PCIE Gen 4, and then this SN80100 is PCIE Gen 5. So I've been hearing, you know, a lot of other podcasts, right, like I've heard that you can't really play the new AAA games on a Steam deck. It just doesn't work, right? Like, it's too choppy, it's too slow. So that's like where you're starting to see,

okay, like I kind of need to understand what I'm putting in my computer because that could be a reason why you're getting bad performance. Or like your game is taking longer to load than you might have expected. Or maybe you're getting some the model pop bins and choppiness, right? Like, yes, that can be your graphics card as well. But as more games, either take advantage of direct storage or, I know that we haven't heard that term in a while. But the whole point of direct storage is your fast SSD talks directly to your graphics card to make everything even faster.

So if you have a slow SSD or even an HDD, that won't work. It won't happen. You see, Mike, I told you not to buy that SSD on T-MU. You didn't listen to me. What do you think makes WD Black stand out from other high-performance storage brands? Yeah, I think what makes us stand out, I've kind of said this a little bit before, but you kind of have, those of us who get to work on WD Black, like, we're all gamers ourselves. So, like, we try to be, like, as authentic as we can be and not try to be either too cheesy

or, like, too cliche with whether what we say or whatever. Like, we don't want to come across as, like, being inauthentic. So I think that's one part of it. And also just the fact that we try to really understand what's going on.

What are people using our drive for? What excites them about it? And honestly, maybe we see this more. Obviously, like some interactions with social media, but also when we go to shows and stuff, right? I've gone to TwitchCon, I think.

the last three years. So it's always interesting and cool to hear like when people are like, oh, I have one of these, right? Like, you know, one of our products and then like getting to ask them, well, what do you like about it? Like what, maybe what don't you like? What was a good thing or, you know, maybe a good thing or a bad thing about it? So I think that's where we try to stand out ourselves of just,

you know, we're putting in the work to better understand what our audience wants. Right. Like, let's be real. Nvidia isn't making a 40-90 for just like a non-gamer, right? Like the first use case is gaming and then the second use case is like those working professionals and some of those other use cases where, yes, I'm a professional that is doing a lot of video editing and stuff like that. Obviously, like our drive's going to be great for that as well. But like, call a spade a spade of spade.

Like there's what, over a billion gamers in the world, right? There's companies that spend, you know, those AAA games don't, they cost a lot of money and they're willing to spend that money, right? So I think it's also just acknowledging who our main target audience can be. And with that audience, like, I assume you guys get like feedback or you do like surveys and market research about them. What kind of feedback do you usually get from these creators and gamers? Yeah, I would say like, you know, big things, you know, on the positive side have always, been like reliable, right? Like reliability. Like, you know, people not have, obviously like, it can happen, right?

Sometimes someone gets a dud, that that'll happen with any product, right? Not just ours. And then in our response, how quickly we can respond to get someone a replacement and things like that, I think is always, you know, on the better side of things. I know I've heard, at least from our support team that, like, we do a pretty good job of that. We don't have a lot, a ton of people mad at us. But at the same time, like, when we we hear what people say it's like super easy to use, right, whether it's installing. And I think we also tried to create some how-to videos, right? Like I think I have a couple of videos of how to install our PlayStation drive into the PlayStation,

right? So just we're trying to do a lot of that and we get good feedback of like, hey, this was like really helpful. Right. You're able to break it down easily. But also like great, you know, like the speed is what I want. or, you know, I've had this thing for years and it's never, you know, it's never died on me or I've never had any issues. So I think that's where we're starting.

And we're doing some other stuff to get an even better understanding of, okay, well, when you use one of our products or even within our portfolio, like, if you use this product versus this other one, how much more of a performance benefit are you going to get for certain working applications? Like we already do that for gaming. Like, okay, if I have this drive versus this drive, how much faster would I get? But now we're trying to look at other things. So, but I think overall, like, yeah, like we get a pretty good response. You always have some of the negative one or in negative comments. But overall, it's like reliability, the performance, you know, a brand that people kind of understand or just feel like is authentic to who they're going after. Jimmy.

Jimmy's keeping it real, as the kids say. Well, let's get into the drive. We're here to talk about. Mike, you can pull up the webpage. We can show people what it looks like. But Jimmy, what is this new S&80100 and what makes this SSD so special? Yeah. So the W Black, S&80100, NVME, SST.

Can you? Okay. Okay, I want you to say that 10 times really fast. The whole thing. Yeah. W Black, yeah. Okay, W-B-B-B-E-100, NV-M-E-S-D, W-B-E-E-S-D, W-N-A-H-V-L-E-S-D, W-L-E-E-E-S-D, W-Black, S-N-A-D, N-A-E-M-E-S-D, W-B-L-E-L-E-X-D, V-B-L-E-W-L-L-E-S-D, W-L-B-E-E-1-E-1-S-D, WBlock, S&80100, NVMESSE.

Now say it backwards. It's a tongue twister for sure, but let's explain what it is. Yeah, yeah. So really what I would say, two things. First off, like, what is unique about this product is that this is our first, so whether it's W Black or Sandisk, right, this is our first PCIE Gen 5 SSD in like the client. space. So I kind of said that a little bit earlier. So PCIE is like the best way to think of it. Okay. So NVME, the best way to think of it is like the way the drive actually looks. So like the way

the pin, like if we look at the right like the gold on the gold pins on the right side of the drive picture, that's how it goes into your computer. Right. Like that's how it plugs in. So that is like what you would call an NVME or an M.2 SSD. And then PCIE is. And then PCIE is, is how the drive talks to your computer. Right? So this is PCAE Gen 5. And so this is our first Gen 5 drive. And so it's our first Gen 5 drive.

