I recently purchased an Intel SASWT4I RAID controller. First of all, it is indeed a hardware RAID solution, so it is operating system independent. This is crucial as my workstation is dual-booted with Windows and Ubuntu. I have the ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard and in the setup of the card, I had some issues. The motherboard would not let me enter the card’s BIOS setup utility. I could see the card initializing, but if I tried to launch the configuration utility, the BIOS would just boot the OS instead. If I was creating a bootable array I would have had a big problem, however was just using it for a 4 SATA disk RAID 10E array, so I installed the Windows configuration utility and set it up that way. The configuration is stored in NVRAM so it persisted with Ubuntu. Unless you have the configuration utility you cannot view the connected disks. I was unable to view the SMART status’ of the disks, even with the utility. There is a configuration utility for Linux, but it is distributed as an .rpm package. In the near future I might use Alien to convert the package to a .deb and attempt to install it on Ubuntu.

The card has a load of LEDs. There are 4 green activity LEDs, one for each port and 4 orange fault LEDs, one for each port. There is a green power LED on the board itself and 2 lightpipes that pass through the backplate that indicate heartbeat and fault, as well as global activity. There is a 4 pin LED header but there is no documentation on how it is wired. I found out that the pins farthest from the backplate are the activity indicator pins with the ground closest to the backplate. The performance was at par with a 3 disk software Intel RST RAID 5 array I already had in the computer, however the access time was about 3ms better. After a little digging in the settings, I found that by default the drive cache is disabled. I enabled it and got roughly the same performance in my benchmark. It does however feel faster under normal use, so it might just be the way the benchmark works. The firmware it shipped with seemed outdated, but I could not upgrade it because the updater requires a UEFI system and has no compatibility with BIOS motherboards. The Windows utility allowed me to flash a .rom to the card but the update package Intel ships has no such compatibility. The card initializes within 10-15 seconds, which is average for a hardware RAID card. When the system shuts down, the drives do not seem to be unloaded before the system power is cut. I can clearly hear the heads of the drives snap into their park positions. I don’t particularly like this because that feature is designed for emergencies, not for normal use. It can cause the drive to fail 100s of times faster than normal.

All in all, it  is still a very good RAID controller considering the sub $150 price tag. It has some issues, but it gets the job done.

If you are a computer enthusiast who is in the market for a new high-performance rig, you might already know that there are absolutely no Intel i7 3930ks to be had anywhere in North America and many other places. There are many theories as to why the CPUs are not in good supply. The first bit of speculation came from users, who thought that Intel was deliberately holding them back in order to force users to purchase the far more expensive 3960X. Others are blaming it on Intel’s transition from the C1 to the C2 stepping on the production line. Intel has not released a full statement as to why they are not available. Intel representatives have stated that a ‘trickle’ may be coming to North America in February, and the majority of new shipments will be delayed until early April.

I’m not exactly sure where to begin the review for a laptop, so I guess I’ll begin by going through the features.

The Outside

The K53SV series is very stylish, coming in both silver and a dark brown they call ‘mocha’ which is the one I bought. The K53SV is a 15.6″ widescreen laptop with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The lid cover is a nice matte textured black plastic with a shiny ASUS logo inlay. Opening the unit up, you are faced with a shiny back bezel surrounding a 1366×768 glossy LED backlit display. There is a 0.3MP webcam and a green indicator LED and microphone to the left of it in the top of the bezel and an inset ASUS logo on the bottom. The bottom half of the notebook contains a one piece Altec Lansing speaker bar running across the top with a silver power button with white LED inset on the right. The keyboard is chicklet style with an almost full-size num pad on the left. The multi-touch pad is offset to the left of the frame, and contains two distinctly separate silver mouse keys. Below the touchpad, but not on the front edge, are 5 green LED indicators. From left to right they are: power, battery, WiFi, num lock, caps lock. Everything on the bottom half is nicely surrounded with a scratch resistant ‘mocha’ coloured brushed aluminum face plate. The left edge of the laptop has, from back to front, the cooling vent, 19V DC power in jack, gigabit Ethernet port (which to my sadness has no flashing indicator lights on it), VGA and HDMI ports, and one lonely USB 3.0 port. The front of the laptop is empty except for the multi-card reader on the left hand side, which accepts MMC, SD, and MS. The right side from back to front has the DVD multi-burner tray, two USB 2.0 ports, and the microphone and headphone audio jacks. The back side is empty. The bottom is surprisingly bare, with no air intake port for the active cooling system. This is excellent because it means that you can set the unit down on your lap or a cloth surface and won’t have to worry about choking the cooling system. The HDD and RAM are both user accessible via one huge door near the front of the unit. The power adapter is roughly 1.5″x2.5″x6″ and has a green power LED on it. The power rating is not explicitly written on the device, but I calculated it to be 120W. The ferrite bead is nicely located close to the power supply (which I strongly believe is an SMPS), which gets rid of having a chunky blob beside the laptop on your desk.

