[mythtv-users] Hard drive recommendation

James L. Paul james at mauibay.net
Fri Feb 20 20:30:36 EST 2004


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On Friday 20 February 2004 1:31 pm, steve at nexusuk.org wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, James L. Paul wrote:
> > Cheap O-rings can work fine. Actually, I've never heard noticeable noise
> > from a drive itself from more that a foot outside the case that
> > rubber-mounting would fix. There simply isn't much audio-frequency
> > vibration for most drives
>
> The (temporary) drive I have in the box ATM whines quite loudly, which
> resonates through the case.  If I hold the drive in my hand instead of
> letting it touch the case then it's much quieter.  Of course, the drive I
> have in there ATM is one that was running for quite a while in one of the
> servers at work and was replaced because we thought it was probably about
> to die - it is much noisier than my old 80 gig drive that did die.
>
> > to transfer to the chassis. My problem is heat dissipation, and
> > rubber-mounting a drive is like insulating it from transferring heat to
> > the chassis. Remember, the drive mounting cage or brackets are usually
> > the primary "heatsink" that cools the drive. The metal contact along both
> > sides of the drive drains _way_ more heat from the mechanism than moving
> > air with a
>
> Hmm..  I never thought about the heat dissipation problem...  I have a
> couple of old P200 heatsinks kicking around here so I might try mounting
> them on the drive to see if that dissipates the heat if it proves to be a
> problem.

If it's not a problem, then, well... no problem. ;)
My heat issues are more exaggerated than most, since the ambient temperature 
in my living room is usually around 85F and so dumping heat from electronic 
gear is more difficult. Most of my serious gear has been watercooled for 
years, but I haven't done that to my Myth box. Yet.

> > fan. Fans are the primary noise source in every machine I've built. I've
> > had
>
> I've got a Zalman heatsink on the CPU with the CPU fan running at minimum
> speed and a QuietPC PSU.  I think the PSU fan is probably the noisiest
> part of the PC, but I don't think I can do much about that since I
> need the air flow generated by the PSU fan to keep some air flow going
> through the case.  The CPU temperature is about 55 degrees, which is
> higher than I would usually have in a noisy machine, but I don't think
> it's really a problem.

I had a Swiftech unit cooling my Athlon 1.4 but it was marginally unstable on 
very hot days, so I tried replacing it with a cheap Spire copper-core cooler, 
the one that spreads the fins out wide and uses a larger fan for more flow 
and less noise. I was surprised to find that it was unable to cool the CPU 
enough to make it even 20 seconds into compiling anything. I'm back to the 
smaller cooler again, but I'll probably switch to watercooling this summer. 
My MythTV box has only been running since last September and the only 
instability issues I've had have been heat-related.

> > By the way, you are digitally signing your posts, but your key isn't on
> > any of the usual keyservers. What keyserver do you use so I can tell my
> > system where to go to update my keychain? There's not much point to using
> > signatures if nobody can validate your key. ;)
>
> I haven't got around to putting it on a key server yet, although it's
> available on my website.  Which keyserver would you recommend BTW?

I don't think it matters much, any PGP keyserver should do fine, I think they 
all sync with each other. The group I default to includes pgp.mit.edu, 
blackhole.pca.dfn.de, and wwwkeys.pgp.net. That's what came set up with GPG, 
I've never had to explicitly configure which one to use. So far, everybody 
else who's been posting here lately has their keys in that group, so my GPG 
client just finds their keys without any problem. :)
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