Gen 5 drives have been out in the market for a few years. But this is the fastest one in the market, right? The fastest one's shipping in the market. And so we're getting 14,900 megabytes per second, which is insane. Very, very fast. the fastest, the theoretical, the fastest thing you could make in PCI-Jun 5 would be 16,000. I don't think anyone can actually get all the way to 16.

So like we're close. Like we're getting there, right? And so it goes, like I said, 14,900 megabytes per second read speeds, 14,000 megabytes per second right speeds. So these two are important with gaming because gaming is a bunch of sequela. read speeds, right? Like you're going through a level. So your computer knows like, oh, okay, yeah, we're on level five. So like level five is here.

And then same thing when you save a game, like you're writing to the drive where you are. And then you have over 2.3 million iops. So iops is inputs and outputs per second. Over 2.3 million read and 2.4 million write, random read and random write. So that one, maybe not so much in gaming. You don't see a ton of random workloads happening, but this will be more if you're, hey, I'm just browsing, right?

Or I got to work on my computer. I got to save something over here. I'm moving files around, maybe a folder copy. Maybe if you're doing like a big, I'm going to move a bunch of my Steam games from one drive to another. Yeah, that'll be some sequential, but there will also be some randomness to that as well. Yeah, so those, it's this, all this performance, which makes it two times faster than S&850X. So S&850X was our like our flagship or our very like our fastest PCI-Gen 4 drive.

So that thing went 7,300 megabytes per second. So we went from 7,300 to 14,900. Right. So we double the performance. But then at the same time, we kept the power of. efficiency the same. Or actually, we doubled the power efficiency. Sorry. So the S&80100 for basically the same power draw off of your system. So about under 7 watts of power, you now get 14,000 megabytes per second, 14,900 megabytes per second of performance. Where S& 850X at that same power,

right, under 7 watts of power was only getting 7,300. So it's a lot. It's like, you know, this thing's the fastest drive you can get. It's two times faster than our old drive. Oh, and actually it's about the same. It has the same power draw, right? So that's good for your system, right? That's less stress on your power supply, less stress on your motherboard. And, you know, maybe if you put it in like a Gen 5 laptop or something, right, again, like battery life is important.

So less stress on your battery means, you know, a little bit longer battery life on your, on your portable device. And then, yeah, so we'll have, right now we only have up to four terabytes. We will have an 8 terabyte with this drive coming out later this year. But yeah, those are kind of like the big highlights for me, you know, how much performance, two times faster than 850X. You know, fastest drive you can get in the market right now. And it's super power efficient, which is really good. to kind of like, you know, again, not put a lot of stress if it's your desktop or a laptop. So you just rattled off some really big numbers.

I would see people in the chat here talking about the numbers. So I'm curious, Jimmy, what kind of real world difference are people actually going to notice with this stuff? Yeah. So with this drive, I'll say this. opening and closing games, you'll see a difference versus like a Gen 4 drive, right? So Gen 4, like I said, it goes under 8,000 megabytes per second. Gen 5 can go all the way to potentially 16.

I don't think anyone will actually make a 16,000, I should say. And so right now where you'll really notice this stuff is like opening and closing games, right, in a gaming use case. And I'm focusing on that because, as I kind of mentioned a little bit earlier during today, the game developers want to make sure the games work on the consoles. So if a console can only go 5,500 or 5,500 megabytes per second, that's how fast the game goes, right? So in-game, you won't notice that much.

It'll still feel fast. Don't get me wrong, but I don't want to lie to you and pretend like, oh man in game it's going to be twice as fast it actually won't and this is a huge bummer i'm not going to lie um that because the game developers don't try to have their games go faster when they can you're kind of limited to that so you'll still see some benefits but it's going to be more towards like opening and closing games but where you'll see other benefits will be like like i said If you're trying to move a bunch of stuff, like let's say you're moving a bunch of pictures around on your drive.

I'm going to move this to another folder. Or I have all this stuff and I need to move it to another place. You'll get a ton of, you'll see significantly more speed that way. Or what we're also seeing, like video editing and things like that. So whenever you're trying to work on the drive itself, and now you have all this, you know, significantly more speed. That's where you'll see benefits of like, oh, yeah, like it takes less time for it to, you know, check that I have the file or to create or like, you know,

maybe they make this video slow-mo, right? Like, that'll be significantly faster than a Gen 4. And then what's the last thing I was going to say? I don't know how many people have this, but if you had two Gen 5 drives, you know, transferring files from one to the other would be significantly faster than just transferring from like a Gen 4 drive to a Gen 5 or a Gen 4 to a Gen 4. And then the last thing will be some AI stuff. I don't know. Like what's it called LLM large language models?

So if you're like loading the model into the AI or whatever AI application you're trying to work on, Right. Like that's where you'll see a lot of this stuff. So this isn't like a, you know, 8100 issue or I wouldn't even call it an issue. This is just PCAE Gen 5, right? Every PCAE generation, it doubles. So Gen 3 could go 4,000 megabytes per second. Gen 4 could go 8,000 megabytes per second. Gen 5, 16,000.

Gen 6 will be 32,000, right? So like when you double performance every time you do it, yeah, it kind of takes like people are still, I feel like, you know, Gen 5's been in the market a couple of years. Those guys are, you know, those tech guys on YouTube, they're still trying to kind of figure out, well, how do I like really use all of this? Right. And so I think that's one interesting thing of, I was kind of saying earlier, the technology is is faster than the applications. But now we just kind of need people to make the applications faster. Yeah, and I know there's a lot you could do with these drives, but who do you think this particular drive was made for? Is it gamers?

