The solution is quite simple actually. Take regular backups. You don't need redundancy on the backups and using JBOD it's not that expensive. It's still far more expensive than one additional drive for parity, and often not really an option on the huge arrays many of the users here have or plan to ...

ZFS can reduce the risk of encountering an unrecoverable read error during a critical time such as rebuilding when compared with more traditional RAID5 implementations. -ZFS stores multiple copies of metadata even on a single drive so if corruption happens to metadata it can be recovered (Had this h...

Do you use dual monitors? Downclocking on all the Nvidia cards are broken when dual monitors are used.

People buy the Velociraptor for the lower access time due to the higher rotational speed. A random access time of 10.3 ms does not outperform the velociraptor's 7.2 ms. AFAIK Seagate drives tend to be slower so I'm not sure why they used those. The 640GB WD blue has a seek time of ~12 ms with no sho...

I have that 4 bay Chenbro case with an Atom 330 board in it, and it's a fairly sweet little system. I had to cut up the case a little bit to add a big fan blowing on the processor and switch out the drive bay fans, but it's a resonably quiet solution. But the problem with using this board in it is ...

Pair it up with the Chenbro case that has 4x hot swap bays and it would make a really nice low powered file server.

Supposedly an LED backlit LCD does not have squealing. There are some "green" Dell LCDs that use an LED backlight.

Well now I can get a HX850 for $142+ tax. Is this even worth trying? I mean.. it has a higher fan starting speed.. but.. thats tempting. I guess its not all too much better than the $150 AR I got on the ZM850, but this has no rebates :? Why do you want to spend $150 on a PSU when you can spend <$10...

Ok guys I just bought the Nexus. It has 3 pins but the PSU fan only has two. The Nexus has yellow,red,black and the PSU has red and black. How do I wire this up? I put in the yellow and black but the fan doesn't seem to be starting up. Red to red and black to black. Yellow is the RPM reporting wire...

Ok guys I just bought the Nexus. It has 3 pins but the PSU fan only has two. The Nexus has yellow,red,black and the PSU has red and black. How do I wire this up? I put in the yellow and black but the fan doesn't seem to be starting up.

The FirePro 8700 is the professional version of the 4870. The 4870 pulls about 130 watts at full load. 225 watts is a bit of a conservative figure.

You can use a Kill A Watt power meter to check your PSU's actual power draw.

Well in theory if the PSU is properly thermal controlled it should keep increasing the fan voltage until it achieves a target temperature. So if the Nexus spins slower at the same voltage as the Noctua the fan controller should be applying let's say 7v to the Nexus but 5v to the Noctua to get to the...

According to this post the Nexus 80 mm doesn't start properly with the Neo HE 550w. Maybe the Earthwatts supplies more power to the fan header?

Yeah I think the Scythe or Noctua is a better choice due to higher RPMs since I plan on using the PSU header.

I can't find many posts about the Kama Flex though

Newegg has the 1500 RPM for a good price ($10) with free ship but they're out of stock at the moment.

Some stuff I found local:
Nexus 80 mm
Noctua 80 mm

My Neo HE 550 is pretty noisy and I thought about replacing it with a Nexus Value 430 but since I already have the Antec why not try a fanswap?

Any suggestions on what's a good replacement fan? I have seen suggestions for 120mm but this PSU uses an 80mm.

This problem has been there since the first generation P180 silver. Amazing it hasn't been fixed or looked at 3 - 4 (P180, P180b, P182, P183?) revisions later. It's one of the few weaknesses in an otherwise solid case.

For my rig I ended up sticking with one soft mounted rear exhaust.

Jeez you guys are brutally honest in your reviews. As a reader I appreciate it but I hope it doesn't discourage companies from sending you guys more review material

There is more to the issue than just cache. Intel's X-25M doesn't use any DRAM cache for user data and yet it is one of the best performing MLC drives currently on the market. The bottom line is that as of this point Jmicron hasn't been able to develop a controller without issues. I would be cautiou...

In my experience the only solution to idle noise is enclosing the drives. A lot of hard drives and silence just doesn't work unfortunately unless you're willing to shell out a bunch of cash and get enclosures for all of them. It's better to go with a single drive or SSD and use a networked storage i...

My file server is currently set up with some temporary components. It's an AMD Phenom 8450 and Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H motherboard with 6 hard drives (4x 640 GB Blue, 1x 640 GB green, 80 GB IDE HDD, Samsung 400 GB). This is a 24/7 system so power consumption is a major concern here. I'm looking for ...

aztec wrote:the Seagate the only single-platter, 7200rpm drive in this roundup.

Anyone else make a single-platter, 7200 RPM that's 250GB or 320GB?

They're all dual platters...

I think there was a blog post awhile back about building an energy efficient server and how an article would be out soon. Any news on that front?

The GTX 260 is also about 3x the price of the low power ATI cards I was looking at... Power consumption does not seem to be that good either, similar to a 4850 in fact. Did I miss something? I don't know what the situation is in the UK but in the US the prices are about the same. The 4870 1gb is ab...

Just a quick update. I reassessed my gaming needs and realized I don't need such a powerful card. I've replaced the 4870 with a passively cooled 9800 GT and I'm very happy. Much lower noise and power consumption. MoJo the GTX 260 has lower power consumption for similar performance. I think it also d...

These boards are finally hitting the retail channel for those who have been waiting. So far Newegg has the single core version with and without external power brick in stock. The version with the external brick is only $20 more. Really wish it came with a single PCI 1x slot but other than that it's ...

What kind of major issues with the 4870? - chronic coil whine under load - driver problems Well I think pretty much all the high end graphics cards suffer from coil whine. The GTX 260 definitely does. I've heard some flavors (non reference) of the 4870 are a bit better like the Asus 4870. Anyone tr...

Well my VRMs also go over 100C under load... but personally I'm not particularly bothered. The warranty is void anyway, and the card unsaleable, so what's the worst that can happen? I have major issues with the 4870 that make me wish I never bought it, but the VRM temps ain't one of them. What kind...

I think I'm just going to get rid of this card. There doesn't seem to be a way to cool this thing down reliably in a quiet way

I just installed the Accelero S1 on my 4870. Instead of using the heatsinks that came with it I reused the stock 4870 base plate to cool the VRM and the memory like what is suggested here. I've got a Scythe medium speed slipstream on it at 7v. GPU temps seem fine at about ~60C but the VRM is reachin...