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Project: Super Ghost

N

n1ce_hat

Gawd
Joined
May 17, 2006
Messages
697
Super Ghost is my file server running Windows Home Server PP2.

Current Specs:
Case - Norco RPC-4020
PSU - Corsair TX750W
Mobo - Asus Maximus Formula
CPU - Intel C2D E5200 (2MB cache)
RAM - 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800
GPU - MSI nVidia GeForce 8600GT (w/Zalman VNF100 passive heatpipe cooler)
RAID controller - Highpoint RocketRaid 2340 PCIe 8x (4x miniSAS to 16x SATAII)
HDDs - 4x WD 500GB, 3x Seagate 500GB, 6x Seagate 1TB, 6x Seagate 1.5TB, 1x Seagate 750GB, 19.25TB total space.
ODD - slim Samsung SN-S083A SATA DVD-RW
OS - Windows Home Server PP2
Other - PCIe 8-channel CCTV card
Power Consumption - ~280w average, ~540w boot

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See recent posts for newest photos.

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The WHS console.


The case.. Before the components.


The RocketRaid... with a whole PCIe bus all to itself.


Cable city. The RR's cables are like 1m long and in my CM-Stacker it was hard to find room for them. The Norco makes quick work of long cables by wrapping around.


It's alive!


Switched to a Cooler Master HyperTX heatsink. Added drives.
 
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Nice so far.

But is that PSU made by Delta or Delta Electronics? If Delta Electronics, try to replace the PSU ASAP. Delta Electronic PSUs tend to be highly over-rated POS. So that 480W PSU may actually be a 300W PSU in disguise.
 
Danny Bui said:
Nice so far.

But is that PSU made by Delta or Delta Electronics? If Delta Electronics, try to replace the PSU ASAP. Delta Electronic PSUs tend to be highly over-rated POS. So that 480W PSU may actually be a 300W PSU in disguise.
Click to expand...

PSU is heading out the door as soon as possible. I assume it's 480w rating is rubbish but that's why a 200w load is.. good for temporary use.
 
definitely interested as i am in the beginnings of making my own WHS setup
 


Well, it's not exactly what I had in mind but managed to get ahold of an Enermax EG 425P-VE power supply. It's got a lot more power than that Delta POS, and i'm sure i'll have more than enough power for now... Also, changed CPU cooler from stock to the Cooler Master Hyper TX. Good cooler for the price!
 
how is the home server treating you i wanted to set one up on in my home for everyone to save to and keep our computers free for program
 
Right now it's doing it's job PERFECTLY. Just as I had imagined, a one-stop-shop for home serving needs. I have about 7 PCs hooked up to it, plus serving media to some game consoles, and the backup utilities and the dynamic drive pool works great. I like how the OEM pack was a 10-client license as well.. Very reasonably priced IMO.
 
n1ce_hat said:
Well, it's not exactly what I had in mind but managed to get ahold of an Enermax EG 425P-VE power supply. It's got a lot more power than that Delta POS, and i'm sure i'll have more than enough power for now...
Click to expand...

Yup, still way better than the Delta POS
 
More drives added! Welcome aboard to my 2 new 1.5TB Seagate's.

And some new pictures..



edit: I snagged some photos off Amazon of my raid controller for your viewing pleasure.



I love this card. If I had the money I'd buy another and create another WHS. This card may not have the all features in the world, but for the price, it rocks! Although, since i'm using this for a WHS build I have not even tried to create a raid array. I imagine it would be pretty fast, and maybe one day i'll set something up.
 
Danny Bui said:
Nice!

How are those 1.5TB Seagates treating you?
Click to expand...

Very nice. One note.. The 1.5's, for some reason, have an issue with the LEDs on the front of the case. They sit with the LEDs on, and only blink once in awhile. You can see in the photos where the two blue LEDs (middle row, left 2 drives) are solid.. Well they just stay that way. At boot, the lights are off until the RocketRaid post screen comes on, then the LEDs come on. I haven't tried plugging the drives directly into the motherboard, nor have I looked into updating my RocketRaid's firmware. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that 1.5TB drives are new. Oh well. It doesn't really bother me, and when the drives are being accessed, the lights still blink a little... :rolleyes:

Oh and I might need to be replacing the Enermax soon. When the computer is operating it only takes ~225W from the wall, but at boot it hits 400W. I bet if I had the Delta hooked up with a 400W load, it would not have been so forgiving.
 
update:
Upgraded RAM to Corsair 2x1GB DDR2-800 XMS2.



edit: also added a 500GB Seagate
 
Why do those two discs need attention?

