Odd crash problem

It's certainly a flawed study, what with the unspecified mixture of
drive models and environmental conditions. On the other hand, the
temperature conclusion isn't implausible or unlikely, and I haven't seen
any conflicting evidence anywhere else. Unlike electronics, mechanical
devices generally do have an ideal operating temperature.

Well, unless they have significantly more surface area than the chips,
they're not likely to radiate or conduct heat much better. The thermal
pads will act as an insulating layer, hence the inferior overall
performance.

Ideally you'd have finned heatsinks and proper chip- in most cases, RAM heatspreaders appear to be just aesthetic.

--
John Jordan

That is quiet :)

*gasp*! Shut it down?! Never. It runs 24/7/365. I'm firmly in the
camp of "it's better for the hardware if it's left on all the time".
But that's the subject of religious wars and best left to a thread of
its own :)

Just don't ask me about my electricity bill.

Understood.

Absolutely. I wasn't trying to suggest that it was inappropriate.

Well, again, we know it's "big numbers" marketing aimed at a certain
subset of PC users.

Yes. I put mine in 5.25" to 3.5" adapter cradles in spare 5.25" bays.
This gives them plenty of room to breathe. The adapters have a
ventilated front bezel which allows air to enter and flow over the
drive. I can tell it works, 'cos when I took a drive out a couple of
days ago, there was dust on it in the same pattern as the vent slots.

*nods* Very much agreed - but remember you're the one that went through
several DIMMs until you found a pair that met your requirements :)
Online reviews are useful for identifying a suitable case.

Sure. Horses for courses, each to his own, etc. It's interesting to
compare and contrast our differing approaches to the subject, though.

I did intend this to be discussion, not advocacy - just want to make
sure you understand that.

--
(\__/) Bunny says NO to Windows Vista!
(='.'=) #
(")_(")

Yes, I've read it ("Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population")
carefully. There's a printed copy sitting by my elbow as I type this.
It's flawed and I don't agree with some of the methodology or findings.
It came in for some criticism on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage.

IMO, if the authors had had the nerve to publish failure rates indexed
by drive maker, the survey would have carried more weight. They were
probably too concerned about being sued, though, especially as it
doesn't seem to be an "official" Google publication.

Heat transfer pads between the memory chips and the metal of the
heatspreader, then clips to hold the two halves of the heatspreader in
place.

It's interesting how the makers refer to them as "heatspreaders" rather
than "heatsinks", don't you think? Especially as that's exactly what
they appear to do.

--
(\__/) Bunny says NO to Windows Vista!
(='.'=) #
(")_(")

The message <oCMZU0Bn+ from Mike Tomlinson <
I think the psus with interior mounted fans work best when the fan is
mounted 'outboard' of the psu casing. This reduces the resultant
turbulence (and loss of efficiency) somewhat.

The small 150 watt unit in the Gateway 2000 case that houses my FreeNAS
4 disk drive server has its interior mounted 80mm fan mounted 'outboard'
of the psu casing (right next to the CPU socket, as it happens :-). The
only mods I did with this was to add a 3.3v zenner to the fan speed
control cct to raise the minimum fan speed a little and twist the
exterior vent slots to about a 45 deg angle to reduce turbulence and
increase the effective CSA.

This fileserver origionally had a super socket 7 MoBo with a K6/2/500
underclocked to 250MHz and undervolted to 1.35v to keep the whole power
consumption down to 50 watts. I had to use the spare KT600 MoBo and
XP2500+ cpu as an upgrade on account the Gigabit network adapter upgrade
was being throttled by that old MoBo.

I've configured the CPU to run at 665MHz instead of the normal 1836MHz
and this has allowed me to set the minimum core voltage setting of 1.1v
(even this amount of cpu 'horsepower' is gross 'overkill' for a
fileserver box). In spite of the huge drop in cpu power consumption, the
box now uses 20 watts more power, all for the priviledge of getting a
useful boost of network speed out of my Gigabit upgrade.

Although you might consider a small 150 W ATX PSU to be marginal for a
box with 4 hard disk drives, it seems to cope just fine in spite of the
fact that the spin up surge at startup does top the 150 watt mark.

I origionally picked the Gateway 2000 box to house my fileserver on
account of its more efficient and remarkably quiet PSU. This box is
still so quiet that you need to place your ear within inches of the vent
slots to hear anything at all whilst my reasonably quiet desktop machine
is running. In the dead of night when everything else is switched off,
it's just possible to hear it running if you stand close and 'listen'
very carefully'.

You might think that a constant background noise is of no significance
but, if you feel any sense of relief on shutting your PC down at the end
of a session, then it's significant enough to be a source of stress that
warrants some attention.

Even as quiet as my own PC is, I still feel a _mild_ sense of relief
when I shut it down at the end of the day (often, this is in the quiet
hours of the morning, around 3 am, so the contrast is magnified by the
almost utter silence of my nearly silent fileserver).

To give you some idea how quiet my PC is, I can tell you that even the
quieter examples of customers' PCs usually totally drown out the noise
it generates. I have on very rare occasions had the pleasure of working
on extremely quiet machines which don't drown out the noise from my own
PC, but this situation is exceptionally rare.

Many of the PCs I have in for repair have been so noisy, I wonder how
their owners can tolerate them for any lengh of time, especially if I've
had to run chkdsk /r from the recovery console for the, typically.
couple of hours this usually requires. When I've finally finished
working on _these_ machines, it's an absolute joy to shut them down and
return to tranquility once again.

It wasn't the clock speed being reduced, it was one of the other timing
parameters that created a reduced "benchmark" reading in memtest86's
information panel.

I don't think a single 2GB dimm would necessarily get round the
problem, plus, AFAIR, 1GB is the limit per slot. Even if a 2GB dimm was
an option, I still wouldn't choose to invest in what, even by then, was
becoming an obsolescent technology.

True, but this is uk.comp.homebuilt so an appropriate comment.

I'm nothing if not pragmatic. :-)

That might be the peak (or, being generous, the short term max loading)
rating but I doubt such PSUs could sustain half that loading
indefinitely or even that any PC system box so fitted would peak much
above 300 watts.

Any PC that demands more than 200 watt will be quite noisy even when a
'quiet' design of fan cooling is employed.

You're quite right about considering the cooling requirements of the
hard disks. A lot of the 'traditional case designs simply leave this to
chance and, as you mentioned, compound the issue by having hard disk
drive bays that force the two drives into very close proximity.

I agree that you don't need massive flows of cooling air to keep a
drive comfortably cool, just at least 2 cms of airspace both above and
below each drive for the air to flow, unobstructed past each drive.

The four drives in my file server rely purely on the air passing them
from the ventillation holes drilled into the front of the metal case
through to the CPU heatsink fins and into the PSU fan at the rear of the
case.

The original hard drive bay does present a problem in that it does
stack the two drives a little too ...
read more »

Gas is about 1/4 of the price of electricity per kWh, although it does
get interesting if you're only trying to heat one room.

There was just a lack of demand, IIRC. BTX has a problem where you lose
a large chunk of drive-bay space, and needs chipsets flipped to get the
lines the right way around, all for a problem that no longer exists
(120W+ CPUs).

Dell do use BTX, which makes sense as they always built single-fan
ducted systems, and BTX is better for these if you have a mid-range+
video card. Not sure about anyone else.


Note that the Google hard drive survey showed the best reliability at
35-40C, with a rapidly escalating failure rate below that range.

What did you use to attach the heatspreaders?

--
John Jordan