Another server project

I

IDversusEGO

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 30, 2003
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Recently I decided to seperate my movie file server from my TV and music server. I had tons of matching smaller hard drives laying around and wanted to put them to use. I can't afford a Stacker right now and I happened to have a full tower sitting in a corner from years ago. so here we are in mod town. The challenge is to fit 11 hard drives and as many DVD roms as I can (for movie ripping).

CLICK IMAGES FOR SLIGHTLY LARGER IMAGE

Here is the case as stripped down as I could get it without a dremel...


here is PS-RagE's idea for mounting the hard drives that I stole. works well. Just some shelving brackets from home depot. $2.95 for 6 feet.


here is the new lower HDD mount being test fit for height. it need to be ground down a little. it's a little wobbly. also I am still waiting on another RMA from WD, that's why there is a gap in the drives.


next up is trying to decide on cooling for the HDDs and finding a way to make the lower drives stable.
 
I woudl try and get the HDD's out of the 5.25 drive bvays so you can get more DVD drives in there...I'm sure there is room for 3 more HDD's in there somewhere that isn't in teh drive bays. :)
 
You can fit 5 drives where you have those 3 drives mounted :)
 
Thanks for the feedback so far guys. I am going to home depot tomorrow to find something to secure thes lower drives. I will also start the external cosmetics soon. Nothing big, just a paint job and going to cut out the lower area to allow more air intake.

fenton06 said:
I woudl try and get the HDD's out of the 5.25 drive bvays so you can get more DVD drives in there...I'm sure there is room for 3 more HDD's in there somewhere that isn't in teh drive bays. :)
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I could, but I don't think I'll need more than 3 at one time and I like having the room for air around the HDD. I like my drives to breath.

Ockie said:
You can fit 5 drives where you have those 3 drives mounted :)
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yeah, but I don't have 5 drives. This setup actually fits precisely the amount of HDD I have. kind of wierd actually.

lame said:
would you ever rip more than 3 dvds at the same time?
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desire, maybe. Need, no. In the custom case I will be building following up this project, I will cram as many as I can, just to be cool. Ihave a source for OEM pulls that is dirt cheap for standard DVD-roms. I get the OEM stuff when his customers upgrade to burners, which is often.
 
ok...just a thought :D Looks good...are you going to paint it or anything? What kind of hardware is going into this beast.
 
I am not painting the frame, as there will be no window :eek: :eek: :eek:

I am painting the outside. going ot go to the auto parts store and look for something this weekend. maybe just a gunmetal grey with silver accents. subtle, but still decent looking.

as for hardware, I am going with a p4 2.66 or a 1.8 and a Matx Asus I have laying around. I the mobo becuase of onboard everything, including gigabit LAN and it leaves me room at the bottom to do a bottom mounted PSU if I want. Probably just use 512 of pc2100. Going to go cheap on the SATA cards since I will have plenty of left over power for software raid. remeber, this is just a file server and part time DVD ripper.
 
did a little work...

quick trip to Home Depot got me some of the stuff I needed to move forward. New sander, some new dremel cutting wheels and such, and my new mini-me soldering iron. scrounged together the fans from the parts bin in the basement.


Also found this heatsink. Going to grind it smooth and use it on a fx5200 I want to go passive on.


Bent the bottom of the rails and wills crew them to the chassis. the one on the front was the first attmept and I need to work with it some more. a little out of whack. it is a tight fit between the memory and the HDDs, but I think it will be fine.


Here's the front of the case. marked off the parts that will go away via the dremel. going to cut it and replace it with mesh, then mount the fans to the front plastic piece. need to cut the metal out of the frame to allow good airflow to the drives.
 
Got the SATA raid controllers. Cheap, but should do what I need. Also picked up some Y adpaters for the SATA drives...


OK, cuts made. Here is the front panel and frame...


here they are together and with the drives behind it.


Now I have to look around and see if I can find some old speaker grill or other mesh to put over the opening, figure out how to attach the fans.
 
CLICK ALL THUMBS FOR LARGE PICS.

Small update, I went ahead and mounted the mobo and PSU to do some cabling. Here is the power on the hidden side of the drives and the SATA cabling......


some of you might notice an extra SATA cable and molex power. I have one more WD RMA that is pending and will drop right in the spot.
 
yeah, I wish. 4 are just 80gb WD SATA drives I had laying around and figured I should use. 2 (soon to be 3) are WD 200gb SATA drives that I recently RMAed. the top 3 in the 5.25 bays will be an existing WD 200gb PATA drive and 2 Seagate 300gb PATA drives. So I have a nice little mixture. I would love to replace them all with Seagate 300, 400, or 500GB drives, but I don't have that kind of money right now.
 
thanks valve. I am thinking about going passive ont he hard drives. with that much space in between them, my other server is keeping fairly cool. Hopefully I can find some good mesh material at Home Depot. I am thinking some gutter screen. If not, there is always Modders mesh
 
Take a look at Home Depot for "gutter guard"

It's got a mush like quality that you could cut to fit.

I'd still put fans on them, just to make sure nothing ever get's too hot.
 
did a little work last night, but ran out of black paint. will pick up some more at the depot today. Not sure I like how visible the chassis is. I need to find some speaker grill cloth or thin black foam to act as a filter and hide the chassis and drives.

 
Paint the front exposed metal parts of the case black so just incase you can see through the foam it would be pitch black.


Check with air filter supplies places, they might have that foam your looking for.
 
yeah, if I have to paint the chassis I will. Just trying to avoid it since I already did the wiring. thanks for the tip on air filters. It seems obvious, but I hadn't considered it. sometimes the obvious answers are the hardest to find.
 
Looking good dude - what are you gonna use for the raid controlers? or will the sets of drives be raid at all?
 
I am just using some cheap cheap Syba controllers off of newegg. going to use raid 0. not concerned about the data as it is all stuff I legally own. I can just rerip it.
 
I have one of those controller too.

Never used it though. Went with the 8-port RAID controller.

One of these days I'll do something with it.
 
Here are the fans mounted. not the originals I wanted, but they wouldn't fit. So I had to snag these from my sage server. And I put the poor sad looking 80mm up top even thoughit screams for a 120. But I don't have anymore and I don't want to spend any money on this case


I hate painting, but decided it needed it anyway. I don't have the patience for painting and it shows when you get up close on this one. couple of finger prints in the clearcoat, couple of "hot spots" from the rattle cans. But it looked so big and beige and ugly it needed paint. and I forgot I had 5volted one of the LED fans so it looks kind of sad. I'll be undoing that soon.


and here's the disc space. I only have 1 200gb in there now, but I have 1 more waiting for a power cable and another coming from WDs RMA department.


all in all, I am happy. got the space I wanted and it looks half decent, especially since it will be shoved in a closet. now I can save up for the Stacker I really want.
 
now here's the whole family:
New file server...


Sage Server...


Living room client...


Theater client...


Main workstation...


Web surfer...
 
I think I have that exact start case lol.. looks good makes me wanna build my file server
 
probably. It was a cheap full tower I bought like 7 years ago. I tried to find a pic of it in the original state. I forgot to take one before the breakdown. It has been sitting unused for years.
 
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