Looks good though.. man you have alot of stuff on disc. I have 5.5TB capacity and 4.7TB free..lol

Zack
 
CarlsonCustoms said:
Why do those two discs need attention?
Click to expand...
Because windows is dumb. Within the dynamic pool it only gets the discs to 95-97% depending on capacity and then it is considered full. When a drive is installed as a server backup drive and it gets full, it just keeps going until the drive is maxed out then stops, or it might continue to the next available disk i'm not too sure. In any event, it always 'needs attention' after it gets a drive to 99%, then I have to go and delete a few gigs of stuff then she goes back to normal. It would be ideal to have a server backup drive large enough to backup each 'shared folder' without getting too full..

I think I manually removed some data from that one that is at 93%.. It would probably have changed its 'attention required' status to normal if I refreshed it.
 
Very small update:
THUMBSCREWS!! I wish they were real gold. Hmm...



More updates to come as I have some stuff ordered that should be here soon. Also I added about 2-3 more terabytes since my last update but the power supply in the server isn't powerful enough to spin any more disks. While the PC is running it only draws 262w but at boot it hits 395w with 14 disks. I added two more and it hit 430w and there were certainly some problems with some of the hard drives not appearing in the bios. I have a staggered spinup feature in the raid controller, i'm going to enable it but really i'm just going to buy a bigger power supply anyway.

n1ce_hat said:
Because windows is dumb. Within the dynamic pool it only gets the discs to 95-97% depending on capacity and then it is considered full. When a drive is installed as a server backup drive and it gets full, it just keeps going until the drive is maxed out then stops, or it might continue to the next available disk i'm not too sure. In any event, it always 'needs attention' after it gets a drive to 99%, then I have to go and delete a few gigs of stuff then she goes back to normal. It would be ideal to have a server backup drive large enough to backup each 'shared folder' without getting too full..

I think I manually removed some data from that one that is at 93%.. It would probably have changed its 'attention required' status to normal if I refreshed it.
Click to expand...
OK.. I can't really can't say Windows Home Server is at fault here. The only tab in the console that thinks it needs attention is the Disk Management tab which is an aftermarket add-on so technically that add-on might need an update or something. Just figured i'd mention that.
 
Well happy new years guys.

I am breaking in the new year with LEDs!

Got these Sunbeam fan-screw LEDs from Performance-PCs.com. They rock! I'm tempted to get more of them, but for now they sure do a good job considering it's just 4 LEDs.

 
Another day another update, right?

Well, yesterday I was at Wal-Mart and I found a really cool utility shelf. Wooden levels, thick plastic rods holding it together.. Looks like it can hold a lot of weight, plus if you buy two of them you could EASILY mount them together since it's based on a completly modular design (i'll probably get another The Norco is like 26" long or something so almost half the server is hanging out the back of it but it's very stable. Hey, I'm eventually going to get a rack but for $29.99 it sure saved me a lot of deskspace (plus my Aspire X-Qpack, Cisco routers, and printer like their new home, too).



oh, and someone on the storage thread wanted to know how much the thing weighed, about 49-51 lbs with 15 drives installed. Not too bad, lighter than it looks.

 
n1ce_hat said:
Very nice. One note.. The 1.5's, for some reason, have an issue with the LEDs on the front of the case. They sit with the LEDs on, and only blink once in awhile. You can see in the photos where the two blue LEDs (middle row, left 2 drives) are solid.. Well they just stay that way. At boot, the lights are off until the RocketRaid post screen comes on, then the LEDs come on. I haven't tried plugging the drives directly into the motherboard, nor have I looked into updating my RocketRaid's firmware. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that 1.5TB drives are new. Oh well. It doesn't really bother me, and when the drives are being accessed, the lights still blink a little... :rolleyes:

Oh and I might need to be replacing the Enermax soon. When the computer is operating it only takes ~225W from the wall, but at boot it hits 400W. I bet if I had the Delta hooked up with a 400W load, it would not have been so forgiving.
Click to expand...


