Tag Archives: linux

"Typhoon" Upgrade Completed

Posted on by
Reply

Just to explain the title, ‘Typhoon’ is my old Linux box. After a while of little interference save the recent fan and GPU replacement, it’s been happily churning away since April 08 when I rebuilt it to merge my Windows and [even] older Linux box.

The reason for this upgrade was simply that the two 320GB drives which act as my rsync’d archive drives have essentially become full and thus in need of swapout. After a bit of looking around and review reading, I went for two 1TB Western Digital Green drives. I used to only use Seagate, but over the last few years I seem to have drifted to WD. These are 32MB cache and 5400rpm drives – I didn’t need more speed, just power efficiency and capacity. Thus far I’m happy with both.

Essentially then, one of the 320GB is now wrapped in a safe place just in case (TM) and all that data is now on the two terabyte drives. The other 320GB drive has replaced the 160GB drive as the home of my GNU/Linux OS itself. On that subject I took the opportunity to upgrade from Xubuntu 8.04LTS to 9.04. there’s another one out next month, but it’s somewhat nice to know this version has been hammered a while.

It’s been running for a few hours and passed all the tests I’ve thrown at it, so I’d say that was mission accomplished.

The Big Box Dilemma

Posted on by

Like most people, geeks, freaks, I have more than one computer. I don’t want to go into that right now. it’d be a longer post.  Over the last couple of years I’ve thinned the herd such that I now have only one ‘big box’. As I write, the details are here, but for the sake of click saving, it’s roughly this: Athlon64 3700, DFI gaming mobo, 2GB RAM, 256MB nVidia6800GS.  I built it in December 2005 as an acceptable games rig. In the end, it got older, as did I, and thanks to family, an XBOX 360 and a PS3, I don’t really game on the PC at all now. About 18 months ago, this became my Linux server with a plug-in eSATA Windows drive for gaming. At some point in the meantime, I’ve lost that drive. The issue with home servers is that I need it quieter, and to use as little power as possible when it’s on (not 24/7), thus I did some quick power checks:

Functional rest at the desktop: ~80 Watts

Being used normally  on desktop: ~90-100 Watts

Peaks during high CPU/HDD use: ~115Watts.

This is all a lot lower than I expected, but it is still a little loud. The are two main fans which make the noise – a 120mm front fan and a 100mm rear fan, with the graphics card a little behind them.

I was thinking of getting an EeeBox or similar, but honestly, I think I can cure the noise for less than 10,000yen:

1) Replace the fans with new, slower turning quieter fans for about 6,000yen.

2) Replace the 6800GS with it’s Arctic Cooling fan with a passively cooled card for ~ 4,000yen.

I’ve already played with OS and BIOS settings, so all things being equal, I’m hoping this will make for a quieter, lower power server.

(Caveat: I know spending money on a 3.5yr machine is odd, but I think it does have a few years left. Also, the 6800GS is quite big – the newer card will be smaller, and thus maybe help heatflow also. It’s 25% the price of an Eeebox.)