1st line of backup defence - external USB drive

So I can't stand the 100 KB/s upload speed for Amazon S3.  It's worse than that.  The gsutil is supposed to upload in multiparts in 1MB trunks.  Boto supports that.  But it may be true for Google Storage, but I doubt if it's for S3 too.  And I couldn't find out if there's an option to force multiparts.  A 2GB file failed when > 1.5GB was uploaded.

I still like the clouds but I made a pack with the devil, brought a 1 TB external USB drive as the first line of defense.  I never did that because for less you can have a bigger and faster internal drive.  And you can use the older drive for backup.

You fill better if all your drives are not in the same casing.  As you can see, the WD Element 1 TB can sit nicely in the smallest fire proof (1.5 hr?) safe with space to spare.

The WD Element is about 7x5x1.5 inch.  It's fully enclosed except for a small power jack, a small USB 2 connector, and a small LED, all next to each other.  It looks like it can survive being sprayed with a hose.

If you place the connector at the back side away from you, you will not see the LED, only a black box.  And actually the LED is brighter than you think, if you are not dead center looking at it, like sitting in front of a desk looking down at the desktop.

It's pretty quiet.  The plastic looked cheap but the box feels solid.  I bet the drives are so small that a lot inside are padding materials to make the box quiet and feels solid.  I would say it's portable if you wrap it in a little shock absorbing material just in case.  It was sent to me in the mail with air bubble packages.

There is the power cord and there is the USB connector.  It doesn't matter which one go first and you can't go wrong.  Once it's on and connected, a WD Element icon appears on my desktop, and I'm using Ubuntu Linux!  It's pre-formatted in NTFS, the Windows file system after XP.  It can be used in Linux, just that you do not have undelete when you delete a file.

The 1st thing I did was ran into a Ubuntu disk utility to test the drive.  I was luck that I ended up first is looking at the SMART data logged in my old disks.  Failure is imminent for my oldest disk.  I remembered that it was absent for a while, and I remembered it failed to spin up, sounding like a failing fridge compressor.

I downloaded some SMART in Windows but I never remembered to look at it again.  In Ubuntu it is pre-installed, which may have saved my life.

I tested the WD using the disk utility.  It passed the short tests, but the long ones cannot survive power management, which shut down something or put something to sleep.  It would be terrible to scan the entire 1TB for errors.  So I'll be watching the SMART data when there's more data stored in it.

Now the performance.  It's only about 20 MB/s for backing up huge files.  It's not particularly fair as I'm copying from a pretty full disk to an empty disk.  For the disk read-only benchmark test it is:

Max Rate 39.2 MB/s   Average Rate 37.9 MB/s    Access Time 16.0 ms   USB2
Max Rate 86.6 MB/s   Average Rate 67.9 MB/s    Access Time 13.4 ms   SATA

My motherboard should support USB2.0 but I used the monitor hub.  The SATA should be II, claiming up to 3 Gb/s transfer.  Again one drive is pretty full and the other is empty.

If I'm copying a small file (<1G), it doesn't matter that much.  If I'm backing up it will not be interactive and the time taken doesn't that much.  It will matter if you need overnight to backup your things, then one night and two night will make a lot of difference.

It can't go too wrong.  There are more than a thousand reviews.  The model is old and established.  And it's cheap.

Heat management for your PC enclosure

The number one enemy of your custom PC is heat. Overheating is very easy when you put together components yourself. Overheating will shorten the life of processor and motherboard. Worst of all, a faulty processor or motherboard can be working intermittently and hard to troubleshoot.

I know because I lost a CPU due to mild overclocking, which means heat. Luckily it lasted long enough and that's time to upgrade. So I swapped the motherboard and CPU altogether. I had the next system broke down in about 3 years, perfect timing for upgrade again. So I didn't bother whether the CPU broke down or the motherboard.

The next pentium 4, 3GHz, became faulty after a year, when I forgot to turn off some video software turning a firewire camcorder into a webcam. It cost me dearly as the system worked perfectly for some random time and then reset. I wanted to save time and so I asked the Firedogs at Circuit City to diagnose my PC. It was a waste of time. Even worse, because I couldn't imagine that they couldn't test the processor properly, I never thought that my processor was faulty. If I didn't ask them for help, I would always guess that the CPU was faulty. I ended up returning the motherboard twice for nothing. I finally get a new CPU from Intel. It was rather painless - all components were under warranty. Service was quick and I only paid forward postage.

