If a particular configuration does have a regular disk access problem, though, then you are at risk of wearing out a 2.5" disk in short order. It's no skin off my nose if anyone is ignorant or arrogant enough (like Aris here...) to wear down their drive--you're just costing yourself money and riskin...

details that a travelstar drive managed in excess of one million load/unload ops. Assume Windows and the drive firmware conspire to force a load cycle every minute. If the drive is on 24/7, it'll use up all those million load cycles after a million minutes, or just under two years. Now consider dri...

[Moderator edit: removed long post (in Latin?), presumably put there by the original poster. If the original poster wants to remove their posts and/or the the whole thread, then please PM one of the moderators. Please see "Mr Evil's" post below, for what I think is a quote of the original post on t...

branko623 wrote:So, I was wondering, about how dangerous would it be to replace the fan and rewire the heater with a nexus or sycthe 120mm?

This has got to be a troll.

Try that and there's a fairly good chance you'll set the building on fire.

Just open a window.

Inwin's new BK623 looks to be potentially interesting for some quiet(ish) small form factor applications. http://www.in-win.us/products/pc_case/BK%20(MtJade)-Series/bk623_small%20copy.jpg http://www.in-win.us/products/pc_case/BK-Series/bk623_003.jpg This thing is tiny by mATX standards yet supports ...

how safe is this? can i damage my drives if i power them up with the system running? or will they just obvously not be recognised? This is completely unsafe unless you're using SATA drives with hot swap support. Kill the power to a running PATA disk when the motherboard is still running and you wil...

Statistically speaking, it's not strictly necessary to control for brand and model when performing reliability studies. If the population is sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse (i.e. no brand or model is highly overrepresented), differences between brand and model will average out. Controlli...

I'm looking to put together a portable no-monitor (headless) server for hauling files and software between sites. To this end, I'm looking for a very small case that supports an mATX MB, 3.5" hard drive and full size optical drive. The whole thing has to fit into a large briefcase (preferable) or in...

Just wondering, what heatsinks would be good enough to passively cool a AM2 Sempron 3000?

I'm looking at building a quiet network server--don't need much CPU horsepower for what I need.

Touch wood, but so far I've never had a good DVD burn fail at a later date. If the DVD passes a byte-by-byte comparison with the data burned to it, then the DVD has remained good. Trusting DVDs without a post-burn compare is asking for it, though. Another trick for DVD reliability is to make PAR2 pa...

High reliability backup is more a matter of redundancy than anything else. The chances of losing all your data are greatly reduced if you keep multiple backups in different locations. In terms of media, external hard drives are the best bet at the moment. Most other methods are too slow or too awkwa...

HTPCs are a niche use. A large niche, but still a niche. For general computing, performance differences between 2.5" and 3.5" drives are far from irrelevant. Seagate's 7200.10 drives have an average seek of 8.5ms and will do a 78MB/s sustained transfer rate. None of the mobile drive makers even publ...

fmriguy wrote:should have just gone with the new WD's...

Reliability is a problem with WD unless you buy a Raptor or one of their 'RAID edition' drives.

There's not much out there at the moment that's both quiet and reliable.

Can anyone suggest a good Canadian source for low-cost off lease/refurb/surplus (etc) hardware?

Most of this stuff seems to be getting deflected to charities these days...

When it comes to reliability, I think the warranty periods speak for themselves. Samsung and Hitachi only offer three year warranties. Seagate drives all have five year warranties--if they made unreliable drives, it would cost them a lot of money in warantee replacements. My inclination is to buy Se...

Relleum wrote:Perhaps the PC-B20 http://www.lian-li.com/Product/Chassis/ ... PC-B20.htm
can compete with the Solo?

When you posted this thread, the second thread down on this forum was discussing the PC-B20.

God-like power.

Failing that, for the world's religious fanatics--Christian, Muslim and Jewish--to realize that blasphemy is a victimless crime and that they've been fighting over a shared delusion.

Failing that, I'll settle for a 20" LP2065 LCD.

Really useful review. Thanks.

Now I just have to decide if it's worth spending an extra $100 on this vs. a Silverstone TJ-04.

You seem to be saying two things about noise levels. Can you hear this case from e.g. across the room or do you have to get your ears within a foot of the fans?

Given the price discount, there's fair odds that buy.com is dumping old stock. Given that the earlier NeoHEs have major problems, it's not worth the savings.

I'm more inclined to think that LVDS is a digital LCD interface rather than an SCSI port.

Don't think thEre's much that can be Done other than replacing the unit. Maybe you could fInd some subtle way to renDer the monitor inoperative so Dell will do an RMA. If Dell won't play fair with you, there's no reason for you to play fair with them. Problems like these are why Dell monitors are so...

You can see the IO ports on the back of the case in the first image. Looks like 2x DB-9 (serial?), VGA, ethernet, modem, PS2 keyboard or mouse, 3x USB, audio, and four other ports I can't make out. I can't say I'd call this much of an industrial PC given that all these ports are exposed on the back ...

In the stock design, warm air from the CPU is used to cook the PSU. A number of people who have commented on this case have just reversed the 80mm fan and used it as an exhaust instead.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1011&pageID=2838

The door is a little restricting but the main case is pretty open.

Isn't really wide open--like this--a bad idea for noise, though? Any grill that lets a lot of air in is also going to let noise out.

*Bump.*

Anyone?

I'm looking at this case, too, as I've been put off by the flimsy construction of the Solo.

There are...issues...with both of these boards. Poorly thought out component placement renders one of the PCI slots on the MSI board unusable. As for the M2N, it's really picky about memory. This board cannot supply more than 1.8 volts to the DIMM slots. This rules out using much of the cheaper DDR2...

You won't have much luck quieting that many HDs. If you can, replace your eight current drives with three 750GB units. You could also look at remoting most of your storage over a gigE NAS or SAN. Leave a quiet boot drive in the system but put the rest of your drives in a ventilated closet somewhere....

What about replacing those 5 HDDs with two or three of Seagate's huge (500-750gb) drives? Fewer sources of noise = easier to damp.