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Project Silver Tower (PC-75 Windows Home Server)

T

thebeephaha

2[H]4U
Joined
May 27, 2007
Messages
2,054
So at work a customer came in and wanted to know if we bought old hardware. I said no as this is the company policy. The customer asked then if we would just take it as he didn't want to throw it away. We walked out to his car and to my surprise he had a Lian Li PC-75 with a window and top blowholes pre-cut.

To make a long story short due to company policy we can't just take home donated equipment so I offered my boss $70 for the case. It was missing all the electrics out of it (leds, fans, front usb, etc) and it had a few minor blemishes but considering the case is still well over $200 I wasn't going to complain.

I also went rooting through some of our clearance hardware and found:
  • Intel Entry Server Motherboard SE7221BK1-E
  • 2x512MB Kingston DDR2 PC6400 RAM (pulled from this worklog for another computer)
  • Supermicro / AbleCOM SP450-RP 450w Server Power Supply (30A on the 12v)

Total cost so far for the case and the following above, $155

I then went home and pulled from mine and my friends stash:
  • Pentium 4 540 3.2GHz
  • 2x1GB Kingston DDR2 PC5300 RAM
  • Dell Perc 5/i 8 port SAS RAID controller (it died, so I bought a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8)
  • Adaptec 1210SA 2 port SATA RAID controller
  • Netgear 802.11G Wireless PCI card
  • Five 80mm fans, one 120mm fan
  • Eight Seagate 7200.10 320GB drives (storage)
  • Pulled my laptop drive hotswap bay with four Western Digital Scorpio 160GB drives from my workstation.
  • Seagate 7200.10 80GB drive (OS drive / storage) Got my friends 74GB Raptor (ADFD) to use instead
  • ASUS DVD-ROM

Total cost of the all parts above I already had, plus the parts I needed to buy maybe around $1000 and considering my Perc 5 controller died there goes $200...

Here are some pictures of the case as I got it and just after I replaced the case electrics and installed the mobo:

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Any suggestions on what else I should do?

I will post new pics as I go along.
 
Update:

All the hardware is pretty much installed except for the 320GB drives as I need to get some drive bays and need to make custom power cables.

Also I need to decide what to do above the power supply, add more fans or make a bracket to hold a secondary power supply.

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Yea, the mobo doesn't read temps at all so I improvised. :D.

Also guys, what should I do about the space above the PSU, I was thinking of makeshifting a bracket to hold some mroe HDDs up there but I'm not sure yet.
 
Oh no...

Bad news, my Dell Perc 5/i raid card died on me... There goes about $200 right there.

Now the question is, since I have the special cables for the Perc and an upgraded cache module for it, do I get another one or should I look at something better suited for WHS?

I know Ockie once used some Supermicro controllers for PCI-X for his builds, anyone know how well these are?
 
If you're building a server for WHS then I'd say to avoid any kind of raid since I've heard there are all kinds of problems with it. Just get some kind of sata controller card.
 
Is there a simple 8 port or more PCI-e SATA controller out there that doesn't have all the RAID bells and whistles? Any NewEgg search I do comes up with RAID cards.

Too... many.... WHS builds... Must... resist....

EDIT: There's a thread in the storage section with this very same question already asked. My bad.
 
Got the lower drive cage from a PC-60, had to modify it a bit... It fits the rails but the screw mounts were different and its too small/short, the stock cage holds six drives, this one holds 5.

With the help of some scrap metal I made a bracket and bam!

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Check out that sexy power cable too. :)
 
those are some sweet power cables man. Was it hard to make them because I really want to make my own because in my stacker my 3 drives are all in the same block and having a wire stick out the back about an inch isnt my idea of good cabling. Any way nice work, good luck with that.

Also are you going to running home server on it or like a regular OS?
 
prodigee said:
those are some sweet power cables man. Was it hard to make them because I really want to make my own because in my stacker my 3 drives are all in the same block and having a wire stick out the back about an inch isnt my idea of good cabling. Any way nice work, good luck with that.

Also are you going to running home server on it or like a regular OS?
Click to expand...

The cables are really easy if you take your time, I popped the connectors off some spare SATA power adapters I had and then found a molex cable long enough to attach the connectors to. If you don't have spare ones, you can get them from places like frozen cpu or performance pcs.

As far as the OS, I put Windows Home Server on and am absolutely loving it. The backup feature is perfect for my needs and how it saves space for the backups is great too. I also love how I can just keep adding drives to the drive pool.
 
Got the new controller card and the 8th 320GB drive today and got the system up and running. I also took four 160GB laptop drives I had in a 5.25" hotswap enclosure and moved this to my server as well. Total comes to 2.98TB of combined space.

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Behold it is finished!

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^ Best I could get 13 SATA cables.

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^ To help with heat since I am keeping this as quiet as I can I added some heatsinks to the drive cage.

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^ As with the lower cage I made a custom power cable.

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^ It was noisy so I made it quieter thanks to Silverstone.

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^ Need to paint that hotswap bay or something...

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^ Didn't have the original IO ports so I bought a Lian Li one for a different case and made it fit, its a bit far back but it works.
 
Nice work!

Favorite part is the heatsinks to the hard drive cage. :)
 
Love it!

Amazing how much bigger than the Stacker it is. :eek:

Pretty nice temp on the CPU for a stock cooler!

Favorite part of it is the lower drive bay bracket (I keep a small drawer full of those blanks lol), and the SATA power for the drives.

Don'tcha just hate it when you tie all the sata data together and find the connector is upside down at the drive? :mad: I've been using twist ties to tack them together till I get it right, then swap em for zipties. Conserves my ziptie inventory lol. :D

I think I have the same IDE cable as you in my Enlight SR506 case, perfect length and way easier to manage than a ribbon that long.

I also have the same drive bay adapter in my PC7 Plus, very nice quality part, wish I could fit two!

WHS won't recognize the drives if the raid card first makes a raid, correct? Only works with them set as singles?


.
 
WHS will see a RAID array but most people say don't use it. I wanted to use a RAID 5 and use WHS just to handle automatic backups but my original card died so I said screw it and got a JBOD controller.
 
nice job man!! I wish someone would just give me a LL case.. haha. Keep up the good work!
 
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