Airflow in my HTPC

Today I added a fan to my HTPC. When I removed the original PSU and put in a PicoPSU the only fan that was providing airflow through the case was also removed.

This was kind of the point of placing the PicoPSU as the fan was making way too much noise. However it also meant that all the hot air generated by the CPU keeps hovering around in the case.

That just doesn't feel right so I ordered this fan.
I made a small bracket to mount it on and fill the hole that the old PSU left behind.

Result after slowing down the CPU fan to the lowest possible speed: CPU temperature 35C and GPU temperature 45C.

Installing an SSD

Recently I made another fine addition to my Ubuntu powered desktop system: an SSD drive (more specific the 60GB version of this). Installing it took some tweaking and I'm not gonna take all the credit for this. This post describes exactly what I did, the posts above that one show the help I got.

I have to add that I changed the swap space back to the HDD. For some reason mounting the swap space on the SSD takes about 10s. I don't know why, so if someone has a bright idea: tell me, I'm all ears.

But now for the results (I used bootchart to visualize):
This is the bootchart with the HDD.

And this is the bootchart with the SSD.

Installing the SSD shaved about 10s off the boottime. Looking a bit closer reveals that this is almost completely realized by a much faster completion of ureadahead. The much higher throughput of the SSD is clearly taken advantage of.

Some stopwatch results:
With the HDD:

• 25s from grub to login
• 20s from login to Firefox ready to use

With the SSD:

• 10s from grub to login
• 12s from login to Firefox ready to use.

So again it makes quite a difference, although it's kind of a bummer that getting to grub also takes 10-15s. But this is the BIOS booting, so there's little I can do about that.

Besides a reduced boottime the overall user experience is better: every program starts faster, I have no way of measuring this though...