SilentBen's P182 Build - FULLY DETAILED - Suggestions?

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SilentBen
Posts: 41
Joined: Wed Apr 16, 2008 6:08 pm
Location: USA

Post by SilentBen » Sat May 10, 2008 4:47 pm

Correction to the...
Newegg's new drive came in, wrapped once in bubble wrap. This one works ok, <24 hours though!
... statement I made. I've noticed this replacement WD6400AAKS sounds louder then my other one. I'm not really happy about it, but, I think I'll just stick with it. :evil:

All the S.M.A.R.T. readings are good and the performance is ok, no bad blocks, etc, so it seems solid!

That, and for some reason, after I formatted the drive... the Serial ATA AHCI Bios (Intel iSrc 1.07 08042006) will not recognize the drive! I had to turn AHCI off and now things are ok. The Gigabyte GSATAII was disabled too, but I have more on the Intel SATA problems below.. :arrow:

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WD6400AAKS FTW! -- at least for now!

Anyway, here are some pictures of the benchmarks I did with my WD6400AAKS drives. I am pretty impressed!

Drive 0 (Quieter one):
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Drive 1 (Louder one):
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Special Project

As I said before, I had a special addition for my PC. I wanted to add something in my 3.5" bay, and I finally did! I wanted to create a hot plug or swap hard drive, but the product I found also allows for USB and SATA connections!

The WD 320GB My Passport Essential - WDME3200TN
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This actually isn't what I wanted! I ordered the Passport on sale at Staples using a coupon and then disassembled the Passport and took the hard drive out of it. I got a free notebook hdd SATA enclosure out of doing this! See the picture? The hard drive on the right came out of it! 8)

Inside of my WD3200ME-01 (and the 00), you will find a Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT 320GB SATA-2 HDD! At the time of writing, I was able to acquire the Passport cheaper then the hard drive itself. More for less, I love it!

The disassembly of the WD3200TN was rough. I really didn't find an exact article or pictures of this enclosure.... so hopefully mine can help someone else figure it out! :idea:

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It is kind of a U-shaped clam shell that is over the enclosure. I found it easiest to start at the USB connector end, I picked a corner and separated it with my finger nail. Then I used an eye glass flat head screwdriver and slowly applied pressure to separate one side of the clam shell.

Unfortunately, I man handled it a little too much and broke some of the plastic tabs that hold the enclosure snugly. The good part is, it goes back together securely enough without them.

Once you get the clam shell off, you're left with all this wonderful stuff! I seperated it all so you can see the parts. No screws, no glue, no tape! EASY! I just slid the hard drive out and the SATA to USB connector came out with the drive from the metal container.

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Now you have a WD3200BEVT and a free 2.5" SATA to USB enclosure!

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Special Project: Part 2

I was on Newegg and I accidentally found this...
Crucial CTSK01 2.5" USB 2.0 External 2.5" Drive Storage Kit - Retail

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It is a...
- Standalone 2.5" HD/SDD SATA to USB enclosure
- 2.5" to 3.5" HD/SDD SATA Drive Bay
- 2.5" to 3.5" to 5.25" HD/SDD SATA Drive Bay (use included adaptor)

It is really just a SATA notebook hard drive enclosure that fits inside of a 3.5" floppy bay, with a USB converter, so you can use it without having the bay. It plugs directly into a SATA interface on the drive way, supports hot plugging, etc. It gets bay power from a floppy drive 4-pin connector, or you can use a standard 4-pin molex connector with the included converter.

So, it is pretty straight forward and easy to install. I am going to post a few pictures and comments.

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Out of the box...

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This is the rear of the enclosure, I'd imagine it can even plug directly into a SATA power plug and cable without needing the bay as well!

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My ONLY complaint so far, is that the drive seemed a little loose. Any forward or backward motion and I heard the drive moving inside. My answer was to fold a business card in half and put it against the hard drive. Be careful not to block any holes of course.

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Without the drive, mounted in my P182. (Ignore the "scratch" like looking area, it was oil from my hands... my flash amplified it!)

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With the drive. It does not obstruct anything like the front door. Even after I eject it... there is still plenty of room!

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I'm not sure if these numbers are good or not... but these are the benchmarks I got using the WD3200BEVT in the Crucial SK01 SATA enclosure connected to the Gigabyte GSATAII controller.

Bottom line on the Special Project:
I think the addition was pretty neat, but of course, it was not necessary. I have more storage then I know what to do with! This device is VERY portable compared to my full-size USB hard drives. It is also very quiet. It is similar to the WD6400AAKS, that I only hear it when it is doing some work. If I use it, it will be worth it... :lol:

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My only problems are...