Is it creators? Is it professional? I would say, yeah, it's like, it's a bit of a mix. So, like, it's definitely made for, you know, who we would call the hardcore gamer. But this is also someone who's like, hey, I can drop $5,000 on a PC, easy, right? Like, and some people do that, right? don't get me wrong. People love to do that.

And so it's definitely made for someone like that who maybe not only games, but like is streaming and wants to record at the same time and maybe and have no issues of gaming, streaming, recording all at once. This Gen 5 drive, right, that's what kind of alluding to. Like people are kind of trying to figure out, well, what could I do before this drive like starts to like maybe get a little bogged down? So that's one use case. And then, yeah, then the other two or the other one would be like that working professional.

So someone who does a lot of, you know, maybe they're a videographer. So someone who's recording in 4K, 8K, I think I heard once like, if you want your video to be 4K, you actually have to record in 8K. Right. And then like if you wanted to be an 8K, you actually have to record in like 12K. Right. So it's like these, those video files are massive. Right. And so it's for those people too who are like, yeah, I kick. I actually, this makes my life easier being able to work with these huge video files with a very, very fast SSD. Will it work for us non-working professionals like me and Mike?

Oh, yeah. It'll absolutely work. It'll absolutely work. You talked a little bit about the like you're able to double the speed, but you're able to keep. the power efficiency pretty much the same. How did that happen? Like how were you able to do that? Yeah, I would say, I think you big, you give the most like kudos to the NAND itself. So NAND is the memory, right?

So if you hear me talk about NAND, it is like literally like what we store all of your data on. So in this case, it's using our newest NAND, which is called Bix 8. So what you can call it? It doesn't really matter what Bix stands for per se. That's just like what we call our NAND, right?

Bix isn't like a term that everyone in the industry uses. But yeah, so it's our latest NAN Bix 8, and it just is very efficient. Like it gets a ton of performance versus like SNA850X is using Bix 5. Right? So we're from Bix 8 to Bix 8 or sorry, from Bix 5 to Bix 8. And we're just able to get so much more performance out of the NAND. And with that, that really, that's a big contributor to the power efficiency numbers. So, like, I would say the biggest, like, the biggest component is the NAND itself.

It's our newest NAND, and we're getting, you know, really good performance out of it. But then on the other side, we have something called the controller. So the controller is basically like the brain, right? The controller tells the SSD, like when you tell it, hey, open the game, the controller's like, yo, find the game and open it. Right. So we're using a customized SMI 2508 controller. So SMI is a company that makes controllers. But this one specifically for SNA80100, we have a custom version.

So like it's not something that anyone else can buy, right? It has some of our Sandoz's secret sauce, some of our IP. and so yeah it's like that combination of the controller and the NAND we're able to get you know we're able to squeeze as much performance out of it while also kind of keeping it very power efficient uh i saw a couple questions uh into chat about this um from crin is what the heck is a heat sink and then from Bali does the heat sink improve performance in any measurable meaningful way or is it just at the gaming aesthetically So can you go into the heat sink aspect? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't have one of the 8100. We're still working on it.

But yeah, so what the heat sink does is, and actually when we do some of the video install, I'll be able to kind of point out a couple things, or not video install, this D install. But the heat sink basically, it's like you take the drive and then you put, kind of call it a heat shield around it. Right. So it's something that's usually made out of aluminum. But what it does is, you know, as you're working on the drive, yeah, that's a really good picture you're showing on the stream of like, so you put this enclosure around the SSD so that when you're using it, and especially if you're trying to stress it out, the heat will dissipate through the heat sink, right? And then the idea as well is that, you know, you have fans in your desktop, right?

So they're blown across everything, right? and whether it's not just your SSD, but then as the fans blow across the heat sink, it'll take that hot air or the heat with it and then help keep the heat sink cool. As far as use cases, so I'll be honest, we're still doing some testing to figure out

where are there certain applications right now where you will see any sort of significant performance difference whether you're using a heat sink versus not. Honestly, it is a little bit more aesthetic and a lot of that has to do with how power efficient this drive is. Some of the older Gen 5 drives, they needed a heat sink because otherwise it wouldn't work, right?

Those things just drew too much power, generated too much heat that as soon as you tried to get them to that full speed, they would just overheat and then throttle, right? So they needed that heat sink to not overheat. So for us, like, you know, if you have, hopefully you don't have, you know, a bad desktop or tower with, or sorry, a desktop or tower with bad airflow. But if you think you do, a heat sink will definitely help with that, right? So if like the ambient temperature around the SSD is hotter than it should be, a heat sink will absolutely help keep the drive performing the way you would expect it. But yeah, we're still kind of doing some testing on our end.

And a lot of that just has to do with like, you know, how good the drive, how power efficient and how good the drive is itself, that we aren't finding a lot of situations where it's like, hey, if you're doing this specific thing, the heat sink is the way to go. But it, again, it can kind of depend a little bit on, you know, what kind of setup do you have? Where do you have your PC? Is there no airflow at all?

Is it hot? Is the room your PC is in? Is it always hot? No, heat sink might help out if it's, you know, you live in a warmer area. But yeah, for right now, it's more to, you know, people, you know, especially gamers, like they love heat sinks. So we want to at least have an option.

And we're the only one with an LED light on it. So you can still have some RGB control if you want it. RGB is the most important. Yes. You know it's for gamers if it has RGB. Yeah, right. I see there's like a ton of, there's actually a lot of questions about this,

and we will get to them at the end of the show here, but we also want to show how to actually install this drive into a motherboard. So we'll get that set up and get to it. Yes, I need to switch my camera, so I will be right back. Enjoy this gift of a seal thinning. for everyone here. But these are some great questions. So I'm definitely going to add these to our thing.

