There are quite a few mini-PCs around from companies like Beelink and AcePC. They vary in spec from very low-powered Atoms and Celerons up to i7 with 16GB tbh. Most come with Windows 10 or a flavour of Android. That's fine, but I also wanted to have at least 2TB of disk space accessible over ethernet (Gigabit) with a further 2TB to back up the main disk. Almost none of the barebones or built boxes allow for additional drives. I could probably do it using external drives plugged into a mini-PC but there's a huge difference between transferring files over a Gigabit link and over a Gigabit link plus a USB port. Anyway, it was all starting to look a bit cumbersome for something I want to sit in view.

The little Silverstone case has room for a couple of 2.5" drives with proper mounting points. The STX board has 2 SATA headers and comes with matching connectors, plus it has an M.2 slot for a third (PCIe) drive to boot from. So I can put everything into one box and hang a little Cyrus DAC from a USB port at the back. I can control the lot with an eSYNiC mini keyboard and use the telly as a monitor.

Gotcha. Thought it would be storage that was the hold up if you didn't want the storage elsewhere on the network.

It's pretty negligible with USB 3 IME.

Talking of gotcha, just made a start at putting the little PC together. The 2.5" drives sit next to each other on the bottom of the case with pre-drilled screw holes and little 'dimples' for positioning. The mobo has risers at each corner that hold it clear above them. There are little riser pin-sets on the mobo with custom clip-on cables taking power and data. They're just 2 cm too short to actually reach the furthest drive  :'-( 

I'll probably have to bodge something now, maybe with some sticky fixer things to sit the drives at 90 degrees to how they should go.

Really? I find that I get a pretty steady  65 to 90 MB/s disk to disk, depending on what else is using the network, whereas to a USB drive it may start around the same but after a few seconds when the cache has gone it drops to a pretty poor 5 to 10 MB/s usually less. And that's with USB 3.

Desktop or laptop drives?

Gotta agree with Smithy. I've got some large USB 3 drives on my server and they get a consistent 80-90 MB/s over my gigabit network. Obviously slower for smaller files. But the bottleneck is usually the read end (card reader, other drive etc) rather than the USB 3 drive. Can't really tell the difference from them being internal drives. I was pleasantly surprised when I first got a proper USB 3 drive, wasn't expecting that speed.

An old drive? Bad enclosure?

It's not something I do all the time since most of my drives are SATA connected. The times I've seen it are the odd times I've copied files - usually whole backed up folders across the network. In this case the USB connected drives would be exclusively 2.5" But that's interesting, because if what you're both saying is correct (which I'm sure it is) it makes my future project for an ultra-cheap NAS more practical with something like the Nano Pi M4.

I suppose my experience could be something as simple as a bad cable and probably assumptions based on crappy USB 3 thumb drives. Whatever, I don't really want additional external drive cases sitting there if I don't have to.

ISTR the the earlier/original iterations of USB 3 were buggy.

So, put the little beast together. Fast, even with a little i3 7100. Got Windows 10 installed and activated pretty quick (once again a Windows 7 key works just fine). Haven't got the accompanying HiFi set up yet but decided to plug in the Cyrus DAC anyway. That involved picking up the tiny PC.

Ooh err, as characters in the Beano often say. As soon as I moved it, the fan noise changed from near silent to helicopter. Checked HWInfo and the temps were OK and the fan speed was steady(ish). Was there a cable interfering with the fan blades? Pretty sure not (there aren't exactly many cables in there) but powered down and checked. No stray cables and the fan was mounted firmly and square on. Mobo nice and tight too; case likewise. Best guess is that the fan bearing is dodgy. Have tried again loads of times with the same result.

Bought the case, fan and power supply from Scan. Haven't used them for years and their customer service has varied from not bad to dreadful and back. About to find out what it's like now.

That's pretty unusual, but I haven't faced a defective fan out of the box. Usually the bearings die in fits and starts after years of hard service (even the cheap ones). Do you know if it's sleeve or ball bearings?

As with Smiffy, it's never happened to me straight out of the box, but of course it's possible. Can you swap it out to another connector, either on the same mobo or in another machine? Just on the off-chance that it's power-related.