The Inside

The K53SV series has many different models, but the one that I purchased was the K53SV-DH71. It sports a 2nd generation Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7-2670QM processor with 4 physical processors with hyperthreading, making 8 logical cores operating at 2.2GHz, with turbo boost up to 3.1GHz. For graphics, it supports NVIDIA Optimus, which allows both the Sand Bridge integrated graphics and the 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M to operate simultaneously. The 540M remains off most of the time, but when an application requires more graphical processing, it turns on the 540M and pipes the output through the integrated graphics. This allows for not only good performance but enhanced battery life as well. The only disadvantage to this system is that there is no way of turning it off, which led to some problems when setting up Ubuntu. I ended up adding a repository and installing IronHide, which provides support for Optimus on Linux systems. The unit comes with 6GB of dual channel DDR3 1333MHz RAM preinstalled, and it supports up to 8GB. The hard drive is a 750GB 5400RPM Hitachi, which is sadly the bottleneck for the entire system. In the future, I will most likely replace it with an SSD, however I cannot afford that at the moment. The battery is a 56Wh 12.5V 6-cell Li-ion pack, which, according to ASUS, will run for up to 4 hours. I have not fully conditioned the battery yet, so I am not going to release my findings yet. I’ll update this post once I have solid figures. My tests confirm that the battery lasts anywhere from 3.5 to 4.5 hours in Windows 7, depending on what you are doing. The battery does not last as long in Ubuntu – usually around 3 hours. This is due to the kernel regression power problems in addition to the fact that Ubuntu does not engage SATA link power management, USB selective suspend, or PCI low power modes automatically on this machine, as confirmed when running PowerTop. A nice small feature I discovered was that the unit will only charge the battery to 100% if it is below 95%. This is to prevent the battery from charging constantly when plugged in, both saving power and prolonging the battery’s lifespan.

Performance

The K53SV is part of ASUS’ ‘versatile performance’ series. I would expect moderate to high end performance from it,  but not the world. The CPU interestingly enough was only able to do 37GFLOPS, which is interesting, given that it is supposedly more powerful than an i7 950 which can do more FLOPS. The GPU didn’t do so well on the Heaven benchmark, with only about 8FPS on max settings, but it can still run games like COD MW3 at max settings with no problem. Using MSI Afterburner to overclock the GPU to 845MHz (the RAM cannot go any faster than the stock 900MHz), I was able to get up to 15.4FPS. The sound is average for a mid-sized laptop. The laptop stays relatively cool, despite the fact that it lacks a dedicated air intake, and you rarely hear the fan at all. The top of the unit gets only slightly warm after several hours of use, but I mostly attribute that to my arms and fuzzy clothing. ASUS markets the unit has having a special technology which keeps the user contact surfaces cool, and I would have to say that they did a good job.

Warranty

Another thing that I might as well mention is that the unit comes with an excellent warranty. First of all, the unit is guaranteed to have absolutely no stuck pixels from the factory. Throughout, the 2 year warranty, ASUS will pay to ship the product in both directions. What really surprised me was that the unit comes with a second warranty known as the Accidental Damage Warranty or ADW at no extra cost. It covers the unit from accidental liquid spills, drops, fire and electrical shocks for 1 full year from date of purchase. With this warranty, they will only ship the product one way, and promise to have a turnaround time of less that 3 days. The only thing you have to do is register it within 60 days of purchase.

Conclusion

After using the K53SV for a while, I have to say that it is in my opinion the best laptop I’ve ever used. I can hardly find fault with the design or engineering of the notebook. The unit is of solid build quality, which is expected of ASUS, and not only has all the features you would need in a laptop, but they are all implemented correctly and there are no stupid design fails. I have no doubt that it will continue to operate flawlessly for a long time to come, just as all of my other ASUS products have. I have never had a laptop by ASUS before, and I have to say that from what I know now, I will most certainly be a returning customer.

