June 7, 2025

Fedora 41 -- a new case for trona

What does a new case for a computer have to do with Fedora. Nothing at all actually, but that is what we are up to today.

The problem is that my new Nvidia RTX 3060 won't fit into my old "Cooler Master" case. It is sort of a measure of how times have changed. The old case has a bunch of 5.25 inch "bays" along with a few 3.5 inch. It expects that you will want to mount a DVD or CD drive in one of those bays. Pretty much nobody is doing anything with optical disks these days (though they have their advantages).

Most (almost all) the nicer new cases have a glass side, which I do not like or want. People want to show off spinning and blinking lights (what one fellow on Reddit called "RGB puke"). Well, I don't want any RGB puke myself. So searching on cases without a glass side serves to nicely narrow down candidates.

I settled on the Fractal Design North with mesh side. You could get a glass side if you wanted one. You could also get it in white (I went for black). They also have a bigger "XL" version, but you only really need that if you plan to install a liquid cooler and get into serious gamer stuff. It turns out Fractal Design is from Sweden (although made in China) and I read that they have very good customer service.

It comes with two 140mm fans (for the front of the case). These are big, and they can run slow and still move a lot of air. This makes it quiet. You can go crazy and load 4 more 140mm fans in various places, if you think you need them.

The NZXT would have been $20 cheaper and also looks like a fine case, but you get a glass side panel.

What about that DVD drive

I can of course just put it on the shelf and forget about it. If I got desperate to use it, I could open the side of the case, hook up cables to it and do whatever desperate thing I wanted to do.
Or I could buy one of these: For $52 I could get a USB enclosure for the thing. I won't spend the money at this time, given that it has been years since I even thought about that DVD drive.

What about SSD drives

I now have a 4T Western Digital drive that holds /u1. That drive has "9 Offline uncorrectable sectors". People say that when you see these, your drive is on its way out fairly soon. What I consider doing is to replace it with a 4T SSD like this: This would cost $259, which is about the prices of the 8T HDD I have on order. So storage on SSD is about twice as expensive. They say that hard drives last 3-5 years, but SSD last 5-10 years. If this is true, then the cost per year of ownership is about equal. And longevity depends on use pattern. It is write cycles that wear out a SSD.

Samsung warranties this particular disk for "5 years or 2,400 TB TBW". They measure write cycles by TBW (total bytes written) and they say the limit for this drive is 2400 TB of writing. Now it is a 4T disk, so this would be 2400/4 = 600 times writing the entire drive.

My typical use on my /u1 partition is archival. Specific projects will have activity as I edit files and do compiles, but the bulk of the disk is a write once and leave it be sort of thing.

My other thought is that I will have a 8T backup disk. What do I do when the 4T primary fills up? The sensible thing is to buy a second 4T drive. By then prices may come down and/or bigger SSD may be available. At that time I will have /u1 and /u2 as primary drives and /u3 will be the 8T backup "mirror" for both.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org