Firstly, get the right components to avoid overheating. The new BTX cases are BIG. But you can get away with fewer fans at lower speeds, meaning quiet operations. The most popular by far are still ATX cases, but the current ones fit for 3 GHz CPUs are bigger than the ATX cases for the first Pentium 4 processors. However, I don't suggest spending a lot on brand new cases. Old cases can still be used with additional fans probably installed. Fans are cheap and quiet, but it's always quieter with less fans.

Enermax has some high efficiency power supplies, which should mean less heat dissipated to the surroundings. I can't tell the difference from the field but this could be important if your PC is put in a confined space. There are some supplies with modular connectors. You take out the connectors that you don't need. But they are expensive. They are not really needed if your case is big enough to hide some unused connectors near the top.

ATX cases hold ATX motherboards and the smaller micro ATX boards. The bigger ATX boards are naturally better in dissipating heat. Also ATX boards usually have a total of 3 fan connectors while mATX boards has two. Though you can easily connect a fan directly to a +12V output of the power supply via adapters.

I don't play much games so I opted for integrated graphics on the motherboard. You can also have integrated ethernet and firewire. I normally have no extension cards to generate heat and obstruct air flow.

Use only two drives if possible, a hard drive and a DVD/CD/drive/burner. The only reason you need two hard drives is for RAID. And now with matrix RAID for newer chipsets, two drives are all you need for faster access times in some partitions AND mirrors in other partitions. If you stack two typical 4 inch (width) hard drive top to bottom, the heat is phenomenal. Try to separate them as far as possible.

And yes, dump the floppy. The cable just obstruct you and the air flow. Newer motherboards can make use of USB flash drives the way they make use of floppy drives.

Serial ATA drives are wonderful. SATA2 at 3Gb/s are sustainable 1.5 times faster than ATA100 IDE drives. With SATA available for DVD drives, forget about the 40 pin 80 wire connectors. They are torture to install in comparison. More importantly they block airflow.

To test your system you need to be able to measure the temperatures. All retail motherboards come with sensor for the CPU temperature and motherboard temperature. They all comes with utilities so you can monitor the temperatures in Windows. To be sure, get SpeedFan from download.com to measure the hard drive temperatures.

It's preferred to put your PC at the floor near windows, it's cooler this way. Since a PC is a big toaster, I suggest that everybody should install a humidifier nearby to save your skin if you work long hours by the monitor. It's also cools the air.

Leave the case open and leave the PC running idle for 20 min or more. All temperatures should stabilize around 40 deg C or less. It's usual for motherboards to sound alarm when temperature reaches 45 deg C. Drives temperature should not be above 50 deg C. If heat is not accumulated, temperature should not rise or drift slowly upwards. And the drive temperature will be close to the motherboard temperature. Unless of course you stack two or more hard drives together.

Then run anti-virus programs to exercise the CPU and hard drive. Except for the CPU temperature, the other readings should not increase by a deg or two. The CPU temperature should be stabilize at less than 50 deg C, though 60 is the alarm threshold. The motherboard has to be cool enough for the smart CPU fan to work. It's no use blowing hot air on the CPU when the motherboard temperature keeps rising.

Finally close the PC case to see how much the temperatures rise. If the motherboard temperature rises a few degrees, that means you can benefit from installing more fans.

If your PC is not cool enough, consider putting your PC against a wall, so you can leave that side of your PC case open. You can drop a few degrees that way.

If you need to install fans, follow the general airflow design of cases. Cool air is usually draw from the lower front of the case and extracted at the top back, where the power supply is. Your case should have places to install a fan at the front to blow air into the middle. Another place is right under the power supply, to help pushing hot air out of the system.

One more thing, the CPU heat sink comes with a thermal paste to make good contact with the CPU. If for some reasons the paste is gone, like installing a new CPU, you need to clean up the paste and get some thermal compound. They look like grease and can reduce the CPU temperature by 10 deg C, compared to no or hardly any thermal paste.