A filesystem in the most simple terms is a hierarchy of how the information is stored on computer storage media such as hard drives, SSDs and RAID arrays. Many people don’t think that filesystems pose a significant impact on the performance of a system and therefore do not think much of them. In fact, most end users never need to deal with them unless they become corrupted. I’d like to share a little story of mine, which I think showcases the true importance of choosing the right filesystem and the effects it can have.

I have an Ubuntu powered server, which contains 4 separate RAID arrays. Of those 4, 2 are used for data storage and they are named ‘Storage’ and ‘Backup’ appropriately in accordance to what they are used for. Every night, the server versions some directories from the Storage array, and copies them into the Backup array. The Backup array also stores filesystem images of other computers, along with other backup related stuff. The nightly backup used to take about 1-2 hours, but lately it has been going for over 7-8 hours – still running when I get up in the morning. I was intrigued by this, and thus went digging to see if I could find out why everything was slowing down. What I found literally shocked me. The 2 data partitions were NTFS! For those who don’t already see the horror, let me explain. First of all, NTFS is a Windows filesystem and it has no place on a Linux system. It is also a notoriously bad filesystem when it comes to speed. I can’t explain why I made the arrays NTFS and not ext4, and up until my investigation, that’s what I thought they were. As a small test, I tried to copy a 1.5GB file onto the Backup array and was saddened to tears when I saw that the maximum transfer speed was an abysmal 300KB/s! This was a RAID 10 array with a benchmarked write rate of over 300MB/s, yet it could only transfer at a speed 1000x slower! I got the feeling that the filesystem was epically fragmented, but since it was a Linux machine, I had no way of checking or defragmenting it.

I decided to reformat the array as ext4, and fix the problem, which was no easy task. I spent an entire day copying the 800GB of data to another array, and proceeded with the reformat. After spending about 3 hours copying the data back, I reviewed the results. The first result I got was actually during the copying process itself. It took about a day to copy the data off the server, but only 3 hours getting it back on. To do the transfers, I used SAMBA over gigabit Ethernet, and using the NTFS partition, I yielded an average of 10MB/s transfer rate with a maximum of about 15MB/s. On the ext4 partition copying data back, I yielded a very impressive average of 70MB/s, with a maximum of over 110MB/s.

As you can see, using the right filesystem can make a huge difference in the performance of a system. I’m not out to say that NTFS was entirely the problem in this situation, but this just shows that a poorly maintained filesystem can cause problems. I also encourage those who can to use ext4, to do so, due to its amazingly high performance.

In the presentation peripheral market, there is sadly not that much to choose from. The R800 is the better of two presenters that Logitech sells. The R800 is very small, just over 5 inches long. It fits very comfortably in your hand, and all the main buttons are easily accessible without the need to shift the device around in your palm. The unit runs on 2 AAA batteries, which to my surprise were actually included in the retail packaging. The USB receiver stows nicely in the butt end of the device, however it is roughly 1 3/4″ long (excluding the USB connector) once inserted into a PC (perhaps so you don’t forget it?). The unit comes with a case which, in my opinion is just a little too small for the device, as I have to be careful to not scratch the end of it when closing the zipper. The device turns on and off via a slide switch on the left side. The device boots in about 3 seconds, and is ready for use. The device does not need any drivers or special software to use, so it is great if you are going to be using it on other people’s computers. The presenter has a 1mW class 2 green laser activated by a momentary switch, and a wireless range of up to 100′. On the top of the device are 5 buttons. The laser button is on top, followed by 2 large forward and back buttons for advancing the slides. Below that are 2 much smaller buttons for starting and stopping the slideshow, and blanking and unblanking the screen. Above all the buttons is a rectangular LCD. It displays the current battery level, as well as the signal strength of the receiver. In the middle of the display is the timer readout. Using 2 buttons on the right edge of the device, you can set a timer from 1 minute to 9 hours and 59 minutes which outlines the time for the entire presentation. You can pause and resume the timer throughout the presentation. The display shows you the time remaining and a progress bar of what time you have left. The device will vibrate just like a cell phone at 5, 2, and 0 minutes to the timer’s expiry, and then will count up with the progress bar flashing aggressively.

I was surprised when I got the device that the timer was not set using some sort of software on the computer. It would have been better if it had some way of programming in not only the time for the entire presentation, but for each slide individually, so you can keep pace. Even without that, the device does what it should, and I would recommend it to anyone who gives a lot of presentations whether it be at school, work or otherwise. The only downside is the price. Logitech states the MSRP at $99, which is outrageous for essentially half a mouse with a laser pointer in it. I was able to find a retailer which sold it for $72, but even then it is still a bit steep. The reason for the pricing in my opinion is that there are simply not enough presenters in the market, and people like me who need them will pay whatever is necessary to get one. If other major companies came out with presenters, I would love to see how they stack up to the R800.

