Thanks for the comments guys. I like the idea of a NAS with wake-on-lan. I should point out that as well as saving the planet I am also interested in saving my wallet. It's a real shame all the Via vendors in Europe are such rip-off merchants. The cheapest C3 based board I could find was £97, and t...

Just one more update. The cheapest way seems to be USB adaptors with a custom case.

The USB adaptors can be bought for as little as £2.50 without a PSU. A modded Sun case should provide the rest. Easy power the whole the on or off, and a USB hub reduces the number of cables to 2.

IsaccKuo: sadly that board does not seem to be available in Europe. Still, the flex-ATX idea might be a good one. I was wondering if I could somehow use a laptop board for ultra-low power and cheapness, but a lack of IDE/SATA/PCI is the problem. I'm tempted to buy a NAS enclosure and try to hack it....

Interesting points guys. I am tending to agree with you, and one nice thing about always-on NAS is that you can use it as a media server and perhaps even overnight BT downloader. The question now is, what computer? I want to keep costs down so Via stuff is out of the question, and the case needs to ...

I have been looking into using HDDs for long term storage instead of DVDs. Now that I am happy with reliability issues and HDD prices have fallen to almost match DVDs in price per megabyte, I am interested in low power solutions for multiple HDDs. The idea is to have an external box with two or more...

Can't wait to get one of these drives. 4GB would be enough for me. My current OS partition is 4GB, 3GB used with Windows XP Pro, Firefox, few essential apps etc.

The performance boost for some applications will be massive. Having zero seek times will be nice.

http://www.evercase.co.uk/KM4021B.htm http://www.aerocool-uk.com/p-case/baydream/baydream.htm I am thinking building a NAS system. A 745 Sempron, undervolted and underclocked with HDDs set to spin down most of the time. I have an old Duron 750 which might be usable too, or a 1.2GHz PIII. Should be f...

EsaT: The modem was connected to the phone line. I don't have dial-up any more, I have cable internet... it is worrying but there are a modem, a PC (pfsense), and two switches between my PC and the cable. I am going to get a Tripp Lite I think, from what I have read they are the best available for r...

The Century Tera Tower has automatic fan control and spin-down, and is USB. I have only seen it available for purchase in Japan though. Shame as I would like one.

What about "clamping times" etc? Obviously, lower is better, but... I have seen quite a few MOV based units fail. I have even had one fail myself, damaging a PC and killing a modem. The modem was not plugged in to the PC BTW. It wasn't even very old, maybe a couple of months. For me, that kind of fa...

EsaT, thanks for the comments. I don't like Belkin stuff generally, but I do wonder about MOV based protectors... I mean, do they actually work? Basically, a surge protector is useless unless it stops my computer being fried when there is lightning in the area, and prevents surges when someone turns...

Thanks el-tel, that information is interesting... I had not even considered the extra power draw the UPS itself will create. Knowing that that particular UPS is silent is helpful. Being "line interactive" suggests that it should offer a fair bit of surge protection. Many UPSs seem to suffer from coi...

I am looking for some good surge protection. A lot of info points to "series mode" units being the best, but I can't find any where to buy them in the UK. I understand the Belkin MOV based units are basically crap, and although UPS units can provide good protection they tend to be noisy. I have been...

There is usally no way to get SMART info from cheap on-board RAID controllers. They add a layer between the OS and HDD which prevents SMART from working. If you need RAID and SMART, get a descent RAID card which supports it. I have an Areca card, very expensive but... there must be cheaper cards tha...

For heatsinks I got some aluminium U shaped rods from B&Q. They do other shapes too, such as a W shaped rod, but U seemed the easiest to work with. I cut the rods to length with a hacksaw and drilled them with a Dremel mounted in a drilling rig. I'm interested in the experiments of a professor who p...

With all this talk of HDs I thought I'd mention my setup. I have a 3ware 7500 series RAID with 8 ports, and a four port RAID on the motherboard. The motherboard has two 40GB 7200RPM Seagates and the 3ware has four 80GB 7200RPM Seagates! It's not silent, but all the drives are suspended on elsatic an...

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how good 2cm polythene mat would be for sound dampening? Poundstretcher has loads of it for £3 per roll

MoJo

http://www.geocities.jp/numano3/index.html

Two different fanless PCs, one a 3GHz and the other 2.4.

I think the trick is to have a carefully designed case, massive external heatsinks and a HD encased in putty

MoJo

Okay, most of you have probably seen this site before, but it's been updates recently so I thought I'd start a thread to discuss some of the techniques used: http://www.geocities.jp/numano3/index.html In particular, I think the two best tricks in use with his latest PC are the massive top mounted he...