Technology for Mortals

What type of PSUs have you used over 10 years? Google’s research indicated that heat was not a significant factor in drive failure. I’ve only had 3 or 4 die in the last 20 years and I suspect a bad PSU wire may have been responsible for at least one or 2 of those. I"m not a pro on this stuff (and I’m generally suspicious of using super high power PSUs), but I’d definitely look at that factor.

As for cases, I like the Antec p180/p182. It’s cool and quiet. The upper drive bay has a slot for a 120mm fan. It’s very quiet has nice airflow (comes with 3 fans and has slots for 4 or 5). I personally like to use Skypes slipstream fans in it, but if you dn’t care about noise, there are plenty of choices.

I have never had a drive fail, knock on wood. As far as recommendation – Antec Sonata III. In this case, yYou get what you pay for….

I’ve had "standard PSUs" and I’ve had some very good PSUs. My current PSU is a Seasonic 330. In fact, for the last 5+ years, my PC has been connected to server-grade UPS’s as well. For the last 2 or so years, the UPS has been a dual conversion unit in which the PC doesn’t even get power directly from the wall, it’s all pure right off of the battery. It is possible that the UPS has been a factor in the reduced fairlure rate in my current PC. I think heat may actually be the cause, because my failures are so random. Physical failures, bad sectors, SMART errors, drives not being recognized… it’s a mess. Considering the average hard drive longevity, the statistics behind these just being uncaused errors is pretty darned unlikely… less than 1%.

J.Ja

Dietrich T. Schmitz
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If you’re convinced it’s heat, you could try putting fans on the drives in your current case.

FWIW, in the aforementioned Antec case the 4 lower drives sit vertically, so the heat shouldn’t build up as much. However, the fan is behind the drives, so it pulls air from the drives, as opposed to blowing onto them. Whether that’s a negative, I don’t know.

The upper bay holds like most cases, but does have a spot for a fan to blow air on them.

nevertheless, I think I’d try add a fan to cool the drives in your current case. If the problem persists, then that’s probably not the problem.

J.Ja.

The heat issue may not be caused by your fan(s).

It may be that if the type you have are mounted with a lithium grease paste between the fan and the cpu, then that paste may have ‘dried’.

In which case, the heat sink is not transferring heat away from the CPUs to the fan.

Remedy is to disassemble the CPU/fan, clean the fan of dust and apply new lithium paste and replace pads and reassemble fan/heatsink.

Otherwise, it would be symptomatic that the temperature would rise without the heatsink/fan doing its work.

I’ve had to do this a few times myself.
Food for thought.

I’m not having CPU overheating problems. I *suspect* that I am having *hard drive* overheating problems. For years, I have been packing drives into my cases like sardines, and most cases only leave a fraction of an inch between drives. In my current case, I have a fan right in front of the drives pushing cool air in, but with only a few mm between drives, at least two of them are going to receive no cooling like that. Nevertheless, in my current configuration, I’ve gotten far more longevity than I have in the past (2 failures in about 2.5 years), but that may also be because I am using better quality drives (the WD RE drives) and a better PSU (Seasonic 330).

I’ll check out those Antec cases!

J.Ja

But I will still hook you up with a spendy recommendation. I prefer Lian Li after my last experience. I consider to cases high quality. One of the "You get what you pay for" types of cases in a positive light. On the flip side, for drives. I think the problem that I run into is the more you use a drive, the more it fails. I try to minimize the capacity of my server drives as if I push them over 90%, they tend to die more often.

Back to the Case recommendation, I have a V2000. A truly nice case, but for some one else, I would look at the PC-P50 model. I can’t think of any others, but the chassis does make the computer look sharper.

Run the smart daemon service, that should zero in on what the bios ‘thinks’ yes?
It should return temperature reads like:

Jul 8 19:00:55 linux-t5e3 smartd[3573]: Device: /dev/sda, SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 122 to 125

Get an extension ribbon cable and position the drive outside of the box for a period and then run the smart report again. If the fans are doing their work, the the temperature read outs should drop accordingly.

C’est possible?

I don’t do any kind of extra cooling, and I don’t even enable the fan in front of the hard drive most of the time, yet I’ve have pretty good luck most of the time. I have not heard of anyone having the failure rate you’ve experienced.

