There is no end game other than doom for a race of beings (...snip) Do you share a jail cell with Lyndon LaRouche? No, I used to sail on the Calypso with Jacques Cousteau: “The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our surviv...

Okay, I see the F@H requirement. This might necessitate adding another box vs. adding another card to your existing box. Maybe if F@H is important, you should consider building a box using one of the new Penryn-based Xeons when they come out 1Q08. That will give you a 2Ghz+ quad-core chip within a 5...

If these drives are just for content and lightweight usage, I would consider getting another 3ware card and putting it into your existing server. Then add a kit to convert the 3ware cables from internal to external (see pc-pitstop.com for examples). Then get another CM Stacker and fill it with drive...

There is no end game other than doom for a race of beings that puts the love of money above all things. This is a genetic defect, the value of a meaningless abstraction, instead of tangible improvements in quality (i.e. evolution). Humanity, for the most part, has shown itself to be weak, corrupt, v...

You won't go wrong with Bluefront's Sanyo Denki recommendation. It is a well made fan, offering a quality level way beyond what is offered from most other vendors.

Many times "ticking" is just the heads moving. If you have any sort of disk indexing active -- Microsoft, Google Toolbar, Yahoo, etc. -- you will have a low activity level of disk access to support the indexer(s). This activity often produces a "ticking" sound. To help distinguish between "ticking" ...

lm wrote:Buy a chest freezer, install a modified thermostat, and witness 2minutes/hour duty cycles

Is this for real? Where would one find an appropriate thermostat? Or find instructions on how to build one? Thanks.

If you are looking at a 5-15 year service lifetime for this machine, I would get a newer machine. While it may still be possible to track down parts for Pentium III boxes, it may take more time and energy than you are willing to invest. The same goes with drivers that will likely be phased out/disco...

If your machine is going to be on 24x7 then you need a machine designed to be on 24x7. Unless your 2.5" drives are "E" series Hitachi drives, they are not designed for 24x7. Even the cheapest Dell server includes server rated drives, not consumer drives. Personally, I would wait for a Dell sale and ...

Can someone please comment on the suggestion that a buzzing power supply is an indication that you've chosen a power supply that far exceeds your power requirements? For example, you've chosen a 500W power supply when all you really needed for your system was a 300W power supply, and that situation...

I would start slowly. It is a tiny device which isn't using much power, so it doesn't need much cooling either. Starting with holes in the case for some airflow and a fan will do a lot I think. If that ain't enough you can always get more enthusiastic with bigger cases and bigger fans :) Sigh. Peop...

A few suggestions come to mind: 1. Mount the router circuit board in a larger case. The current case is too small for adequate cooling, much less improved cooling. 2. Remove the existing fan/heatsink and add larger heatsink(s) to the chip that currently has a fan. You should be able to easily mount ...

DO follow the intelligent suggestions you will find on this board when it comes to parts, fans, etc. HOWEVER, do yourself a favor make the "dropping the noise level down to the minimum" side of things as simple and reliable as possible. HENCE DO CONSIDER putting your computer inside an iso box of so...

Interesting that the 750W power supply is quieter than the 650W power supply all the way up to 375W. The 750W unit is 18dB up to 375W whereas the 650W unit is 21-23 dB.

AMD latest Opteron, the Barcelona, has the best support for running virtual machines at reasonable speeds via Nested Page Tables. This is the current state of the art. Of course, buying the newest chip when it has barely begun to ship is not often a good road to stability or reliability. But if you ...

Now I just have to figure out a way to cool them well ;) A Yate-Loon 92mm fan fits between the front of the hard drive cage and the air grate. I have one zip tie'd in there, with its power cable going up through a hole in the upper chamber "floor" that lets it out into the two cavities on either si...

There are not a lot of options for older Xeons. The stock heatsink will require a fan that produces a fair amount of air flow. Such a fan will be noisy. I would take a peek at the Swiftech heatsink below. You will need to check and make sure that two of them will fit on your motherboard. http://www....

Has anyone run Western Digital SE drives in a RAID array? WD warns that the SE drives have a long error-recovery time, which may cause the RAID array to drop the drive, but has anyone actually had that happen? I am looking at purchasing a Asus M2N32 WS Pro board (6xSATA), and some 500/750/1Tb drive...

Thanks for the advice. I really do like the look of RE and RE2, especially the more recent ones which give the Raptors a challenge. It's the £60 difference per disk which is the concerning part. The RE/RE2 drives do not offer any overall performance gains vs. the non-RE/RE2 versions of the same dr...

I run a number of Western Digital Enterprise drives, from the 74GB Raptors up through the 500GB RE2s. All my RAID arrays are based on various 3ware cards. If you run a 3ware card, the "RE" is absolutely critical. If not an "RE" drive, the drive BIOS must be RAID controller compatible. Many consumer...

Considering motherboard selection (Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R) and SFF it's highly unlikely that any separate graphics card will be used at all :) If I've learned one thing from being a ruler, it is that the future is unpredictable. Sometimes it is best to prepare for possibilities now, even if those po...

PSU: Corsair HX520W as recommended for these cases. off-topic question: Why to use 520W PSU for 50-100W system? I'd go with PicoPSU or similar :) It all depends on the graphics card (now and in the future), doesn't it? Likely the HX520W is recommended so the customer can pretty much plug in whateve...

yeah, the 0 performance difference on raid 0 claims are crap. i have done it so many times with such obvious performance gains, it's nuts. Writing you dont, reading you do is what most modern or OLD tests show. 2.5 drives are made like crap though in terms of longevity. or designed like crap inhere...

RAID 0 is not likely to provide noticeable performance increases. "The real world performance increases are negligible at best" http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11 A three year old article with RAID tech that was immature compared to todays ICH9R or 6XX series technology would...

Hi all, Has anyone run Western Digital SE drives in a RAID array? WD warns that the SE drives have a long error-recovery time, which may cause the RAID array to drop the drive, but has anyone actually had that happen? I am looking at purchasing a Asus M2N32 WS Pro board (6xSATA), and some 500/750/1...

"Furthermore, Tyan will introduce Quad-Core AMD Opteron-based platforms based on current design to support AMD’s Dual Dynamic Power Management™ technology, which offers separate power planes for cores and memory controller for optimum performance with reduced power consumption ." http://tyan.co...

I think much depends on the specifics of your disk driver and/or disk controller. For example, in the 3ware world (I know, not the world of the OP, but I am using it as an example): FUA (Force Unit Access). FUA commands are a way that the RAID controller or a program (such as a database program) can...

It is not safe to "hot unplug" drives. You can reduce the risk by turning off the write cache at the drive, controller, driver, and OS levels. However, you take a massive performance hit when you disable all the write caches. Maybe for read only content, there is some sense in "hot unplug". But this...

You will thank yourself every day by getting a dedicated graphics card vs. going with chipset graphics. When you starting using a lot of RAM to push a lot of pixels, even for office apps, a dedicated graphics card really helps your system work better. And almost always the video output circuitry is ...

oh, no, wait! I've told you about the HTPC project, but that's ANOTHER project. By no means it's related to the same machine. They are two machine: the htpc project I've told you in the pm, and the "calculation server or workstation" that is the scope of this topic. ;) Sorry if I've mixed something...