My Linux box has been running not too keenly on the file transfer side of things lately. Well, more than lately. It’s been very irritating. We’re talking mp3s skipping while playing across the network. Certainly Samba should be able to handle streaming 5 meg files in real time, right? Maybe, maybe not. I kept putting off the troubleshooting until the other day, when I finally decided to poke around the server logs. Uh-oh, all sorts of IDE read errors were popping up on the mp3 partition. Turns out it wasn’t Samba that was balking, but the hard drive itself. Yay failure!
Well, not really failure, just a bunch of bad sectors. After a bunch of tests, I could see that it was the same bad sectors, so there was a good chance that the drive wasn’t failing. Now the difficult part was clearing enough room to backup as many of the mp3s as possible to avoid having to re-rip all of my CDs. During that process, I also decided it was time to upgrade my woefully outdated power supply, as that was probably the cause of the problem to begin with. So I headed over to CompUSA and picked up one of those Antec TruePower units. I decided the $90 was worth it to protect all of the money I’ve spent on storage anyway.
What a great call that was. Not only did it eliminate all of the crummy y-splitters I had installed and up the power available for the 5 drives in the server, but I can actually hear myself think with it running. You start to take the background noise of computers for granted. Even though the Dells at work are very quiet, I sit next to a much noiser server as well as the network cabinet. So I was downright shocked at how quiet this unit ran. As a matter of fact, I’m now looking at getting an Ultra X-Connect for my desktop computer to shut that up thanks to the current rebate.
Hopefully, background noise will become a thing of the past. Imagine actually being able to enjoy music and movies on my computer again!
Sounds of Silencers Are Loud and Clear: PCs Are Too Noisy
I have been fighting noise pollution for some time. My solutions so far: keep the case open, so it get loads of circulation and therefore needs less fans/cooling. Buy less noisy drives and one GOOD cpu fan. Although my desktop is right next to me under the desk I hardly hear it.
Kurt – cool article. What initially turned my off from quieting down my system was how expensive the mods can be. But I’m glad to see more manufacturers turning towards the problem.
Deiter – That’s a tricky one, I insulated one case with carpet padding so closing the case removes a lot of the noise. The other case, however, might benefit from that.