Just a few days ago, my Vuze installation on my Ubuntu powered server simply stopped working. It would start and almost immediately crash. In my case, the problem was caused by the Java Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) library being 64-bit, while my server OS is 32-bit. This architecture mismatch caused the crash. I have no idea how this problem started, since I don’t remember Vuze updating or anything like that.

How to resolve the problem:

1. Begin by going to http://www.eclipse.org/swt/ and downloading the SWT for Linux.
2. Find the Vuze installation folder. In my case, I extracted Vuze to my home directory, but it could be anywhere.
3. Delete the file ‘swt.jar’ in the installation folder.
4. Open the archive you downloaded above and extract just the ‘swt.jar’ from it and put it into the Vuze installation directory.

You should now be able to launch Vuze, if this was indeed your problem. If it still fails to start, you can open up “/home/<username>/.azureus/logs/debug_*.log” and see the stack trace for the error.

In keeping with the theme of Ubuntu desktop environments, I thought that I would comment on my experiences with the latest version of the GNOME interface. As soon as Ubuntu 11.10 came out on October 13th, I decided to upgrade my previous installation. Bad idea. It ended up breaking so much that I could barely get into the system in failsafe mode, so a reinstall was necessary. I kind of expected this as 11.10 was a big change in some departments, and I did have an interesting system configuration. Anyway, back to environments. I used Unity for the first week or so, and I got used to it – somewhat. There were a few things that I just couldn’t get used to, like having the launcher all the way on the other side of my desk, a place where I seldom venture.

I then decided to try out GNOME 3 (also known as GNOME shell). It is the successor to the ‘classic’ interface in all previous versions of Ubuntu. You can install it with just a few clicks by opening Software Centre and searching for ‘GNOME Shell’. Once installed, you can simply log out, and then click the gear in the top right corner of the login area and select ‘GNOME’. Installing GNOME 3 does not replace Unity, and you can switch to and fro at any time. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely avid about either Unity or GNOME 3 yet, but I see where they’re headed, and I embrace the change they are imposing. I just don’t think that either once has perfected the ‘new’ style interface yet. The first thing that you will notice is that with GNOME 3, almost the entire interface is hidden. Only a thin bar at the top is visible. It features an ‘Activities’ button on the left, the clock in the middle, and the accessibility, volume, networking, and user applets on the right. However, you will not find indicators there. They can be seen by moving your cursor to the bottom right of the screen. A transparent panel will emerge from the bottom, and the indicators appear on the right in an almost stacked manor. They don’t all look okay, especially ones like indicator-multiload. Their icons are cropped, and so ones that are irregularly shaped don’t turn out right. There is a special one called ‘Removable Devices’ which allows you to eject and unmount media. Your currently active application title will appear on the left of the top bar, directly beside the activities button. At this point all it seems to do is allow you to close the application, but I can see a jump-list type menu coming in the near future.

The top panel is flared at the edges of the screen, so that when a window is maximized, the corners are rounded, similar to Apple products. Speaking of maximizing, GNOME 3 has the same drag-and-snap features as Unity and Windows 7. What is interesting is that there is only one caption button in window title bars, and that is the close. There is no minimize or maximize/restore. You can always right-click the title bar though. The close button is on the right instead of the left like in Unity. The menus for applications are located under the title bar, unlike in Unity where they appear in the top bar. The whole interface aims to be semi-transparent and rounded, with very simple and clean menus. The applets for volume and network are much more simplified than in Unity. There are subtle animations everywhere, and they make the interface flow, but they’re not a waste of time and don’t reduce productivity. GNOME 3 does not have support for Compiz, so there are no customizable flashy effects at the moment, however that is likely to change in the future, as the GNOME 3 window manager, Mutter, matures. In terms of the notification system, notifications appear in the centre at the bottom of the screen in that transparent bar that I mentioned earlier. You can also turn them off in the user applet. The user applet is similar to that of the one in Unity, except that there is no section for devices and printers, and there is only an option for suspend, no shut down or restart. It took me a while to figure out that when you hold down the alt key on the keyboard, the suspend option turns into a menu which gives you the other options.