These are some great questions. So we're just setting up the while Jimmy's getting ready for his. Oh, Mike, you said, uh. Yeah, sorry. I had a filler word. Yes. Basic presentation skills, Michael. Yes, we're marketing.

We've got to do it. No filler words. This is a professional. broadcast. Oh, do everything correctly. Yes, please. Yeah, more RGV. Thank you everyone for the awesome questions.

There's a, like, I think SSDs, like power supplies, people usually don't really think about them until it's too late, to be honest. They're like wondering, like, why is my PC so slow or why can't this thing run? And I think the reason why is because it's kind of a, a, a,

boring product until you actually start learning about it and then you realize man like this is actually super important i should probably pay more attention to it yeah um all right we got the jimmy cam going jimmy can you hear us yes i can hear you guys can you yeah we can hear you so jimmy here is showing the nzxt t x 870 e mobo and he's going to walk everyone through the installation process so Jimmy, without further ado, we'll pass it over to you and just show us how to how to do this. Yeah, no, definitely. Also, Ivan, thank you for sending this for me to show everybody. This is a great motherboard, like, really like the aesthetic of it, right? And it looks really sleek. So before I get into the actual installation, there's one thing I really wanted to point out,

and I noticed it's on the back of the box, which is really important. So when it comes to installing your SSD, you have to pay attention to where do I put it? Right? So you see here it says M.2, 1X, P, say, 5.0. So it's telling me, hey, this slot here, this is my Gen 5 slot. And then I have three more, but they're Gen 4. So if I put an S&80100 into any of these three down here, it gets nerfed, right? It's not running at Gen 5.

It's running at Gen 4. So that could happen where if you accidentally put it in a Gen 4 slot and you're like, hey, I thought this thing goes 14,000, right? Or over 14,900. Why am I not getting that? Well, did you put it in the wrong slot? Because if you put it here, it's going to get capped at, you know, under 8,000. Right.

So you need to pay attention, right? So we want to make sure it's here in the Gen 5 slot. And is that slot always the closest to the CPU? Yeah. Yeah, it usually, yes, that's a good thing to point out, Ivan, is that it tends to be the closest to the CPU. So, but there might be exceptions, but for the most part. Yeah, yeah, agreed. It usually, it definitely is the one closest.

Let me just move this completely. Get this more adjusted here. Okay. Take this out. Like that there, put this bad boy over here. Okay. So like this being your CPU slot, right? And then this would be your, usually this would be your Gen 5 slot.

So in this case, it's got its own built-in heat sink, right? So you can see a lot of the Gen 5, a lot of the new motherboards that are coming out, come with this built already. So do you need to buy the HeatSing version of 8100? you know, with something like this, I probably wouldn't, right? Just because it comes with a built-in heat sink, not only here, but this as well. So it probably makes less sense to get it, but you always could, right? Like, you could still get a heat sync version if you want to have it in this slot and show maybe just for the RGB or something like that. So I got my handy little W-Black screwdriver, and this will go here to this screw.

Is that the only tool you need to install this? Yes, that is the only thing you need to install an SSD into your new motherboard. Right? Even honestly, even if I was building a new PC right now, I'd really just need a screwdriver. There really isn't any other big things that you would need. You would also need a hammer to smash the temperate glass on your side panel and posted on Reddit for Reddit Karma. There you go.

There you go. Good point. Okay. So we'll take this heat shield off. Kind of just put it to the side. Oh, one thing I wanted to show. So this is like your thermal Tim. Or, yeah, Tim.

I forget what that stands for. Yeah, it looks important. Whatever that is. Either way, like, this helps dissipate the heat. So like, if I were to install this for real, for real, I would take this off, this blue. sorry, I'll take this blue plastic off to put it on the drive.

I'm just going to put this over here. Let's get our new 8100 out of the box. While you're doing that, can you let people know, is there anything that they should do before actually tinkering with the motherboard like this? Oh, yeah. I think the most important thing to do

is like make sure you touch something metal. Right. So like I was touching the screwdriver. You know, like I don't have any keys on here, but like you could touch a key. Like you could touch a door, right? Like anything in your house that is metal, you do that just to release any static electricity you might have on your body. Right. So if you're someone who is wearing socks and you live in your house as a carpet and you're, you know, rubbing your feet on the carpet, it, make sure you touch something metal before you touch your motherboard because you could fry your motherboard, right? That's the thing that like you risk is like frying your motherboard.

You definitely don't want to do that. So that would say that's like the most important thing is make sure you don't have any static electricity in the body. Yes, we should also remind people that whenever you're doing things like this, make sure your computer is turned off. If the motherboard is still installed inside the computer case here, you know, you don't want to have your PC running while you're doing any of this stuff because it should be a problem. I work customer service and a guy was like,

okay, I say okay to install my SSD and everything like that. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's totally fine. He goes, okay. I'm like, wait, are you on your computer right now? I was like, yeah, it's on right now. I'm like, please turn a PC off. Like some people don't realize that. It was like, oh, gosh.

You're like, yeah, wait. No, not the piece of you're on right now. That's funny. Yeah. So this is an 8100, as you can see, right? Like these are very, very small also. I want to point out, this is Sandisk, right? So to again prove that Sandisk is making this, even though it is a WD Black product.

So the first thing here is we're going to install it here. So again, like if I was doing this for real and I was getting ready to build this PC, I would take this cover off because there is more thermal paste underneath here. And then this is like where the SSD locks in. So I think before this like comes facing down or locked in. So you just want to you want to click it, click it open. So you take the drive. You put it in the slot if I can do that. And you go out of like an angle, right?

Do you do like a 30 degree, I think? Something like, I don't know, 30, 45. I'll get my little pro-trackter on. This is actually installed. Like, this is how I know it's installed, right? Because it does, it kind of goes in on an angle, right? So, or at least I know, like, hey, this is connected correctly. Like, my drive is there.

