Suppose you wanted to build 3TB worth of storage. What would lead to the quietest overall solution? It depends on the style of usage, and whether or not it's acceptable to spin down any drives. c) 6x some quiet 500GB drive, 3 or 4 platters per drive = 18 or 24 platters total If most of the data is ...

You certainly have the right idea abandoning the original case entirely. I wouldn't bother trying to run the thing entirely fanless--you ought to plan on at least one 120mm or at least 80mm fan somewhere in the mix to blow or suck air through the heatsinks. Definitely you want to figure out if the m...

I don't know about you, but I'll be keeping my eyes out for some obscure San Francisco plastics outfit taking a patent out on "transparent aluminum"...

I couldn't tell from the pictures what kind of hard drive mounting the 900 used. Does it even use "semi-soft" mounting like the Solo/150? You won't be able to tell from the pictures. The hard drive mounting is weird, in order to accomodate the rugged solid box sides. Visualize that the hard drives ...

I agree, it is effectively the same as the Lian Li I pointed out above. Even better, I like the bottom-mount PSU placement. However, I'm not really hot on the 900's looks. If it had a solid side panel (no vent or window) and a flat top (instead of the fan and whatnot), I'd probably pick one up. I t...

Have you looked at the Antec Nine Hundred? It has nine bays somewhat like that case, but it also comes with front 120mm fans for the hard drives and a huge 200mm exhaust fan. I recently picked up an Antec Nine Hundred for my main server. It keeps everything nice and cool, and it's also a real looker...

is it not possible that the actual seal for the pipe is below the membrane, which is purely there for cosmetic purposes? and possibly some air is trapped under there at atmospheric pressure, hence the bulging? Hmm...that actually makes a lot of sense. Look at that second link: Some HSFs . In the mi...

I have no idea what the heck that NPH mumbo jumbo is supposed to be about. The old Cool Scrapers I have simply described them as "stubby heat pipes". Whatever's on the inside, they work nicely. The ones I have are capped off by a decorative cap made of thick black plastic (it has decorative "bat win...

I have no idea what "NPIH" is, but I do know that the Cool Scraper CPU heatsinks I have are obviously not solid copper (they don't weight a ton), and they work well enough to fanlessly cool a Sempron 3100+, which is all I've ever asked of them. I doubt they work as well as traditional thinpipe heats...

It looks nice! That CPU fan has got to go, of course.

I still think you should have just gone with a normal flat top and left the PCI slot area open to allow air to exhaust out the rear. Not that it matters now, of course!

Maybe not. Most of us avoid post-Northwood Pentium 4's like the plague. These inefficient CPUs generate lots of heat requiring more airflow to operate--as well as causing the PSU to draw more power so they require more airflow also. All that extra airflow translates into more fan noise. Nothing pers...

I have used the older version of this cooler in four builds--they were available for only $15 for a short time here in the US (close out sale). The older version had a silly "bat" themed look. The new version looks much nicer, but apparently the fins are a bit more tightly spaced.

I never really kept track of how long...maybe a few months, at most. I didn't put any special load on them...maybe a bit less load than usual because of the use of no hard drive or a 2.5" hard drive, and of course no fans. The only PSU death which really surprised me was the fanless AT PSU I was usi...

I've killed more than my fair share of old expendable PSUs by running them fanlessly (on purpose). It will definitely increase the chance of the PSU dying. If you're not up for a fan swap, at least run the computer with the side open and use a small desk fan to blow air around. It's only temporary, ...

Forget about the Celeron D. If you care about power consumption or noise level at all, there is no reason whatsoever to get any Pentium D or Celeron D.

They already did, a couple years ago, I think. This clicking issue is pretty famous here on SPCR, since it started some time shortly after WD Scorpios got some rave reviews for silence here. Basically, it was like this: 1) Some people here on SPCR raved about how silent their new WD Scorpios were. 2...

Why is Anandtechs first hand experience any worse? Because they don't specialize in quiet computing, so their testing labs won't have a low noise floor. You have to go to some effort to remove noise sources from a testing lab--including the computer you do the testing with. In contrast, many people...

Well if we are purely talking of johnsbys interests, haven't you read that he wouldn't go for a raid-0, but rather for raid-1, because he's afraid of losing data. It depends on the situation. RAID1 is good for uptime, but it can be bad for losing data--anyone or anything that erases data on one dri...

Erssa, reread the first post:

johnsby wrote:...I need to have 1TB storage available avg. 6 hrs/day...

He needs 1TB of storage available around 6hrs/day. If that's not for a SERVER, what is it for?

I wonder why they don't make LCD displays with 2048x1536 resolution. 2048x1536 is a rather common maximum resolution for graphics cards. I would have thought it would make for a logical size between 1600x1200 and 2560x1600. Currently, I use an IBM brand Trinitron CRT at 2048x1536 and it's wonderful-...

Well if you were using 2 500gb drives you would raid stripe them which would make them almost twice as fast as the 1tb drive, wouldn't you? Nope. First of all raid-0 doesn't double performance and second, the Hitachi with it's 32mb cache has a big lead on the 500gb drives, the raid-0 might be faste...

I only have one 2.5" drive that's been in constant 24/7 use long enough to make a useful data point. It's a Western Digital Scorpio that's been in near constant 24/7 use for almost two years cooking within a crude homemade silencing enclosure. For all appearances, it still looks as good as new, and ...

That rear case fan is blowing inward at the CPU heatsink, right? This is blowing CPU heated air into the case rather than taking it immediately out of the case. Maybe you might get better temperatures by flipping the fan? By flipping the fan, your CPU temperatures may increase a bit but the chipset ...

How can I convert calories to watts? Exercise. :P Seriously, a calorie is a unit of energy, while a watt is a unit of power--power is energy/time. They aren't directly convertible, because you need to specify an amount of time involved. However, you can figure out a person's average power by taking...

Silly question--would an 80gig 3.5" drive from last year be single platter? They haven't made 3.5" drives with 40gig platters in a long time, right? What about 100gig?

Thanks!

Wait-a-minute. I just noticed that the fan was already set to blow upward into the case, in its stock configuration! I was wondering why the PSU was placed on the bottom...with the typical PSU configuration blowing air out of the case, the airflow would have been upside-down compared to the typical ...

Oh, the dust will come in either way! But my experience with bottom mounted PSU's blowing air upward into the case is that the rear grill acts like a dust filter. Sure, the holes look too big to make for a dust filter, but just give it a few days/weeks. In short order, the rear grill will be covered...

That's a nice, big CPU heatsink! You should give that 80mm fan a fair shake by seeing how loud it is when undervolted to 5v. You can also flip the fan to blow into the case.

I'd go so far as to say it's a BETTER idea to put fans of different sizes in series than to put fans of the same size in series. My experience with putting two 80mm fans in series is that they tend to weirdly interact with each other because the speeds are almost the same. The current going through ...

Trekmeister wrote:A pic of my A4000 and another.

Is that a homemade parnet cable at the bottom of that second picture?