I could not get the Intel AHCI BIOS to hot plug with this device! I am using Vista x64, all the updated drivers, etc. It was detected fine with the AHCI BIOS was scanning devices and Vista seen it, but once it was unplugged, it wouldn't detect it again until reboot. There was no safely remove hardware option. :x

My solution was to turn on the Gigabyte GSATAII controller, install the Gigabyte drivers in Vista, restart, and then everything was wonderful. When I plug the drive in, things will freeze for about 3 seconds, and then the drive is detected. I turned off write caching, but I cannot optimize it for quick removal, and I read this is normal. However, it does appear in safely remove hardware. :shock:

The WD6400AAKS issue though is still very puzzling. I'm honestly second guessing Intel's AHCI controller, especially with some of these new SATA drives. According to some google searching, it seems that I am not the only one having with problems and this controller.

I also redid my wiring because I wanted to use the FDD power wire and I wanted to prepare for the new BR/HD drive at the top. It is not as clean as my first job, which regretably, I didn't take any pictures of due to my fustration! :wink:

Image

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Coincidentally, I just found a VERY similar product to the SK01 converter, but branded by Rosewill... in fact, I think it is the same thing, just without the 5.25" converter. :roll: Rosewill RX251-US

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I suppose I am pretty complete at the moment. I would still love to address any questions or comments you may have, so please post! Thanks for looking! :D

AckeDman
Posts: 150
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:20 am
Location: Sweden

Post by AckeDman » Fri May 16, 2008 6:08 am

Simply amazing. Any reason u taped of the top vent? Why not use it as exhaust or intake? why not have any intake at all? Shouldnt u have like more exhaust then intake to get negative airpressure or whatever its called?

SilentBen
Posts: 41
Joined: Wed Apr 16, 2008 6:08 pm
Location: USA

Post by SilentBen » Sat May 17, 2008 7:20 am

A good question! I taped the top air vent to avoid an air shortage. To my understanding (correct me if I am wrong), by keeping the top vent open, the rear exhaust fan will try to pull air directly from it.

In an intake situation, this could be ineffective as it doesn't move air directly over the heat sink. If I had a Tuniq tower or something that was nearly flush against it, it might be effective to leave it open. The orientation of my current heat sink is setup more horizontally... which moves the air from the front of the case to the back of the case. This is another good reason for me to use the Kama Bay... as a (near) direct air intake for it!

In an exhaust situation, it just creates a huge inefficiency! The rear exhaust fan would work directly against it, as the front air intakes would loose pressure to the CPU heat sink/fan, etc.

The toss up between negative (more exhaust cfm) and positive (more intake cfm) is complex. By theory, a negative pressure will cause a draw of air from any opening it can (ex - around the CD-ROM drive, unused drive bays, etc). It makes those fans in exhaust work harder and louder, and also it might cause dust to clutter up (since the airflow indirectly can bypass air filter systems). The good part is, negative pressure could move the hot air out a system more effectively. The positive pressure forces cooler air in (assuming ambient room temps are cooler then ambient case temperatures plus heat load), but it does not exhaust the warmer air as quickly as the negative pressure system would. It may actually circulate it I think.

Without actually being a fluid mechanic or able to measure exact CFMs and so forth, I cannot really answer your question about air pressure. I think it is kind of preference and what you are happy with.

The only reason we have "air flow" is because air moves from the high pressure to the low pressure; the more difference in the pressure, the greater the air flow. Nearly all the components in the case have heat loads, located in "hot spots", with different orientations to the air flow, disruptions and obstructions to the airflow, etc. I'm not going to try to figure all these factors out!

I'm ok with my setup at the moment. It is pretty quiet, pretty cool, and my dust filters are doing their job. In another 2 weeks, I'll probably have to clean them!

(Once again, I'm not a fluid mechanic or physics master... don't quote me on this or use this for your research papers! I'm not a reputable academic source of information! :roll: )

SilentBen
Posts: 41
Joined: Wed Apr 16, 2008 6:08 pm
Location: USA

Post by SilentBen » Sat May 17, 2008 7:35 am

Another thing I tried to mention the other night but I lost the post...

I completed my build and installed the LG GGC-H20L BR/HD-DVD CDROM drive. I had some technical problems using the ICH9R SATA controller again. After I installed the CDROM drive on the ICH9R controller (not on AHCI anymore, just legacy IDE), Vista x64 seen it ok, installed the drivers automatically, etc.

However, PowerDVD 7 Ultra did not recognize any BR or HD-DVD movies. It kept coming up with a message about an unrecognizable disk format.