I saw that same LED constant on thing on 1.5 TB seagate drives in a supermicro 24 drive case hooked up to a 3ware controller. Problem went away when I updated them to the new firmware.
 
houkouonchi said:
I saw that same LED constant on thing on 1.5 TB seagate drives in a supermicro 24 drive case hooked up to a 3ware controller. Problem went away when I updated them to the new firmware.
Click to expand...
Well at least i'm not the only one. I bought 2 at the same time and the LEDs were always on, then I bought another one and it had no issue. I will certainly look into the firmware.



The Enermax power supply coudn't hack it. Simply not powerful enough to run even 16 drives without keeling over at boot. For some reason staggered spinup did not work. Had to upgrade, went with the Corsair TX750W. It's a wonderful thing.



So, I decided the P5B had to go (broken CMOS unable to save, not enough SATA ports, and I wanted dual PCIe x16 for an additional RAID card or video card). Instead of buying a new one, I just grabbed the motherboard from my Zalman HTPC because it's far easier to reformat 1 HDD on the Zalman than it is to unload and reload all the data on the server, and I wanted the motherboard to be one good enough that I would likely never have to swap out for years. Zalman will have to wait to get a decent board, maybe in the next i7 motherboard lineup.



Time to drain the data.

*Four days later*

In goes the Maximus Formula!



Lots of data to move. This is the first time i've implemented RAID on the server. The top 4 drives in the system are four 500GB Western Digital (16mb) in a 2TB RAID-0 stripe. It works phenomenally. I have five 1TB Seagate's and three 1.5TB Seagate's that I hope to stripe as well as soon as I get a couple more drives. I decided to install the OS on a 750GB (mounted in the top bracket). Moving to a bigger drive was better because windows references the OS's HD for the 'total size' of the server when copying files over the network. I was going to install the OS on a 1TB or larger hard drive but I'll probably need those for a RAID so I just went with a 750GB Seagate.

The CPU this time around is the Intel Core 2 Duo E4400. A 10x multiplier and a 2MB cache makes this processor easy to overclock and gets a lot of work done. Windows Home Server really puts the CPU to the test while transferring large amounts of data, it may even be worth putting a Q6600 in the server in the future. It's a bit excessive, but I put my 2x2GB OCZ Reaper 800MHz kit in the server. It's not really doing much better than the 2x1GB Corsair 800MHz kit, and i'll likely switch them back later.

You will notice I changed all the molex connectors on the Corsair TX750W with ultraviolet easygrip green connectors. I also got enough UV heatshrink and sleeving to do pretty much all the cables inside the case, although some might have gotten neglected. Ordering parts through Performance-PCs.com is great because most of the accessories (CCFLs, LEDs, Fans, etc) all come with the sleeving service for free, and they do such a great job. You can tell which cables I did, but either way it looks better than no sleeving. I got a 15" green CCFL from them, and I had a 12" blue CCFL borrowed from my other PC which really makes the server bright In the future, you might even be able to appreciate this feature without removing the lid.

The aluminum 80mm green LED fans look awesome, it was a good idea getting those. I'll probably end up changing the front row of fans at some point in time but that will be a little expensive.




I haven't got any compressed air so bear with me on the grotesque amount of dust. It hasn't been out of the HTPC since it was new so collecting dust since then.

