Computer Upgrades

I placed an order on Newegg yesterday for two more 750GB hard drives for my fileserver. I'm very excited because they arrive tomorrow! Newegg is fast! I'm thinking of making a trip up to Microcenter at some point in the next couple of days to get a new north bridge fan. I figure as long as my machine is going to be off while I add new hard drives and the like, I might as well get rid of the one loud fan that's in the box. I still need to figure out exactly how to expand a linux raid5 array, but that should be fun. Also cool: my hard drives were each part of a combo deal, so I get two free USB drives - one is 2GB and the other is 4GB. Perhaps I'll actually use one sometime.

I also did some research for my next primary machine while I was shopping. I've picked out a likely case and memory, but beyond that I ran into some troubles. There wasn't any clear best choice on processor/motherboard/graphics combinations. In the end, I decided that since I won't be buying a new machine until at least June, that I'll postpone any research until then, too.

The only lasting decision I made was to name my new computer Nora. In fact, this will be the first computer I will have named. I chose the name when it immediately popped into my head when Newegg asked me what I should name the wish list of parts I'd created. So, I'm not sure what the significance is yet, but Nora has some potential to be special.

File server fixed!

I'm almost positive that my file server is fixed! I am very excited. I can now fill up the remaining 600GB (of 2048GB).

What was the problem, you ask? Well, it would appear that the voltage applied to the DIMM sockets was set at 1.9V instead of 2.1V. I'm not sure if I should blame the RAM's SPD data, or the BIOS for ignoring said data. I'm betting it's bad data on the RAM, because the Corsair Memory website listed both 1.9 and 2.1 as the tested voltage in two different places. They appear to be confused.

Either way, manually setting the DIMM voltage to 2.1 allowed memtest86 to run for a full 24 hours, which is hasn't been able to do for a long time. It's time to plug my hard drives back in, boot up, and transfer some very large files!

File Server Aggravation

I left my server up over the weekend. It was booted into Windows. It was frozen this morning. This is quite annoying, but does have one positive piece. Basically, it is unlikely to be software-related at this point. Since the computer freezes when using either or both sticks of RAM, I'm betting it's not the RAM. The chances of both sticks having slight errors at the same time seems small. I'm going to swap out a different PCI express graphics card and see if that helps things. If it doesn't, I'll be pretty much out of ideas, and almost certainly out of cheaply tested ideas.

I'm house-sitting for my parents, though, so I won't have a whole lot of opportunity to test things, anyway. Damned inconvenient, really.