It's steady. It's not falling over. And then you would just gently push it down. And you can kind of see like this is in, It isn't locked yet, but when I push it down, right, like now I'm locked in. So, yeah. So like now this is this little holder has the drive locked in. I'm connected.

And then the next thing I would do is put this back over it. But before I do that, I kind of wanted to, you know, if I'm thinking of the PC I want to build next, I'm not just going to have one SSD in it. Right. So I would have my 8100 in the gen. five slot. But then I also want to make sure that I have a backup. So again, like this is another heat shield. And you can see it has the thermal, like the tim. There's three different ones, right? Because you have three SSDs. So I was going to put this aside really quick. And then what I

would do, again, all depends how much money you have. And you wouldn't have to do this right away. You could do it later, but I have a 7,100, which I think is last time I was on here, this is what I talked about. Yeah, this product. So this is a Gen 4 drive. So, you know, I have two, two terabytes here. So this is a way that I could get, you know, four terabytes of storage. But again, like, I have a Gen 4 drive. So I'm going to put my Gen 5 in the Gen 5.

And then I might as well put a Gen 4 in the Gen 4. And while you're talking about. that actually um i know you're we talked about gen 4 gen 5 making sure that you're the correct PCIE slot um is the s n 8100 is that compatible with most current motherboards even if they don't have like pcii 5 yes so it it is backwards compatible it will work um you just won't get the speeds right so like if you put if you put it in a gen 4 slot you won't get 14 000 900 it'll work right you'll just get something probably half the speed. You'll probably get something closer to like what 850X is.

So about 7,300. But yeah, that's honestly the biggest thing to call out is like it'll work. Like the SSD will turn on. It just won't be as fast as it could be. And then it'll work, but it just won't be efficient. Just like me and Mike every Friday, right? And then with this one, so this one, you hear more of a click. And that's because there isn't the path.

underneath like this one had. So I know this one's good. Like this is locked in. I have no worries here. But if you notice, this one clicked a little bit. That click, I remember the first time,

like when these types of drives are brand new, and I remember the first time I installed one, I thought I broke it when I heard of that click. I was supposed to crunch like that? I was not ready for that. But I'm glad you mentioned that because that's normal. Yeah, that's normal. Yeah.

Definitely normal. So yeah, so now I got my, my 7,100 in here. I got my 80,100. And then yeah, so then you just put everything back together. So you put this back in the little grooves. Lock that back in.

Same thing here. Make sure that's all lined up. Screw this bad boy back in. And then from a storage perspective, you'd be good to go, right? Like, now you got to. I've put your processor, your RAM, your graphics card would go right here. But yeah, that's that's basically it. As far as the SSD installation is.

Is there anything after like once you get everything set up and turn on to BCD? You need to update the bios or anything like that or is it pretty much? Yeah. So if this is like a brand new build, right, which like in this case it would be, yeah, you got to do two things I would say. So you turn it on and when you turn it on for the first time, the only thing that'll come up will be the BIOS. So likely there won't be too much you could do just because it's going to want internet. So it can download all the latest drivers and things like that.

So in reality, the first thing you would do is once you had a PC all built, you would put, you would install Windows, right? So you'd get your little Windows USB, you put it into your tower. and then you let Windows do its thing. So you get it to update and you got to make sure you connect to the internet. I think usually for the first time, your Wi-Fi won't work. Luckily, like this thing I noticed, this motherboard comes with Wi-Fi and tenants. That's what this is.

But for the first time you use it, you're going to need to connect it directly to your modem. So via, you know, Ethernet cable or something. And, yeah, after you have everything updated and you have Windows and stuff, then yeah, you want to make sure all your BIOS drivers are up to date and Windows will prompt you to do all that. And I think even, I was looking through this a little bit earlier, kind of like the user manual for the other board. So this will also tell you a lot of good things of like what you need to do. This is like I won't go through all of it, but like you can see the same opens up and manual. What is that?

Nobody reads those, Jimmy. I don't know how to read. Yeah, that's a good point. There are some pretty pictures, so that helps a little bit. But yeah, so once you have windows going and everything, then that's when the fun starts, right? And you can start to install everything. One other thing I will point out, and this is probably what I'll end up doing, is like if you already have a PC, but you want new SSDs, new everything, you could actually clone your drive. So to do that, you would need something like this, like this is called an NVME.

enclosure. So you need a bad boy like this. You plug your SSD into here. I could probably take one of these out, whatever. You put your SSD in here and then you use a software that we have. It's called a cronis. And then you plug this into your PC and then you clone your old drive onto your new one. So then you actually don't need to reinstall windows because you just made a copy of your old drive onto your brand new one and then you can build your new PC that way that that'll save you some time but builders hate this one simple trick that's awesome yeah yeah cloning is something i'll admit like i only just learned about it maybe two years ago and like like i said i built my first pc in 2013 so i didn't even know what cloning was um but yeah cloning can help save some time and

and make your installation a little bit easier. Cool. Well, thank you, Jimmy, for walking us through the installation. We have several community questions to ask you. Do you want to hop on to the other cams? Yeah, yeah. Let me hop back on my PC. All right.

And get off of this. Pull up the seal. Seals back up. Man, he makes it look so easy. Is anyone else having trouble with Twitch chat? No, just me. What do you mean? What do you mean?

There's an issue. The fact that you are typing in the chat. It's working. Signal, there is no issue. The chat is working for you. I finally gave in. I finally gave in, actually, I recognize that username. I believe they won a prize from the NZXT Club last month.