Now the real important part of the interface is the ‘Activities’ panel. This is the heart of the new interface. You can bring it up by clicking ‘Activities’ in the top left corner of the main monitor, or by moving the cursor to the top left corner of any monitor. I love that feature, because it doesn’t matter what monitor I’m using, I can always bring it up quickly in one fluid motion. One other great thing is that when you move your cursor into the corner on a multi-monitor setup like mine, for the height of the top panel, the cursor is held on one monitor like there is no other screen, so you can nudge the corner of the monitor even though there isn’t really a corner there because it is in between two monitors. It is such a small thing, but epically crucial to the interface, and it was something that Unity failed on for a long time. The activities panel is remotely similar to the dash in Unity. On the left is the ‘favourites bar’, which is like a launcher. You can pin applications to it, and start them by clicking. It appears on your primary monitor, so it’s in the right location regardless of your setup (are you listening Unity developers?). Unlike Unity’s launcher, the icons get smaller as the number increases, unlike Unity’s ‘folding’ effect. There are also no indicators as to how many instances are running. The large area in the middle can have two uses, which are toggled with two buttons at the top. The primary use is to show you all the windows open in your current workspace. It arranges them as large as possible in live updating tiles on the monitor that the window resides on. The window title is displayed below, and you can close applications right from the activities panel. You switch applications by clicking them. You might think that bringing up the panel to switch active windows is a pain, but I found it faster than Unity’s launcher, partly because I didn’t have to move my cursor as far, but mostly because the targets are bigger, and you can go faster without risk of selecting another application. On the right are the workspaces. GNOME 3 dynamically creates them as necessary. Just drag windows over the workspace you want them in. It will automatically create new workspaces as you fill them, and destroy them as you close or move applications. Applications that do not appear in your favourites can be opened by typing and searching, which works exactly the same way as Unity. If you want to browse installed applications, you can click the second function button at the top, and all the applications will appear as tiles. I find this interface better than Unity because it’s full screen. You can also view by category just as in Unity. To open a new instance of an already running application, hold down the ctrl key. You can close the activities panel by clicking on an application or launcher, or by nudging the corner again.

At this point you can clearly see that I enjoy using GNOME 3 far more than Unity, and I use it exclusively now. I highly recommend that you try out both because they offer a similar interface, with minor changes, and it’s those minor differences that can make or break your experience with Ubuntu.

It has been a few days since the Oneiric Beta 1 was released, and I’ve had a few days to play around with it.

The major change that most will notice is that 11.10 does not ship with GNOME 2, in fact it does not ship with GNOME at all! The only interface available is Canonical Ltd.’s proprietary Unity interface. As I have said  before, I don’t like Unity very much. Regardless, I began testing with an open mind.

There are many things that bugged me about the Unity interface when I first used it in 11.04, so many in fact that I can’t exactly list them all here. The first problem that I had was that all my favorite panel applets were no longer compatible. I used applets like System Load Applet, and Hardware Sensors Applet. Over time the two projects were ported to become ‘indicators’, that is that they can show up in the indicator area on the top panel in Unity. The System Load Indicator project is progressing along well, and it looks great, almost exactly as it was before. The Hardware Sensors Indicator is not exactly ready yet, but it should be ready soon. These software ports help make Unity usable to the extent that GNOME 2 was.

Enough about panels. Time to delve into Unity itself. The first improvement I noticed was that Unity was slightly faster than before, which is a plus. The idea of replacing the applications menu with special ‘lenses’ in the Dash makes Unity seem more unified (no pun intended). Another welcome change is that the old ‘Ubuntu Button’ which was previously in the panel is now in the Launcher itself. The Launcher also now comes with some settings. It still has very low customizability over other systems, but they are a welcome advancement. Some new settings include being able to change the backlighting on the icons, change the icon size, and hide behavior. The setting that is still missing is the ability to move the Launcher to another edge of the screen. When this question was posed to Canonical’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth upon the release of 11.04, he responded that he wanted the Launcher to be close to the Ubuntu Button. While that might have been true, now the Ubuntu Button (now called the ‘Dash Home’) is part of the Launcher, so it can move with the Launcher. I am still wondering why they haven’t done something about this.

The biggest problem of all is multiple monitor support. 11.04 pretty much had none. I have a two monitor setup, one in front (my primary), and one to the left. The Launcher is shown on the primary monitor, on the left side. In 11.04, this put the Launcher right in the middle of the monitor setup. Since the Launcher auto-hid itself, you would have to move the cursor to the screen edge to show it. The problem was that there was no screen edge there. This meant that I had to use the keyboard super key to show the Dash, then cancel it and scramble to hover over the Launcher before it hid itself again. As you can see, this was the main reason that I never used Unity. 11.10 changes the setup a bit. It treats the monitor to the left as the primary, always. This solves the screen edge problem, but it creates another. I have to move the cursor across both screens to get to the Launcher and back, a distance of sometimes 7000 pixels. While this problem is much more tolerable than the old one, it is still an area for improvement.

