The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve been doing some overdue hardware upgrades on my little server/community ISP. 500GB drives have dropped to the $200 range, and while they’re not necessarily the cheapest per gigabyte storage, it’s a so much more efficient use of space and electricity that it seems a waste to buy a smaller capacity drive. So I bought two internal 500GB drives and one external 500GB so I can have a backup some place other than the backup server in my basement, in case the house burns down or someone decides to break in and steal all the computers (note to thieves: please don’t do this).

Since I’ve been burning through hard drives (literally!) at a rate of about one every six months, I decided to do something about the temperature in the case. The CPU has been hovering dangerously around 60 degrees celcius for a long while, and the drives well into the 50’s — except the one drive with its own personal fan, which is happy to hang out in the 30’s. (I’ve got three more hard drive fans en route).

In any event, I’ve never bought a CPU fan before, so I just picked out a random one that seemed better than what I had. Little did I know what I was getting. When I took the new fan and heatsink out of the box, I was reminded of Crocodile Dundee: That’s not a CPU fan, mate. This is a CPU fan.

Pictured below is the TITAN TTC-NK15TB/SC(RB) I bought for the low price of $31. Although this image doesn’t show the Japanese anime decoration on the top, it captures the size. The old fan/heatsink combination was about 20% the size of this one, and not nearly as shiny.

I realize for all you case-modder/overclocker/slashdot/gamer types, this is probably a puny cooling apparatus, but for me it was pretty exciting. Now my hands are apparently permanently covered with blue thermal grease, and my CPU is running at a cool 40 degrees.

Oh, well, here is the top view:

Of course, no one ever sees that, except the person installing it.

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