That's cool. Yeah. Jimmy, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you for showing us out of this thought, man. That was really, really cool. You make it look so easy. Yeah, no, I think I've...

I think when I build this computer or my next one, it'll be like my fourth or fifth. So I've had two funny instances of helping friends. One was like, I can't get it to turn on. And then I drove like 45 minutes. I get to his house. And I just, I just like squeeze the power cable. like I actually click it in

and then I push the button and he turns it on and he just looks at me and he goes my brother and I spent hours and we couldn't figure that out and then I had another friend who luckily just lives around the corner and he was like I'm trying to play Spider-Man and my graphics suck I bought a 30-something

or whatever graphics card and I come over and then I'm like hey turn a computer off and then same thing I just like push the graphics card until I hear a click. And I go, okay, now, now your graphics card is installed. And he's like, are you serious?

I'm like, hey, man. It's a little thing. It's a little as dumbest thing. All right. We have some questions here for you, Jimmy. From Mouser Car. Can we ask Jimmy where he sees the biggest gains to be made in the gaming storage space? Like, will prices come down because of manufacturing gains or more speed?

Shoot, maybe even both. I think, you know, when it comes into the gaming space, I think it'll be an interesting thing, or like what I'm most excited for will be these next consoles that will likely come out, you know, if it's been every seven, eight years, we're talking about three years we'll have new consoles, right? And they're going to go faster.

So they're going to get even faster, you know, hopefully double the speed because we already know that gen 5 is double the speed of gen 4. So I think once we kind of get to that point, and if the console manufacturers maybe start to realize that like, hey, we should probably just kind of make our consoles like mini PCs that people can upgrade themselves, then I kind of see some more benefits, right, of, okay, like, you know, whether it's Microsoft or Sony, they give a, like, they give, like, they give, me more of an opportunity to expand

how much storage I have. And I feel like the PS5 did a really good job of putting that M.2 slot where you could put any SSD, right? Hopefully you put a WD Black S&850p in there, but you could put any SSD that's fast

enough. So I think that's like maybe where, you know, as gaming gets a little bit more module with the consoles and not so like proprietary, like you need to have this only specific thing that the console maker makes and it costs X much because they can do that, right? Because you're kind of seeing, you're starting to see it even with like the handhelds.

Everyone's starting to make a handheld and you could swap out the SSD in there. Right. And so I think that that's where I'm starting to see maybe like when it comes to us and, you know, us as gamers and like where we can, you know, call it economies of scale, right? As they build more things, but there's more components that we ourselves can change out, then that'll just give us even more of a benefit to our overall experience. Mauser also has a follow-up question. They want to know if the new WD Black S&80100 NVME SSD will work with their Nokia 3310 phone. I don't think it will.

I don't think so. Yeah, they do use a NAN, like, flash memory in phones, but it's a different. It's like, it's built into the phone. It's not, not a, like a swappable SSD. So sorry, Mazur. Okay. Junior is junior asked, should you get a heat sink if your motherboard already has M.D.2 heat sinks. Personally, I think, I would, I would lean towards just use what the motherboard has.

right, especially like this one that I work that we looked at today where everything has kind of a, you know, a heat shield or a heat sink already built in. Like I think you're better off just using what the heat, you know, using what your motherboard gave you. Especially, you know, if you're spending a decent amount of money on your motherboard, you might as well just kind of use it the way that it, that it comes. But there are other motherboards and I'm sure over the next few years we will see, even more cost-effective motherboards that are PCA, Gen 5, right? Because, like, I'll admit, like, the market is still very much Gen 4.

Not everyone has a Gen 5 PC, but in three years, I think, you know, you're going to start to see that transition over. So, yeah, like, as you get, as you start to see some Gen 5 motherboards that have less of these built-in heat sinks than a, than a heat sink model

of 8100 would make a lot more sense. But, you know, I, personally, like, I see something that has all these heat shields and heat sinks already built in. You can save 20 bucks on getting the non-heat sync version and then just using what the motherboard comes with. Too cool for you, B5. While we're on the heat seat topic, have you ever experimented with SSD water cooling with this drive? With this drive, no.

I know there is a competitor that has one. and I feel mixed about it because it's like, that's cool concept. Don't get me wrong. But at the same time, I'm like, so is it just like they're trying to be super cool with a like a water cooled heat sink? Or do you actually need to water cool that heat sink

because of how hot it is? So that's where I like I get a little mixed feelings about that. But no, we haven't experimented with it. A lot of that just has to do with, you know, that's going to cost money on our side. So do we want to make the drive even more expensive and then ask you guys to pay even more? Or like how much of a benefit besides a cool aesthetic would you get? So how many people are willing to spend that much more money and figure out, okay, well, I need to now liquid cool, not only my CPU, but my SSD.

and that can get really costly. And that sounds like a very, very customized build. All right. The last question is not really a question, but it's from Bolly 321 TBD. They say, this is not a question, but rather praise for Sandisk integrity and customer support.

My best experience with Sandisk was about 15 years ago when I claimed warranty on a memory card. I got it replaced, no questions asked. They even advise that I should cut my card in half to prevent someone stealing personal data. I only buy Sandys from that day and I will never switch. So you should share that with your team and Jimmy. That's really nice.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. All right. So now it is time for my favorite part of the show before you wrap it up. If you're still here, you're almost going to hear the secret word, but I'll let Mike take it away and so you can ask you some questions. All right, we're going to need some rapid fire questions. Name off the top of the head, you know, simple one will start easy and we'll start to go into a little harder ones. First one, easy, you know, since you say that you're a gamer, what games are you playing right now? Yeah, right now I am, I've been playing a lot of Doom Dark Ages.

