Faulty Power Supply Symptoms - Power Supply Failure

Just recently in the past 2 weeks, I noticed that my Freenas computer began to shut down randomly for no reason. I wondered what the cause of this could be. I began to carry out a little investigation into this matter. The first thing I checked was the CPU temperature. It idled at around 40 degrees celcius so that was fine. I checked the Freenas logs and there was nothing to indicate why the server was shutting down. I thought it all seemed a bit strange that this would start happening all of a sudden.

I had a look inside the case when the computer was running to see if I could find any other clues. I took a glance at the power supply which I had suspected was the problem. What do you think I saw? The fan on the PSU was not spinning! This was the case solved for me as I then knew that the PSU was overheating, hence causing the computer to shut down.

Faulty Power supply symptoms:
Power supplies do fail eventually. Factors like age, dust and ventilation all affect the life of a power supply.  However there are usually some obvious signs that it will fail. Apart from the overheating problem as I have mentioned earlier there are other signs to look out for:

• If you notice that the outside case of the computer is hot to touch around the area of the PSU.
• If you switch on the computer and after a few seconds it switches itself off again.
• If nothing happens when the power button is pressed. An light may flash on your computer to indicate a fault.
• After intensive applications or games have been running for a while, the computer might switch off or might even display a BSOD.
• Usually the computer will shutdown randomly without a BSOD.
• Beware when you upgrade a graphics card to a high powered one. Graphics cards are extremely power-hungry so make sure that your power supply can deal with it.

What to look for when choosing a PSU:
Check with all your hardware's minimum requirements and see if you match it by at least greater than 20%. A power supply will only supply what is needed. That means that if you buy an 800w power supply it will not use 800w all the time, only what is required.

Do not attempt to repair a power supply as they hold a high charge even when not plugged in. Replace a power supply when you can at the first signs of failure to minimise the risk of damage to other system components.

Freenas Server Project

Earlier this year, I began a project to build my own home server. My plan was to have most of my data stored on a central machine at home. I decided to make it Linux based and I chose Freenas.

I looked at my local Freecycle group and saw that someone had offered a used computer. I followed up on this offer and I received a very smelly and dusty computer. It smelled of dog, cigarettes and foot odor, combined into one putrid pong. I had to scrub the case to get rid of the smell and I even had to wash the motherboard with water to get the dust off of it. I then spent a while drying parts thoroughly with a hair dryer and left it for around two weeks to dry in the air. I was delighted when I eventually pushed the power button and the machine came to life.

The old filthy heatsink that came out of the computer.

I then installed two 500gb Western Digital Green hard drives into the server. I also prepared a usb flash drive and a Freenas CD for running the OS. Afterwards, it was quite easy to set up I enabled Samba, FTP, SSH, bitTorrent, UPnP and Itunes media server. 

Specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.0Ghz

Asus M2N-MX motherboard

2Gb ddr2 OCZ ram

2x Western Digital Green 500Gb Drives

The Finished Server

Overall I think that the project was quite successful and I have been running this system for a few months now. There is a great sense of satisfaction when you have transformed a piece of garbage into a useful machine. If you happen to be reading this and you have any questions on how I set it all up, feel free to leave a comment or contact me. 

First Post

I had started a wordpress blog some time ago but I found that the wordpress.com free hosting service was too slow :P. This led me to blogger :D .  I will be reusing one old post about a small game myself and my friend made some time ago. Apart from that, I will hope to update my blog as regularly as possible with new content. :)