There's no reason to do so. Wax is flammable and a hydrocarbon product, while coconut oil is renewable and non-toxic. Adding any solid such as metal oxides inhibits the natural convection that makes liquid oil such an excellent coolant. Remember the transformers on power poles - just oil, nothing mo...

The coconut-oil PSU is still running (after moving to my new home last summer). It's been on 24/7/365 since being immersed, without a single problem. Only issue is in summer it's hard to get it to re-solidify even if unplugged for a day. It still looks exactly like the pictures I posted here before,...

The whining seems to be due to a particular load which I placed on one of the molex peripheral connectors: a new 500 GB Seagate IDE drive. The drive itself is a bit loader than quiet. I moved the drive over to the other power 'rail' today and the whine all but disappeared. It may be total load on th...

Um, vegetable oil is non-conductive. Knock it over and the only problem would be cleaning up the oil. Using silicon carbide instead of oil would solve that problem too.

Great news! I just installed my new Bidirectional SATA-IDE adapter between my chipset primary IDE port and Rator SATA drive. Here is the link to buy these (ridiculously cheap at $3 too!): High speed SATA IDE Bilateral Adapter Converter New EDIT by Mod: fixed the 3-mile-long link for you, again. And ...

PSU is still working nicely, but lately I detect a slight high-frequency whine.

My next PSU-in-a-Pot project will use the same pot, but silicon carbide fill instead of oil: http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings ... amics.html

Yesterday I put my new Seagate 500GB IDE drive into service! Also according to plan, I removed three SATA drives which weren't spinning down. The new drive is on the chipset IDE controller and spins down nicely. So at night when I'm watching video, only the Raptor is still spun up. The noise differe...

I can only speak from my personal experience; my drives stay spun down unless I access them, on an individual basis. However, I've shut down lots of services and disabled lots of crap in Windows; an untweaked installation would be less likely to spin down drives. As you say, dismounting works, but o...

Indeed you are correct; having no mounted volumes on a drive guarantees (providing Windows is set to spin drives down, and the controller supports it) spindown. However, just not having any processes accessing any volumes on a disk will also guarantee Windows spins it down, again provided the contro...

without using hdparm, will Windows own power management spin your drive down? also, is your SATA controller (ICH integrated) running in native SATA or IDE mode? You can check by going to Device Manager, and finding if your controller shows up under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" (IDE emulation mode), o...

I found this topic after much searching

viewtopic.php?p=376114#376114

Here's a thread on StorageReview documenting spindown software/hardware support. You might be interested to read it.

http://i9.tinypic.com/8b58w7o.jpg Good News! Today my VT6410 two-channel PATA IDE controller arrived from eBay! So I popped it into a free PCI slot and hooked up a disused 30GB Maxtor IDE, and whaddya know it spins down! the silence was roaring as my hard drives were snoring even the Max on its spi...

Ah, finally! The definitive document: SCSI/ATA Power Management http://sg.torque.net/sg/power.html "Those states marked with "**" are the resultant power condition state after a START STOP UNIT (start=0) SCSI command has been executed. For (s)ATA devices the SCSI-ATA Translation draft (SAT at www.t1...

[wurlug] SATA power management http://lists.nluug.nl/pipermail/wurlug/2005-June/001131.html I got the same problem, using a 2nd sata drive only as backup. Unfortunately, I have not found a solution yet... As I understand it, sata does support spindown but the ioctl function is not implemented in the...

Yet more... https://secure.sccs.swarthmore.edu/pipermail/slug/2005-August/006338.html (putting this back on slug...) Dan wrote: > Actually, now that I look at it again, it looks like sdparm was > failing silently at putting the disk in standby mode. Yeah, I was a little surprised when you said that ...

And here is a very interesting article on SATA shutdown: http://linux-ata.org/shutdown.html When a disk is powered off, it needs to flush its write cache and then unload its heads so that they don't crash onto the recording surfaces. Most disks have mechanical mechanism to unload its heads even when...

Here is another thread about the same issue:

Internal additional Sata spin down
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p ... opic=24303

Of course, but the load is symmetric if it is horizontal. If it is tilted, the load will not be symmetrically distributed but will have a more complex distribution that will require either fluid dynamics computation (FDB) or mechanical simulation (ball) to predict the motion path / particle flow cha...

Leaving aside for a moment the possible gyroscopic effect, I'd like to look at the device in question as if only purely gravitational effect was operative. In this case, any orientation but case-horizontal would result in an uneven load spacial distribution on the bearing(s). Whether mechanical or n...

Today I've had some more thoughts on why spindown works on all IDE controllers but only on some SCSI (ie. SATA) ones. The idea is that the IDE controller isn't doing any translation, it is just passing the standard ATA commands sent from Windows directly to the devices: Windows (ATA command sent) ->...

Reviewing my setup, and assuming that the VT6410 IDE controller supports spindown, I have three problem drives, all SATA. [C,I]....NO.....{Bus Number 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114] [E,H]...NO.....{Bus Number 1, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114] [F]......NO.....{Bus Number 3, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI31...

After much research I've found that this card requires CFs that are set to 'fixed disk' mode, if it is to be used for booting Windows, or used in an array. Fixed disk cards are rather hard to get, and Transcend's don't run in Ultra DMA, only multiword DMA mode 4.

As evidence of my presumption that some controllers support WinXP's spindown and others do not, below I'll provide links to other sites/forums posts which provide others' experience: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

I've been having fun with my PC's spindown support :) Using an A7V8X board with 3 different controllers and WinXP SP2. Found by experimentation that the BIOS must be set to spin drives down (after any time) and also Windows must be set (to the desireable time). If either is not set, no spindown occu...

Indeed... my PSU is still running nicely, it's been up 24/7 so far. No rancid smells or polymerization yet. The faint coconut odour lasted about 1 month and is now gone. Solid-state drives... the last 2x1GB DDR sticks should be arriving for my iRAM SSD within a week. Already have 1 iRAM running 1GB ...

No problemo. The oil melts in the palm of your hand, like good milk chocolate. So it will quickly 'melt into' the crevices of your hot device & provide luscious cooling.

Every day, I press my hands upon the warm belly of my 'Black Buddha' and gently rub him... This brings me good luck!

The project is complete! Took three days of work/downtime. I learned a few things, and there were only two items which were not expected: 1. The pot's handles are riveted on; the rivets are gasketless, so oil will leak through them if its level reaches the rivets. 2. The stainless steel lid is uncut...

Wires & other obstructions cause turbulence in the "laminar flow" of the oil, and make it difficult to remove the supply for maintenance. And yes, most PSU heatsinks are electrically "hot" with high voltage. My most difficult problem yet to be solved, is how to bend 20 12-AWG solid wires to get them...

Last supplies bought!



1. 10 small pointed screws

2. 6 cute hard rubber feet

The screws will screw through the existing holes in the PSU PCB, into the cute little feet!