Sheska

CPU: AMD A8-3870K
Motherboard: ASUS F1A75-V Pro
Case: NZXT Source 210
PSU: CoolerMaster GX 450W
RAM: Crucial 2x4GB DDR3 1600
SSD: Crucial M4 64GB
CPU Heatsink: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus
Plus incidental fans and cables.

Total bill of materials was $399.71, provided my get my two $15 refunds. It took almost a month and a half to get all the parts on sale, which saved me almost $150. And then the very next day after buying the last two items, even better sales come along. Such is life.

The case is simple enough; I didn't want anything flashy or with any lights.It has a removable back panel so I could route the cables back there without blocking airflow. And I filled 5 of the 7 possible fan locations. Lots of wind.

The PSU has each of its cable bundles have a sleeve. Oriented as it is in the case, it has its own separate airflow, sucking in from the bottom and blowing out the back.

The CPU is actually an APU. AMD put a quad core processor on the same chip with their Radeon 6550 graphics chipset. It may not be as powerful as getting an Intel i5 and a discrete graphics card, but it certainly is cheaper. Even though it's an inexpensive product line, I opted for the most expensive option, to be able to overclock it, which is why I bought a new heatsink. So far with just using the ASUS auto overclock option, it's up from 3GHz to 3.3GHz.

The motherboard is a higher end one for the APU line. ASUS is generally good, and it has plenty of options for overclocking and customization. My first experience with UEFI too. Shiny!

RAM is cheap, and I almost went with 16GB but reading around, it seemed unnecessary. I can always add more.

The flooding in Thailand has really pushed up prices for HDDs and I've always wanted to try SSDs. Now they are the same price! 64GB isn't much, but aside from media, I don't think I'll need much more than that. A secondary HDD for storage is also on the potential upgrade list.

I loaded it with Lubuntu, a lightweight version of Ubuntu. I wanted Ubuntu for it's ease of use, but not with Unity, its new desktop system. I tried that on my laptop for a while and got annoyed with the sidebar. So a lightweight version it is! People say it's for old computers but I could never tell why I should go for something "heavier". More shiny? It's shiny enough! And I've installed bunches of software. Ubuntu's package management system is really awesome. If you haven't used it, it's like the App Store or Android Market for your computer.

Booting up takes about 35 seconds. Shutting down takes about half that. Programs open nigh instantly. It's fast. It runs cool with all the fans I have on it. I still need to add more software, but so far, so very good.

And its name is Sheska.

Storage Space

My current project is to build a $400 computer. Well, I'm almost there but I'll leave that for another post when it's finished. I've had another computer project floating around for a number of years that I've wanted to do. I'm going to build a NAS (network attached storage) of my own. Currently, all of my files are on a secondary hard drive on my computer with only the irreplaceable files backed up to an external drive. Even then, I haven't updated the backup for a some time and a drive failure would probably destroy some pictures I'd like to keep. I could buy one or more external hard drives, but then I don't like that solution. It's too restrictive and...easy.

Phase one of this project is to build the computer. Nothing fancy, except the number of HDDs (up to 8). Prices for HDDs has been prohibitively high as of late, restraining me from building my machine yet. FreeNAS is some free software that installs onto a thumb drive and lets you run the computer in a corner without a monitor or keyboard. You can access it using your browser for configuration and if all goes right, you can mount the storage it provides as a network drive on the computer, making it appear like your local drive.

The idea with this is that any device on the network can access the files. I can watch movies on my phone, listen to music on all computers (and I have a lot of computers, with more to come), and store and access home videos and photos. True, there are web services that provide some of these things, but this is mine. Faster access, lots more space, and more possibilities. The NAS can also provide protection against hard drive failure. If one breaks, it can be replaced without loss of data.

True backup doesn't put all the eggs in one basket, even with the aforementioned drive protection. What about house fire? Theft? Meteors? Welcome to phase two. Here, multiple machines are created. These machines are then housed with others where they can use them for their own storage. It is then easy enough to have each of them synchronize the data between machines at night (the details are unimportant!). Now, any machine can be lost and the data remains on the survivors. The data can also be encrypted if so desired.

The point being that hard drives fail, computers die, and the internet is slow. Plus with my future computerized house, I'll need to keep my stuff somewhere.