If you’re packing them in like sardines, that might be a big factor because HDDs do heat up quite a bit. Try spacing them out and engaging the fan in front of the HDDs. Some chassis have 120 mm fans in front of the HDDs which is nice.

I can’t space them out much more in the current case, due to lack of space. I really just want a case that allows, say, 1/4" (or better yet, 1/2") between drives to let the air flow. Alternatively, in my next buildout, I may just shed two drives. I haven’t really seen any scenarios where I’ve been simultaneously reading from my data volume and my system volume at the same time. Instead, I may just do a large RAID 1 for the whole shebang, and have a single, large drive in the system to backup to. In addition, I would move the page file to that single drive, because it will give better write performance than having it on the RAID 1.

J.Ja

Antec has a couple of cases that should fit your requirements. The Atlas 550 and the Sonata III 500. The drives are tray mounted with noise insulating grommets that also provide more air space between the drives. The Sonata also can have a 120mm fan mounted to draw additional air over the drives. I’ve used the Atlas for a 4 HD RAID, dual video card, Intel 975 system for a radiologist that is going on 2 years now with no problems. I also have several Sonata 4 drive RAID systems in service with architects and engineers that are working great also.

Since 1.5 TB hard drives are cheap, do you really need more than two or three hard drives?

Well, in my current configuration, I have 2 RAID 1′s, one for the system and applications, one for data. I was hoping that two volumes would make my life much easier, and make the system faster (so it could read from both volumes separately and without contention). In retrospect, the two volumes didn’t work out so well; it was a hassle since I couldn’t cleanly get all of C:Users moved to the second volume, and I never really needed the usefulness of it for recovery purposes, especially since I have the RAID 1. Basically, it solved problems I didn’t have. So i think for my next build, I will be putting in 3 disks; 2 750 GB models in a RAID 1 (I currently have a 150 GB RAID 1 and a 250 GB RAID 1, both of which have plenty of space on them), and a single 1 TB disk to backup to and hold the swap file (since RAID 1 is so slow on write, and to keep it off of the system drive). Then, once a week, I can copy the backup files to my file server, to the destination that I curently backup to. But still, that would leave me with 3 drives, and in most 4 drive cases, they do not leave much room between drives.

J.Ja

Justin, I don’t know why you need to move all of the users directory to the D: drive, but I also don’t see why you couldn’t do it.

All the user data can be moved by simply moving the directories to some location on another partition.
For example, just drag Documents to d:JustinDocuments and all data references to D:usersJustinDocuments will look in that directory.

If others don’t work that way, you could probably accomplish it by logging in as a different user (possibly safe mode), move all of those directories to the D: drive then use the mklink command line tool to make a soft link to d:Justin.

Now C:UsersJustinAppDataLocal is still a valid path, but only Users actually resides on your c partition.
I’m not sure how much you really gain by doing that vs just moving your Documents, Pictures, Video etc., but I think you could do it.

If you really want to move the entire users directories, I think you’ll have to do it from the recovery console.

BTW, if the P180/P182 (same case just different colors), you could look at the P190. I believe it’s a larger case (server case?). All that said, if all you have is 3 or 4 drives, the other cases are more than adequate.

I wanted to move all of C:Users to the second volume, because I wanted all *data* on the second volume. In theory, this would be useful for a data backup.recovery plan (especially for a drive wipe/reinstall), as well as making the system slightly faster in certain extremely intense scenarios. It didn’t get me any benefits, so I am not doing to do it on the next build. Moving the contents of C:Users worked fine for most things, but for other things, it did not seem to work. Stuff like Application Data did not want to move, for instance. It was really, truly frustrating to have the data split across two volumes. Maybe this was an operation that needed to be done in Safe Mode, who knows? But when I was doing this, it was on a Vista RTM, and there was little information on the Web about C:Users at that time. Another frustration, is that some applications seemed to have C:User’s hardcoded somewhere, because some of the directories i moved kept reappearing. Ugh.

J.Ja

Justin, if you move the data from the recovery console and then use mklink, it should work.

Warning long post ahead

Mklink creates a symbolic link to the directory/data. As a result, even if software hard coded to c:usersJustinAppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfiles, it’d still write to d:usersJustinAppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfiles….and if one day you decided you needed to move some/all of the directories to to E:, you’d just have to change the link to point to the new directory.