So before that, I was, I was, you know, probably 20, 30 hours into Assassin's Creed Shadows. And then when Doom came out, I was like, all right, like, let's go kill some demons. Let's go to hell. Let's listen to metal music. and so yeah that's what I've been playing right now. What is the game you'd recommend everyone? Oh, man. It can be anything too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a, if you guys really like story, like, open world story games, I still think that the Horizon series, so Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. Like, honestly, like some of the, some of the, best, like, you know, original IP and story that I've ever played. I think, you know, if I'm thinking of newer games, right, those two I've really enjoyed and I know I'm pretty sure they're trying to make it a trilogy. So like, I'm really excited for that, for that third game. But I'm, I'll admit, I'm more of like, I really love a good story and like background and

everything. So like those two I was really impressed with. The only bummer with Zero Dawn was like it came out right when Breath of the Wild came out. So I feel like everyone was like, Breath of Wild is the best game ever, which I admit, it's great. Don't get me wrong. But I feel like Zero Dawn kind of,

you know, ended up in the shadows, and it's a great game. So if you're looking for some backlog, I think you can play it on PC now too. You don't need to have a PlayStation console. Those, the Horizon games are really good.

I love that. Great, great. Great recommendation. What is your favorite game of all time? Oh man, I think I probably said this last time, and I'll stick to my answer. It's a Major, Zelda's Majors Mask. Nice. So this was like, I still have it.

So this is like the original player, Nintendo Power Players Guide. So this is, oh man, I think if I opened this up, it was built and it was made in the 90s, right? So this is when I was a kid. Oh, copyright 2000. So yeah, this thing is that it's falling apart. So it's 25 years old. Wow. This was like one of the first games, you know, what, 2000, I was, you know, 10 or 11.

So it's like little Jimmy got his N64 and like learned how to read surprisingly and was able to follow this guide to, you know, get all the masks and have the secret ending or sorry, the like the fierce deity version of Link that I always just kind of love this game and it was, it has like a special place. it's such a creepy game too with you putting on the mask and everything like that and you've seen the theories. Every time he does it, he's like screaming as he's changing. Oh my, this is a kid's game?

Yeah, right. What's the weirdest tech product you've bought and actually liked? Yeah, this one I was, this is a good question. I'm debating like how techie this really is, but a food scale,

especially ones that like talk to your phone. Yeah. So like that it's just like, okay, you tell it what you gave it. And then it's like, well, here's your macros for, for what you eat. Right. Like I'm, I turn 36 in like two weeks. So it's just like I do have to pay attention to what I eat.

And I will admit I probably use that food scale a lot more than I, than a normal person probably would. But it's important to pay attention to what you're eating and staying healthy. facts. What's more stressful? Launching a new product or trying to explain what SSD is to a parent? Yeah. That's a good question. I had to say,

Ivan, you know, it's funny you had me say, you know, the product name 10 times fast, because I like, I'll send my parents some of the stuff I've done. And that was the first thing my dad said.

He was like, I don't think I could say that. Like saying WD Black, S&80100, NVM, SST, right? He's like, it's a tongue twist. I don't even know if I could say that.

But I think what's more stressful? Probably launching the product. But I'll only say that because I've had a lot of experience explaining very complicated things to my parents going back to when I was in college as an engineering student. And yeah, that's probably one of the things I'm a little bit better at. But I think for the rest of you, it might just be trying to explain anything. technology-wise to, you know, especially if, you know, my parents are boomers. I'm sure your parents, probably everyone here, maybe Gen Xers, right? So people, you know, 10, 20 years older than me, they're not always as tech savvy as you hope.

I've launched, we've launched so many products since I've worked here. And I still say explaining my mom how to turn on Wi-Fi on her iPad up here, like, almost impossible. she she has broken three TVs by just using the remote I don't know how like one time I'm like okay maybe the TV's old second time like this is third time I'm like mom I don't know what you're doing because she just keeps clicking stuff and eventually the TV just breaks I'm like I don't even know that was possible but apparently yeah I'll change my answer it's that because you know I'm I'm I live in LA but I'm from Chicago so like I get my mom calls me and then I'm like face timing her and I'm like oh my God Like trying to troubleshoot technology, you know, thousands of miles away is gets the heart racing. Let's see. What's been your proudest moment of your career? Oh, man.

Honestly, I think this product launch is definitely a big proud moment. But I think, you know, in other terms, I would say the transition I did, right? Like, you know, in 2017, I was like, I was literally helping build diesel engines and trucks. And then now I'm here talking to you guys and showing you how to install an SSD into a motherboard, right? Like, I really went from like, this is a job and it helps pay the bills and like, whatever, I'm smart. I know how to do this to like, now I actually get to do stuff. I find fun and I enjoy. And, you know, going to work is a blast.

where before it was just like, oh man, wake up, sit in traffic, get here by 8 a.m. And like I can, you know, it's just like that pivot I made has just made me so much happier. And I'm proud that I was able to do that. J.R.S. Jr. in the chat says this has, this has lightly less oil involved. True. Very true.

Yes. Less messy. Yeah, I didn't wear a nice clothes at my old job because I would, get oil or like soot yeah soot like what comes out of the engine right he's just dirty all the time and I'm like what the hell uh what would your last meal be oh my last meal I think it would be oh man it would be such a hodgepodge it would be it would be I'll put store tacos um but like like Tijuana style and then it would probably be like a Chicago, not a deep dish pizza, like a Chicago thin crust pizza and a Chicago, like, Italian beef sandwich.

So it would be like pizza, tacos, beef, like, definitely the, some of the unhealthiest food I could eat, but if it's my last meal, like, I'm not trying to eat healthy. Oh, yeah, definitely. And then for the final question, would you rather get $100,000 right here, right now, or you get chance for one million, but you have to hit a hole in one and you only have one week to do it. However, you can try as many times as you want throughout the week. Oh, wow. Yeah.

