Well, it was kind of an experiment/dumb-ass event. I was on a quest to silence my PC for cheap, so I connected all the fans grounds to the 5v to take them down to 7v so they would run about half speed, thus quieter. I ensured I had proper air-flow and cooling by modifying the case so that there was multiple fans running slower with more pressure than faster with more raw volume. So there was a guaranteed air flow with no recycling/reheating of air through eddies and dead-zones. Just a constants, quiet, steady stream of cool air from the front-bottom through the power supply.
It ran well for about 5 months, and nearly silent. But I was only running minimal load and one hard drive. Then just a few days ago I decided to load up Gentoo Linux from Stage-1 on a RAID-5 array. It compiled for 2 1/2 days, then finally when I got it up and running, the RAID arrays kept dropping out and having to re-sync. Then the USB mouse started rejecting interrupts and shutting down. This would then cause X to lock up and lock down my keyboard as well. Being a fresh system, I had yet to set up SSHD, so I had to reset. Once I got it up to single user mode, I was able to copy from the RAID array to a single partition on one hard drive so that I could dis-connect the other two and cut down heat and power.
However there was problems during the copy, and I didn’t bother spending the time to double check it before disabling the RAID array and re-formatting it. So after I changed grub.conf and successfully reboot to the new partition, I suddenly learn emerge, portage, and a whole bunch of other apps are shot to hell. Then finally, I guess the overcurrents and power fluctuations from crossing the positives on the fans corrupted the data on the hard drive, and possible my RAID-BIOS. So it won’t even boot. Becaus the main BIOS and the POST works though, I think I can flash the RAID-BIOS, fix the wiring, and get it back up.
But it’s still a royal pain in the ass!!!
