Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Socket A Cooling

Found my notes... the CPU fan in the beast is an old ThermalTake Super Mini Orb. Air flow for the lower fan is 25.5cfm and the upper fan pushes 17cfm. Rather noisy critter at 32-34dBA for both fans which spin at 5000-5500rpm.

So I need something quieter... Eventually, I'd like to replace the (6) 7200rpm IBM DeskStar 75Gb drives with quieter 160Gb or 200Gb drives. But I think I'm going to hold off on that until the fall at the earliest. The system is stable, and I dread the 40+ hours it would take to upgrade and format the new array. I'll still do it at some point because a 275Gb array is starting to feel small now that I'm working with video files that are usually 5-15Gb. The 160Gb drives would bump me up to 550Gb in the array, while 200Gb drives should bump me to 750Gb. Which is a heck of a lot of space, but HDTV, DV and video capture files are all in the 10-13Gb/hr range. Multiply by 3 if you're going to do any editing/encoding. I have 100Gb free on the server and 100Gb free on the capture workstation, and it's not unusual for me to have to stop for a while to move video files around because I'm out of room on one box or the other. (That's a different can of worms, that it takes an hour to move 12-16Gb across the network, but I'm upgrading to gigabit ethernet next week to fix that.)

FYI, the p160 case includes a pair of temperator monitoring thermistors that you can position anywhere whithin the case. I have one hovering up in front of the power-supply (directly behind the top 5.25" exterior bay) and the other is down in the middle, roughly centered over the motherboard. Now, I'm not sure which is which, but one reports a temperature of 40-41C and the other reports in at 34-35C, ambient temperature in the office is currently 24C (75F). Since the CPU is running at 100% due to the PrimeNet client, it probably will never get much worse (motherboard reports the CPU temp as 50-52C).

posted by Wuphon's at 3:03 AM