Now whether that saves you or not, I don’t know. I just moved the non-profile directories. I never reinstall, but I have done a restore from an image of the C drive. If you back up your bookmarks with something like Foxmarks, even if you had to restore from an old image, you wouldn’t lose much.

As it stands, i can restore to an image from last september and all I’ll lose is a few apps, a bunch of updates and perhaps a few settings.

The advantage of having the profile on the C drive is that it’s possible (likely?) that an issue that causes you to restore from an image (aside from H/W failure) is located in a sub directory of profile.

IMO, splitting data to a different drive is smart, but the key to success is image based backups. Whether that’s using the backup built into Vista Busines/Ultimate, Norton Ghost, Acronis or some other solution is up to you. I got Acronis on sale for 9 bucks last fall, and I think it’s much easier to use than Ghost.

If you’ve never used it before, give mklink a try by doing the following:

create a directory on your d drive called programs.

Copy some app directory to that directory.
Rename the original directory to .orig
Open an admin dos window
type mklink /d d:Programs Run program from whatever shortcut you normally use.

If you don’t want to copy a program over, you could create the link to D: first and then install it in the c: link.

Antec P182. It’s plenty big, and plenty beautiful. Quiet too.

I’ve actually used mklink before (to get Hyper-V to do what I want), and I know that (now) it is the right way to go about this. A friend suggested I use an unattend file as well. But for the next time, it’s a moot point. I’m just doing single volume next time. The RAID 1 eliminated 95% of the reasons for it, and I haven’t had to do a wipe/reinstall of my OS since I ran Windows 2000 (although this machine is starting to show some bitrot). In fact, the last time I did a wipe/reinstall, I lost critical data, because I forgot that Outlook Express used to stick its data under C:Windows, and I lost all of my email from 1995 – mid 2000, which really hurt me emotionally, a lot of gems were buried in there.

J.Ja

I’ve been bitten by outlook data loss myself because I forgot about its default location. That’s something that drives me nuts. I remember talking to Jim Alchin and his team about this when we discussed putting all user data on a separate partition. The whole reason they didn’t put outlook data under My Documents was because Microsoft uses roaming profiles and they didn’t want the email PST files to roam. Seems to me this decision has screwed countless number of people who lost their data. If Microsoft didn’t want PST files to roam, they could have simply put in an exception to exclude PST files. But for god sakes put all important data under “My Documents” or “Documents”. Every time I set up Outlook, I will create an Outlook folder under “Documents” and put all mailbox and address books in there.

Yup, I do the same with Outlook. In my previous case, it was Outlook Express, but both of them love to hide their data inappropriately.

J.Ja

I’ve recently obtained a Cooler Master CM690 case, which, with 7 120-140mm fans possible, makes cooling no problem. I have it filled with a very hot running P4 (yes, I know – it will be getting upgraded soon) 3 – 1 TB, 7200 RPM drives, 2 optical drives, an ATAPI ZIP drive and a floppy.

The case is largely meshed, so air flow is very good, yet it is quiet, as all the fans run slowly. There is also a place for an 80x15mm fan for the backplate of the CPU, so Cooler Master seems to have thought of just about everything. The front case fan blows air across the drive cage, where the drives mount crossways, and they keep very cool, though they are not in contact with the case, so the case does not act as heatsink whatsoever.

There is room for another 2 hard drives, though, if you could change to a 3 drive configuration, you could maintain a full drive space betwen the three drives, further keeping things cool.

Am I correct that MS no longer puts PST files in the windows directory? I searched it, and found nothing. I did find it under C:UsersAppDataLocalMicrosoftOutlook

I should note that I don’t use outlook at home for anything other than syncing contacts with my phone and I’m using 2007 on vista x64 (just in case it matters).

Outlook’s files are now under %AppData%, so they are at least tied to the user’s directory.

J.Ja

This one is easy — ThermalTake Armor (not the new one, but the sturdy, old stainless steal armor).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811133021

Also, CM 690 is nice — not quite as pricey.

It’s a nice looking case, even though it’s of the "blue LEDs and clear sides" design that I’m usually not a big fan of. Thanks!

J.Ja

Justin, if you decide on the Antec, I suspect Fry’s has the best price at 70.00. Unfortunately, they’re sold out online, and most stores are out of stock too. But there are a couple of stores in CA that have one (literally).
http://www.frys.com/product/5178456?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

I’ll leave it to others to help you find deals on the cases they like