This most recent configuration is a champion. It has solved many of my previous problems.
- Staggered spinup works now. This was not possible before, and now is not necessary because the power supply can handle it.
- In the WHS console, my disks were all being reported as HPT_DISK_1_1, HPT_DISK_1_2, and so on, but not usually in order. It would have a random number at the end, many of them just ended up with _1_1 and every time you would add a disk to the system the disk name for EVERY hard disk would change. It wouldn't just mess up the name of the new HDD, but EVERY HDD. And not only to Windows, but the 'Disk Management' tab in the Windows Home Server console would also be drastically impacted and the whole wireframe of the server would have to be entirely redone because none of the drives matched up anymore. Very annoying! I did upgrade the firmware on the RocketRaid to the latest (1.4), but it didn't have any immediate effect. After reinstalling the server, the disks are showing up in the Home Server console exactly as they are supposed to without even changing the model number of the drive. The only device that shows up with any name other than a model number is the RAID-0 stripe. Perfect. Lets just get those 2TB disks on the shelf, okay Seagate?
 
damn many that is a lot of disks....

just a question..... why not go with a know high end psu from the beginning.... the corsair is good but it took 3 PSUs

i would personally go with a power and cooling 750w for a nice server build like yours.

i have a highpoint 2220 and when i was running WHS as the host OS it read the same ports in drive management. hpt_disk_1_2 it was the port number on the card.


with the 5 500gb i would do a RAID 5 and not 0 unless you jsut wanted to use it as a high performance swap space for like video editing or something... or even a RIAD 10 (0+1)

interested to see how this progresses. i like that walmart rack. you know the SKU or have a link on their site to it?
 
Adidas4275 said:
damn many that is a lot of disks....

just a question..... why not go with a know high end psu from the beginning.... the corsair is good but it took 3 PSUs

i would personally go with a power and cooling 750w for a nice server build like yours.

i have a highpoint 2220 and when i was running WHS as the host OS it read the same ports in drive management. hpt_disk_1_2 it was the port number on the card.


with the 5 500gb i would do a RAID 5 and not 0 unless you jsut wanted to use it as a high performance swap space for like video editing or something... or even a RIAD 10 (0+1)

interested to see how this progresses. i like that walmart rack. you know the SKU or have a link on their site to it?
Click to expand...

Well the original components used for the build were spare components I had from previous computers. When I bought the case and RocketRaid I hadn't purchased any other parts for the server other than HDs. I wanted to make sure that when I bought components they would be the right ones for the build. A friend gave me the Enermax which seemed to do the trick but clearly underpowered. The Corsair is a much higher efficiency power supply and since the thing is not running at 100% capacity like the Enermax, so it draws much less power overall. I think the spec on the PC P&C 750w and the Corsair are near identical as far as amperage goes. I really wish the thing was modular but I guess I'll just have to deal with it.

I did pick up a 2nd Walmart 'utility rack' and join them together, it worked out perfectly and only needed a small modification at the bottom with drilling holes. I'll see if I can find a SKU or something for you later.
 
Upgraded the CPU to an Intel E5200 Wolfdale. This is a really great chip. 12.5x multiplier, 45nm, and 2MB of cache. Its basically the same as my old E4400 except the die shrink and the higher multiplier. Standard 2.5GHz, I overclocked it to 3.2GHz and it is still ice cold. Maybe eventually i'll tune it a little more and take it to 4GHz, but for now it certainly has enough power for the server. Cheapest 2MB chip out there, and by a long shot.

I also added another 1.5TB drive, bringing it to approximately 16TB (advertised space). At this point, moving data around is a lot more flexible. I put all the 1.5TB's in the storage pool and all the 1TB's are backup at the moment. Still trying to 'rebuild' the storage pool's data, as it just takes forever to move the data. Of course it doesn't help when you start a transfer and you come back 8 hours later and it's stuck at a prompt like "this folder already contains a..." or "are you sure you want to move the read-only..".

I also wrote off my car at the same time. The Buick totally got clobbered by an Olds Alero. I'll post a pic when I get to the storage lot but at the moment lets just say his bumper vs my front right tire at 60kmph and totally demolished the axles and, well, everything around it. New car yay!

edit: the E5200 likes 3.75GHz @ 1.30v. I tried 4.00GHz at 1.35v but no go, i'll try bumping it up later but at the moment it's pretty quick. I only wish it had more cache but for $90 Canadian i'm not going to complain. Intel spec is around 1.38v so I don't exactly want to get crazy. In Windows it reports 1.272v when 1.30 is dialed in the BIOS, and coretemp reports 41C idle, 50C load with the Zalman 9500, so I think we're doing pretty good at the moment. While i'm rattling off numbers, my watt-meter is reporting 260-290w usage depending on what drives are spinning, and it hits 440-450w when initializing hard drives.