It's a sleeve type and there's a basic description at anandtech. 

Yes, it's odd. I've had a fan that didn't get on with a motherboard and case and caused the whole thing to hum with harmonics. I did have a supposedly silent-fan that was noisy out of the box, but it had clearly been used for some kind of extreme sport in transit as the packaging was badly damaged. Apart from that they generally do what they're supposed to.

This one is impressively quiet from start up. It also looks nicely made with a copper insert for the core. It uses the same split-pin mounting system as stock Intel coolers and loads of others. I've read some complaints about it being difficult to install and the design of the components and possibly material used doesn't give as positive a feel as some, but once it was in I could see it was square with the pegs locked in place and it was perfectly solidly positioned. It just goes ballistic if it's moved - even to the extent of removing a USB stick.

I've had a chance to look a bit closer and I'm convinced it's the bearing. I've left it running for 15 minutes and it does a steady and very quiet 1800 rpm. It keeps the CPU at around 32C which is fine. As soon the PC is moved it complains. A few times it even stopped completely for a split second as I could see the logo on the blades.

@Manthorp: yes, I wondered whether it might be a dodgy power thing, especially as the bios on the teeny weeny motherboard has some fancy fan management stuff that I hadn't seen before. It's one of those 'dual view' bios setups, with what's supposed to be an easy view as an alternative to a more traditional page by page, function by function setup. The easy view has 4 fan settings from quiet up to maximum. It also has some snazzy functions that allow you to fiddle with a graph of what the fan does as temperature increases. I left that alone. Yes, I could swap it into another PC, but do I really want to spend more hours ripping out fans and cleaning off thermal compound?

Scan asked for a video of it happening. I replied (rather snottily) that I could do that, but under the Consumer Contracts Regulations I'm entitled to a refund whatever the case. They immediately issued an RMA number and reply label. I have done a quick vid and sent them a copy. It's here if you're interested: linky to my noisy vid
It does look a bit as though the noise is because of how it's perched, but I left a bit of case overhanging so I could pick it up - and it does the same wherever I put it.

I read a long time ago to avoid sleeves, only do balls (nj). On the few occasions I did have sleeves (prior to following this advice), they seemed to wear out 2-3x faster than balls.

True that. However, leaving aside my fun with this cooler, balls are usually noisier.

Well, well, well. This is turning into the project that goes on giving and reminding me why I gave up building PCs. So, I took the fan off and cleaned off the thermal paste. Then I turned to the CPU and started to clean that too. Little bit of paste down the side, so rather than poke it further in with my tissue, I decided to pop the CPU out to be on the safe side. I never really looked hard at the socket, but blow me down if there aren't half a dozen bent pins - some really bent ones. I'm somebody who inserts a CPU as if I was nursing a lump of C4 wrapped in hot nitoglycerine, so I'm damn sure I didn't bend them. Everything booted OK so now I'm wondering whether to bother with a repair. 

Just as an example of what I often get with USB 3.0.
This is going...

• MicroSD card (decent V30 standard)
• Cheapo USB 3.0 card reader
• PC - Win10
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Server - Ubuntu 14.04
• 6TB drive USB 3.0

Transferring some 4GB files straight from the card to the network drive.



Obviously for what you want internal is the right option, but for when appearance/space isn't so much of an issue they easily compete with internal drives these days. Which is nice since many externals are sold cheaper for some reason.

Precious little difference between that and hdd to hdd over ethernet. In fact it's as good as I see ssd to ssd over ethernet (sata). 

Maybe my usb3 card, circa 4 years old, isn't as good as I thought it was.

Straightened out all the bent CPU socket pins. Ran Intel processor diagnostics a bit. All works. Scary stuff.

Huh? Isn't there a hole for each pin, so being bent would stop it connecting? I'm confused by the photo, there's only one bit that looks like the pins might be flattened, but several that don't seem in the right position, except where the two halves meet and they all look flat. Far too Eschery for my tired brain. :(

The machine was running with them bent, right? So are unconnected pins like bad sectors on a disk and the processor just ignores them and runs a bit slower?