So, remembering my past experience... I decided to hook the ODD SATA CDROM drive up to the Gigabyte SATA II controller instead. Needless to say, things worked great after that... sort of.

(Note: The JMicron ports are the 2x purple color... the Intel ICH9R are the 6x yellow color)


My new problem was anytime that Vista was looking for the CDROM drive, it was freezing and locking up for a few seconds. The problem turned out to be that Gigabyte's drivers (on the web) for the Gigabyte SATA II controller were out of date and causing the hang up. After doing some research, the GB36x SATAII controller on the GA-EP-35-DS4 motherboard is a JMicron JMB363 or JMB36x controller.

I installed the latest JMB36x drivers from JMicron's FTP site, using the self-installation package for WinXP/Vista, and selected the SCSI capabilities over the ATA, and now everything is fixed!

Even when I use the 320gb drive now... it is as fast to open as a flash drive is, no lag or delay!

I hope this helps for anyone else with this problem.

Moph
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed May 21, 2008 1:37 am
Location: South Australia

Post by Moph » Tue May 27, 2008 8:45 pm

Great buildup Ben!

Built a very similar system myself last weekend ... buildup thread if you're interested is:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp? ... =20863&p=0

My posts are quite long, so pretty piccies are near the bottom of Page 2 if ya want to skip to the good stuff.

Am playing with cooling at the moment myself. I'm aiming for good circulation with near-silence, which to me means lots of S-Flex 1200's @ 5V. I've modded the case to fit an S-Flex in front of the lower HDD bay, another in stock position in the upper HDD bay (but no HDD caddy installed), one each in the rear exhaust and blowhole, and S-Flex 1600 on the TRUE cooler. Very, very quiet at 5V, but awesome airflow and still quiet at 11V. Q6600 is stable at 3.4GHz @ 1.35V currently, and will be pushing higher once I've finished lapping the cooler base.

Will be experimenting with blocking vents up and various other configs to see what gives the best airflow through the case (low turbulence but minimal dead spots / hot zones).

With all fans on low and running at 3.4GHz the CPU is at ambient + 6 degrees at idle, and ambient + 34 degrees during burn (or +28 with CPU fan on 11V). Pretty happy with that :) At stock speed (2.4GHz) I can undervolt stably to 1.0000V which gives idle of +2 degrees and burn +12 degrees!

Temps measured using CoreTemp under WinXP Pro.

MrMartin
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 3:52 am
Location: netherlands

Post by MrMartin » Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:31 am

nice build man, I know others have similar ones.

But I have one question, perhaps it is a bit silly but here it goes.

In what direction does your PSU need to be?
Fan up or Fan down?

Any ideas about that?

figment
Posts: 232
Joined: Fri Feb 01, 2008 10:15 am
Location: "Fake" Virginia, US

Post by figment » Sun Jun 22, 2008 5:48 am

It doesn't really seem to matter.

I have a build similar to Ben's and I went fan up. The idea was that it would suck in less dust if the fan was on the top.

My PSU (Modu82+ 525W) currently runs its fan at the minimum speed (about 420rpm) and the hard drive in the front never breaks 40C.

However, I know several people also run fan down with this and other PSUs and have no problem. So its really up to you and it probably won't matter at all which way you go.

jhero
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2008 11:13 am
Location: ottawa

Post by jhero » Tue Jun 24, 2008 4:32 pm

Yep, my fan is currently down and although my fan speed does usually rise to around <800 rpm, I can't even hear it

I do however have 3 HD's at the front (a raptor, 2 seagates) and could explain the high rpm since each HD is around 50-55 degrees according to Everest

MrMartin
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 3:52 am
Location: netherlands

Post by MrMartin » Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:18 am

I was wondering, is the thermalright cooler touching the side door of the p182? or is there a minimum marge between them?

This thing is so huge, and I do not think it will be good if it touched the side door, right?

So how big is the margin?

dragonfire
Posts: 62
Joined: Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:23 pm
Location: Massachusetts, USA

Post by dragonfire » Wed Jul 30, 2008 10:30 am

Another question, when you put the right side of the case back on (behind the mobo), how hard did you have to press on the cables? Phrased another way, was the case side panel slightly bowed outward from the pressure?

Thanks!

rei
Posts: 967
Joined: Wed Dec 08, 2004 11:36 am

Post by rei » Sat Aug 02, 2008 12:20 pm

Instead of black construction paper (which can leak blue LED light if it's especially bright) I find that cutting black electrical tape the size of the light makes for an unobtrusive blocker.

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