I am amazed at how much RAM Windows Home Server is using. I thought they would be mostly unused, but currently out of 4GB, it's using 2.5GB!
 
This whole Seagate 7200.11 firmware scare is getting to me. I have so much data on these drives and when "all 500GB, 1TB, and 1.5TB" are potentially at risk, and the firmware update "might cause the drive to fail" make me want to buy some 2TB Western Digitals. I love Seagate, but unless this whole firmware massacre gets sorted out I might bail on them and go Westy. Grr.

Drive pool is built up and perfected. The 4x500GB RAID is now a backup for some huge folders, and the 1.5's are being migrated to backup use.

Need more storage! Only 30% of my data is backed up, not wise.

Oh I put the 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 in there. Even when transferring large files to and from the server while SyncToy is backing up like a mad man it still has a gig of free memory, so the 4GB was pretty much being wasted.
 
Just give it a month or two before the firmware problems are sorted. At least that's what I'm hoping for anyway.

Nice work man!
 
Danny Bui said:
Just give it a month or two before the firmware problems are sorted. At least that's what I'm hoping for anyway.

Nice work man!
Click to expand...

Thx.

Yeah that's my plan as well. I'm not changing any firmware over until this is sorted out. Well, i'm not even going to shut my server off until then either. The one 1.5'er that has the solid LED with 'bad firmware' has become a backup drive so I can at least not worry about that one. I'm sure Seagate will figure it out.
 
So I haven't updated this thread in awhile, a couple things have changed. I added a couple more drives, bought a Samsung slim DVD-RW, 10-bit 8-channel Conexant PCIe video camera capture card, and the MSI 8600GT video card. I rarely use the server's 3D ability but I found that the GeForce2 wasn't able to keep up with me in Windows, so it is retired. The slim DVD is awesome, I really wish I had a slot-loader but I would have had to order it and I didn't feel like waiting.








Insane dust in this house, eh? It's a losing battle, the dust bunnies have taken over. I have to take a vacuum to the front of the HDD bays every week or so because they get seriously clogged with dust. Sometime in the near future we're going to fix our house dust problems, namely the clothes drier vents and the other air ducts need cleaning. Sooner than later I hope.
 
everyone should look at that last big picture, the one with the quick swap drives or whatever. then scroll with your mouse wheel up and down while staring at it. trippy! and yeah i have 640GB in my comp and wish i had 1TB. then id be free as a bird. what id do with 16TB i have no idea...
 
You've got a great looking rig there. I'm in the process of building something similar but getting a little crazy and opted for a Corei7 920 bases system. We'll see if I can keep it cool.

Two questions I had for you:
1) How do you like your Zalman CPU cooler? Do you feel it works well and is it quiet?
2) How has the RocketRAID 2340 been treating you? I'm planning to purchase the same (only because the Supermicro SAT2-MV8 won't fit my motherboard). Any difficulties with it?
 
Jeffe said:
You've got a great looking rig there. I'm in the process of building something similar but getting a little crazy and opted for a Corei7 920 bases system. We'll see if I can keep it cool.

Two questions I had for you:
1) How do you like your Zalman CPU cooler? Do you feel it works well and is it quiet?
2) How has the RocketRAID 2340 been treating you? I'm planning to purchase the same (only because the Supermicro SAT2-MV8 won't fit my motherboard). Any difficulties with it?
Click to expand...