Unity, just as always, has been designed for 3D acceleration. However Canonical was forced to create a 2D software accelerated version, and I must say that it has major problems. It has bugs galore, and major features don’t work, including things like not being able to rearrange the Launcher. The 3D version isn’t without bugs either. Zeitgeist-daemon crashes often or becomes a runaway process. The music lens doesn’t seem to work at all, the volume indicator has major problems when you click and drag it, and other assorted problems that should be ironed out by release time. I strongly suggest not installing the Beta on any computer that is any bit important because it will let you down. I would wait until at least the Release Candidate.

In terms of bundled software, I was surprised to see Synaptic Package Manager not installed by default. While Ubuntu Software Centre does practically the same things, Synaptic is far more powerful for administration, and I wish that they had not removed it. It can still be installed through Software Centre. Speaking of Software Centre, it has had a major upgrade since 11.04. The first welcome change is the speed improvement. It is still slow as all-get-out, but better than before. The replacement of Evolution with Thunderbird is another interesting one. I have nothing against Thunderbird, however Evolution does the non-mail tasks far better than Thunderbird. If you don’t think that I’ve been positive about anything, 11.10 also ships with a new login screen, which is the best I have seen so far, in any OS.

Overall, 11.10 is shaping up to be a much better OS than 11.04 in the Unity department, and I think that it will be welcomed throughout the community despite its (major) flaws. Two of my testing machines were fresh installs, and they went just fine. I also did an upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 and the machine became unbearably slow, over 4x slower startup. I’m not sure if this is just a bug, or if this might be the time to reinstall.

While working on a new Windows WPF application today, I ran into a serious problem. I had made a UserControl class and wanted to use it in my application. After defining it in the XAML of the main window, Visual Studio said that the entire assembly could not be found. I spent several hours checking the code: namespaces, assemblies, cleaning/rebuilding etc. but nothing changed anything. I eventually found out that Visual Studio has problems when working with projects over mapped network drives. I copied the project from my server onto my desktop and voila! The error was gone.

First of all, you might be wondering why I’m writing a review about a fan. You might think that a fan is a fan and that’s all. But let me tell you, the Noctua NF-S12BFLX is a fan like no other. There is more technology in this fan than there is on the space station. The NF-S12BFLX is a simple 120mm computer case fan that is anything but simple. Just looking at the fan itself, it doesn’t seem very special at all, but after opening the Velcro flap on the box and reading all about it, you can understand why it costs $25. First of all, it has tapered blade ends for less noise. In fact, almost all the features are for increased airflow and reduced noise. It comes with 4 mounting screws as well as 4 rubber plugs, which you can use instead. They are suppose to reduce vibration and noise while increasing lifespan. It also comes with 2 power adapters, which adjust the voltage and reduce the speed.

Before installing the fan, I powered it up using an old PSU. On maximum speed, which is only 1200rpm, the fans are supposed to move 100m3/h and produce 18dBA of noise. My testing revealed that mine only made 16dB of sound, which is pretty good. I didn’t test the airflow, but compared to my other fans, it was very impressive. With the Low Noise Adapter (LNA) the fan was inaudible over the PSU fan. The same went for the Ultra LNA.

I bought the fan to replace a burned out exhaust fan on my server. With my backup server being a huge pain-in-the-ass to start up, I decided to replace the fan while the server was running. Removing the old one was pretty simple, but getting the NF-S12BFLX in was exactly the opposite. I wanted to use the rubber plugs, but the thing is that they need to be threaded through the hole from the outside and through the fan. Then they need to be stretched (which makes them thinner), and when released they expand and hold the fan in place. This worked for the first 2 holes, but it was nearly impossible to grab hold of the plugs on the holes closest to the motherboard. It took some clever maneuvering with some right angle pliers to get them in place. The plugs are designed fine, but I would not recommend hot-swapping them, as it would be so much easier if there was no motherboard in the case. The NF-S12BFLX comes with a 3 to 4 pin PSU adapter, which I used.

The fan has been running for a few weeks now, and has made a drastic improvement in the airflow of the case. It claims to have an MTBF of over 150,000 hours, which is insane for any fan. It is too early to tell how long it will last, but I will monitor it, and keep you posted on how long it lasts.

Update: It’s been 6 months 24/7, and it’s still going strong.