Does anyone make an inexpensive water-cooling flow sensor with a data output, so that if the sensor stops spinning, it will force a powerdown of the computer? The simple plastic indicators with a paddle wheel are okay ..... but who sits by their computer 24x7 watching to make sure the wheel is still...

Some notes on switching supplies.. They mainly work by slicing up the incoming power into small pieces, but safety is a very big deal to prevent the supply from self-destructing and potentially taking out all your connected devices along with it. - They have a designed MINIMUM amperage draw, and wil...

Has anyone tried making a striped RAID array with Lexar 80x flash? http://www.lexar.com/digfilm/compact_flash.html This appears to have an effective speed of 12 megabytes/sec (96mbit/sec) per card. I'm thinking that by setting it up with an IDE RAID controller, striping data across four of them in 4...

The thermal management of printers and copiers sucks in general, and it's all because of the fusing system. If the printer can do 50 pages per minute, that fuser needs to be very hot to heat up that much toner. Meanwhile you may have noticed that the printer/copier is made out of plastic. A 250+F de...

I'm just going to ignore the whole flame war, and offer some constructive advice on how to simplify and/or make this setup easier to manage. 1. Exceeding the 16-foot USB length limit using Active USB 2.0 extension cables . These are in fact cables with a single-port USB 2.0 hub built into the end of...

Thanks to the Intel Pentium IV heat monitoring system, at least you're not buying a brand-new system. Rather than smoke itself, the P4 will automatically throttle down to keep from baking to death. But just how slow does the P4 get when the magic-smoke containtment takes effect? I wonder how well a ...

Panaflo 3rd wire: Locked Rotor sensing vs tachometer Why does Panaflo offer fans with a locked rotor sensor? Because for industrial applications it allows for a less complicated device design, compared to having to read a tachometer signal. Measuring the speed of the fan based on a tachometer signa...

Yes, okay, so the general concept is covered in the FAQ. But how many fan and/or case manufacturers are actually applying these principles? When designing for silence, do they consider the implications of airflow interactions with other components, or are they just looking at individual components, ...

Whoah, the fish locomotion researcher has some awesome articles on DPIV. Take a look at page 14 of this PDF, with the frames animation of the vortex moving over the fish's body: Drucker, E. G. and G. V. Lauder. 1999. Locomotor forces on a swimming fish: three-dimensional vortex wake dynamics quantif...

Ah, here we go. The flow mapping system is known as: Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (DPIV) Flows of water around swimming fish (method and implementation) http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~edrucker/home/dpiv.htm How DPIV works: http://www.holomap.com/dpiv.htm Particle Image Velocimetry at NASA http://w...

When talking about fan noise, the interesting question is exactly where the noise is coming from. Let's assume that you have very quiet bearings and the motor drive is silent, and the rotor is properly balanced. Where does the noise come from, if all these factors are eliminated? Are the blades vibr...

Well, when I look in the Device Manager for Windows XP, there's an item in there called the "ACPI Fan" that probably controls this. Not everything in a PC is Plug 'n Play. I wonder if you were to change the BIOS setting, if the change could be detected by manually running the Add New Hardware Wizard...

With my panaflo L1A, it's not the hub or the blades getting louder, it's that durn clicking noise of the electromagnets turning on and off as it rotates. But really, this is to be expected as it ages and dust accumulates. Increased drag means increasing torque is needed to keep spinning at the same ...

Well, it's much the same with ATA-133. The drive mechanism and onboard controller typically cannot sustain the full 133 rate for any length of time either, and the actual continuous read/write rate may only be in the 10-20 megabytes/sec range. What I'm saying is that the performance you'd experience...

On the cold cathode subject I'd just like to point out where this comes from. It's not really snake oil, but rather a technical term that really only an electronics technician could care about. If you look at a standard household fluorescent light, you will notice that there are two pins on each end...

This may be considered a cheat of sorts because while it can work to silence your hard drive, it does so only by moving your system's hard drives out of the room.... WAY out of the room, as in, down the hall, perhaps in the basement, perhaps in another building. The key here is Gigabit Ethernet and ...

As the owner of a TI-4600 128DDR, I find the card to run what I would call unnecessarily hot all the time, whether in 3D or in generic 2D windows. I would not call the typical 2D graphics of Windows all that stressful on the card. So why must it run at full power, so hot all the time that it must be...

It's amusing because it makes you want to start a rock band that plays various PC cases as drums. Computer History Museam - IBM 1403 Printer (1964) playing music (Includes MP3 song samples) The User - Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers (Includes MP3 song samples) Music played by IBM Line Printer

A few years ago, a company was making a product known as ZEN CD drivers. It used multiple laser beams to read about 8 tracks of a CD simultaneously, and thus give an 8x increase in read speed over a drive running at the same speed as the ZEN. For those seeking quiet, low CD RPM, ZEN multibeam is the...

How To Really And Fully Wipe A Hard Drive? You need to raise the temperature of the magnetic coating above the Curie temperature (770 C for iron). But as the platters are probably aluminum, and the melting point of aluminum is around 660 C -- you're probably going to have to settle for melting the ...

We need someone to do a drive overheating test. Put the hard drive in a small toaster oven with a temperature probe, and see just how warm the drive can get before it fails, slowly heating the oven by 25 degrees every 15 minutes and run a full seek and read/write test of the drive, from 150F on up t...

It won't "just build itself". There's some sort of BIOS boot tool that you use to create the array. And in the process it will destroy any existing data unless you back up the data first so you can copy it back after the RAID array builds. On the topic of volume growing, it needs to be set up in a w...

I'm not sure on what these max safe temperatures are based. I assume this is for the cover gaskets and drive bearing oil? In the worst case scenario, the actual data on a hard drive should be safe up to approximately 500F, even if the circuitry may not survive. You can probably set the drive in a wo...

It's an air vent, a breather hole. It lets air flow in and out of the drive. When the drive warms up, the air inside expands, and the vent lets the air out. Then when it cools the air contracts inside and some air flows back in. Without the vent, the drive cover and frame could warp slightly from pr...

Expandability without reformatting is possible with RAID, but probably not with what is on your motherboard. That is reserved more for the higher-end RAID cards that cost $500 or more just for the RAID controller. You would likely need an external drive to hold data while upgrading the RAID array yo...

You can actually turn off the swapfile in Windows if your computer has a sufficient amount of memory. The problem is that most people are not willing blow a lot of cash on memory, so the swapfile takes up the slack. Even for a boring office-job PC, 256 megs can be pretty tight, when you tack on anti...

Yes, some objective answers would be nice, except I am unwilling to disassemble a system under warranty to identify this stuff for you. Why not buy one yourself for testing? I believe ALDI will refund your money within about 30 days of your purchase if you are not satisfied with the product. Since y...

-= The Technology Guru Speaks =- ;) A furnace gives you some very unusual silencing options unavailable or at least highly undesirable with a PC. Your type of furnace is pretty much entirely self-contained and requires no actual air circulation beyond the piping you see. Therefore you can completel...

Looks like ALDI has a new one for $799. This is likely the same silent design, but this one even more packed for $100 more than what I bought 6 months ago. Wireless 802.11b, 160gig HD, DVD writer AND another DVD drive, 512 meg, 800mhz bus, wireless keyboard/mouse.. yikes. (This is blurry 'cause I ma...

This is just a pitch for Medion's PCs which are extremely quiet. Links: Medion's home page ALDI International home page ALDI's Special Purchases this week I have a 2.6 gHz PC purchased about 6 months ago from ALDI's. Very nicely equipped for not a lot of money, and virtually silent. First, the gener...