That's. The original question was a year. I'm like a year. I can easily do that. And then like I'll say, well, let's shorten it. Let's do a week because that makes it like a little bit like a, ooh. So can you hit a hold one in a week? You can try as many times you want.

It's just you have a week to do it. Yeah, that's true. Yards is the whole. I'm going to say since it's a hole in one, I'm going to say at least because like what, 100 something is like I say, I'd say at least 150 to 200. So you're not, you're not, you're not just doing a little pitching wedge, but you're going to, there's some difficulty. Yeah. I think I think I would take, I would, I would try to go after the, the, the million for.

Because it'd be fun if it's like, okay, this is all I'm doing. Well, maybe not fun. It'd be probably sucked towards the end. but like if that's all I got to focus on for a week, I'm not even that good at golf, but I would try. I would try to get good at golf to do that. It's like I'm like, you might as well go for it. Just try.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Would you do it, Ivan? No way in hell, man. I would just take the, I would take the $100,000 and I would just, you know, gamble it, try to win a million, basically. It's not just as good as chances, right? Yeah, probably better chances.

Yeah, actually. Maybe. All right. What are the odds of hitting a hole in one? Oh, gosh. I mean, if you think about it, it's very rare in professional because you only get one chance. But like, you just stand on one side and you just keep hitting it for like 10 hours. I think you could probably get near it at least.

Actually, I just asked chat GPT. So for an average amateur golfer, right? And I guess amateur is someone that golfs every so often. It's 12,500 to one. So you have to hit 12,500 times in a week, basically. Yeah. A professional golfer is 2,500 to one. That's a lot.

I'm excited. I don't know. 12,000, both thousand, 500, about by seven. So you have to hit at least, ooh, you have to hit close to 1,800 a day. And that's just statistically speaking. Tired. That's a lot. You get tired.

I will get tired. Ooh. I don't know. Now I'm not as confident. I was like super. I'm like, oh, just give you the club. Now I'm like, oh, the odds sound a lot worse now. Maybe it does need to be a year because that's a lot of swinging, man.

Yeah. Maybe a month. Still do it. I'm still going for it. Yeah. Yeah, why not? All righty. I'm going to get into announcements.

And then Jimmy, I'll ask you some. if you have any announcers as well. So we're giving way an N6T PC with Intel. You can go to our club nccc.co slash club to learn more. The more poochie points you get, you can see some hard request things. Thank you, Ivan. You see some hard request things of claiming your poochie points.

Go ahead and do that. The more poochie points, the more entries you get. So join in and start now. We're also hosting an in-person feedback event this summer at the N-Z60 HQ. So if you're in SoCal and you want to help kind of give us advice, how to shape our future with products and stuff like that.

You guys can apply at nzxte.co slash summer 2025. And if you guys go and you guys get selected, you guys will also get some really cool stuff. Ivan, do you know the exact date on the event? Yes, but I do not want to give it out publicly in case people, so people can just show up and show up and do it.

Okay, yeah, yeah, so that has to be secretive. But on that note, So the people that are selected will be notified no later than Monday. Here, I'll copy the link right now. Here it is. That's the link right there if you guys want to sign up. We just launched our new bunch of new stuff. We launched a new micro ATX case to H3 flow, a newly updated H9 flow, a cracking elite

420 and a line of Cracker Plus coolers available in 240, 280, and 360 millimeters. So you guys can take a look at n6.cose slash new stuff or exclamation point new stuff in chat. Thank you so much, Jimmy, for talking with us and showing the installation. Do you have any announcements you want to make? Any events coming up? I guess maybe the first thing first, just, yeah, super excited about the S&80-100. So if you're looking to build a new PC this year or, you know, looking for something and maybe future-proof a system, yeah, you can go on Sandus.

I think if you go Sandus.com and you click our store, you should be able to find more info. So we not only have like the product page where you could buy it, we have like a solutions page. You can learn even more about the product. But yeah, other than that, just, you know, keep an eye out. Again, like, you know, we are Sandus now. We are, you know, we are making any of the SSD or Flash products.

And like I said, we'll probably have, you know, some kind of new Sandus brand eventually. And you'll see a lot more of us in explaining, you know, what used to be called this is now this. But yeah, just know that, you know, us on our side, we're excited to be our own company again and excited for the future of what we can give not only for gamers, but for everybody. Yeah. I mean, I'm actually, I literally was like, when we were doing the installation, I was like, isn't my SSD? And it's literally a WD black one too? I was like, isn't this one kind of filling up?

And I literally check. And my SSD is 89 or I have 89 gigabytes left out of my one terabytes. So I'm like, oh, I definitely need to do one soon. Yeah, time for time for more storage. Yep. All righty. So thank you, Jimmy, for joining us. And thank you everyone here for coming in live and watching how to install a new SSD and all the new stuff that WD Blacks and Sandus are, you know, releasing stuff like that.

The code for 500 extra entries into the motherboard and the hard drive or an SSD, sorry, technically hard drive. SSD giveaway for 500 extra entries. This is our way saying thank you for joining us live and kind of holding you hostage so that you guys have to watch us. The code word is WD Purple because last one was NZT black because they're like, oh yeah, well, I think what we'll do WD Purple now. So that is the code for 500 extra entries. So thank you guys for joining us and thank you Jimmy for joining us live on the NZXT

podcast. And make sure tune in live on Friday. at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the official NCC Twitch. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. If you guys have any questions for us, send an email to podcast at n6.com or tag at N60 on social media platforms. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, Jimmy.

And have a very safe weekend, everyone. See ya.