To address the temperatures, I fitted a 12cm fan on the front of the box. The only place it can sit is just above / slightly covering the keyboard/mouse/serial/parallel/.... ports. Crap location, but not sure what else to do (see picture at the initial post, the cr*p location I have chosen is below ...

however your motherboard AND HDD's should support staggered spin-up, which spins up one drive after the other to reduce the strain on the PSU. Very interesting, and just the kind of thing I think my server with 10+ disks would need. How do you determine whether the mobo and disks support staggered ...

Last weekend was spent cutting wood into pieces and put something workable together. I've got some measurements from the mobo temperature sensors. case CPU Diode CPU Socket Initial layout, idle 49 44 66 Initial layout, busy 52 55 82 The busy measurements are taking as the top temperature (as reporte...

Thank you SO much for the replies. That's great suggestions. from reading the websites about the recommended solutions, I think the T-balancer BigNG is the one that best fits the bill, particularly since it can measure so many different spots. I think that would give me the safety that I'm looking f...

gb115b, looks very nice and would do the job. But not as fun as budging the job myself by cutting wood into tiny little pieces ;) Verion, ah but that's the problem. My existing tower cabinet wouldn't fit in there. The two HTPCs are SFF boxes that blow the exhaust straight up so it would be hard to m...

n00btard wrote:Zalman MFC-1 does 4 fans via adjustable knobs, 2 fans via 5V/12V/off switch.

I had been looking at the MFC-1, but it doesn't seem to give an indication of temperatures.

Ideally I'd like the controller to show me how warm it is at several spots in the case AND spin the fans up/down as necessary

NyteOwl wrote:Yes, but you'll likely have to take the time to rebuild the array once you have all the drives the same size. This could take quite a while for a 2 TB array.

Yes.

And?

Cheers, Andy. I'm in Brentwood, Essex (but assuming that our overseas friends haven't got a clue where Essex is, it was more meaningful to register as "London") during the night and in Kensington during the day. The linnen closet is not an ideal location. On the back of it is about 2 inches of free ...

It depends on your RAID controller. My Adaptec 2810, for instance, can take 4 x 300 + 1 x 500 and turn it into a RAID-5 arraid of 5 x 300 + a single (non-RAID'ed) 1 x 200. Obviously you'll only get 1200 Gb out of the 5 x 300 in a RAID 5 setup, though. But at least the controller makes sure you don't...

I need to fan controller that can monitor and control 4 or 5 case fans plus a the CPU fan. I've browsed quite a bit but haven't been able to find anything able to do more than 4 fans. It's for a file server that will be behind closed doors, so the fan controller must be the fancy kind that gives the...

I have a server, 2 HTPCs and a wife who likes to record a lot and store it for eternity. So with room for 10 3.5" drives, my current file server case is running out of physical space for the disks. Of course it's easy to throw a few of the older 100-200 Gb disks out and buy new 750 Gb disks. But eas...

Thanks ultraboy, that is a good help. Nice and easy way to get the 2nd PSU powered up simultaneously. Glad to hear you haven't had any problems with the dual PSUs. I hadn't thought about ensuring that the mobo and VGA was powered from the same PSU, but by pure chance the layout I have in mind only u...

I'm investigating options for a new machine that will be used mainly for storage. I'm likely to need a lot of disks, and instead of upgrading my current (nice and quiet) PSU, I've been thinking about putting an extra PSU in to power the drives. Both PSUs will be connected to the same wall outlet, so...