1) Love the Zalman cooler. For performance per dollar I would use a cooler like the T.R.U.E. or similar but the Zalman's looks make it worth using IMO. It's very silent, the base is a mirror finish, and it performs very well, and don't cost a heck of a lot. My friend has the Zalman 9700 model which is a bit bigger and it is a great performer as well, also dead silent. Reading reviews apparently the fans wear out early but i've been using mine for years and have no problems. I originally bought it for my Zalman HD160XT HTPC case but that was when the Maximus board was in there, after moving that board to my server I left the Zalman cooler on it. The i7 setup may be a little bit overkill for it, but at stock clocks it should be good. Right now at 2.5GHz it is running at 45-50C (outside temp is 26C). It's really hot in this room, and it doesn't help that the CPU is getting all the heat from the HDDs. I reduced the clock speed on the server to stock 2.5GHz due to power consumption and heat, the server can be an oven when you don't have central air or any other type of A/C set up (have 3 A/C's downstairs, maybe this week I'll work on them...). I found that the 2MB cache and 2.5GHz clocks on the e5200 were more than enough for a setup like this. I might invest in a 6MB cache e8400 for 'insane' power but that probably won't come along until I have a comfortable amount of drives. I think an i7-powered server would be WAY too much power (but very [H]). I find that my stock e5200 is plenty. I like the new Zalman 9900, but I feel it is lacking something. It seems like there is a very small amount of metal weight compared to how the previous ones looked, but I would have to do more research into that. I don't even like the design of the newer model, and I don't even believe it utilizes the ever-popular 'heatpipe-direct-touch' technology that most high end coolers are moving towards.

2) The RocketRaid rocks! I would highly recommend it! Never a problem, very fast, and a great BIOS. I would spend a bit more and get one with the onboard buffer, or one with a DDR2 slot for more cache. The price for the higher model Highpoint/Areca cards jumps to the $1000 mark easily, making the <$500 a GREAT choice for the WHS system. In a Norco 2040 you have 20-drives hotswap, so a 16-port RAID card with 6 ports on the motherboard works perfectly, with ports available for the 'top' HDD and the optical drive. My upgrade path involves getting another Norco 2040 and putting the RocketRaid in that one as my backup server, and getting an Areca ARC-1680ix-24 for the main file server. I would really like to know how much of a difference the 2GB/4GB cache on the higher end cards helps Windows Home Server's performance. If the performance is not that great, I would not hesitate to get another RocketRaid 2340. The CPU on the higher end cards (dual core 1200MHz IOP348 on the Areca) is much faster than what is offered on my RocketRaid (800MHz). It would be interesting to see any performance benchmarks in a WHS setup that would tell if the faster chip has any real world performance benefits, but since WHS does not use RAID I doubt there would be.

I set up the 4 x 500GB raid with my WD drives and added it as a 2TB storage pool drive to see if it would work and it loved it. The speeds I got off that drive were unlike any I've seen, but nothing out of this world. Maybe a much larger RAID-0 drive would work better, but the speed of WHS without RAID is very good, I get >100MB/s over the network which is more than I need. I would be curious to see a 20-drive RAID-6 setup added as a storage pool drive in WHS. RAID-6 is a feature missing on the RocketRaid 2340 I wish I had, but at a price 1/3 of the Areca I want, I had to go without.
 
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n1ce_hat said:
1) I like the new Zalman 9900, but I feel it is lacking something. It seems like there is a very small amount of metal weight compared to how the previous ones looked, but I would have to do more research into that. I don't even like the design of the newer model, and I don't even believe it utilizes the ever-popular 'heatpipe-direct-touch' technology that most high end coolers are moving towards.

2) The RocketRaid rocks! I would highly recommend it! Never a problem, very fast, and a great BIOS. I would spend a bit more and get one with the onboard buffer, or one with a DDR2 slot for more cache. The price for the higher model Highpoint/Areca cards jumps to the $1000 mark easily, making the <$500 a GREAT choice for the WHS system. In a Norco 2040 you have 20-drives hotswap, so a 16-port RAID card with 6 ports on the motherboard works perfectly, with ports available for the 'top' HDD and the optical drive.
Click to expand...

Well, I've got the Zalman 9900 and once my system is up and running (next week or two), I'll test to determine if it cools sufficiently. Most reviews I've seen on it have been positive so far.

And your response on the RocketRaid 2340 made up my mind (thanks!). Mine should be here on Wed. I realized I would need extra SATA ports on my mobo to support 20+1 drives + optical (though may leverage an older IDE DVD burner). As for RAID, I think JBOD with WHS is fine for my purposes, though it's nice to have the RAID option. sweet!

BTW, I noticed we're both using the same PSU (Corsair TX750W). Can I ask you how you managed to connect power to all the molex connections (drive controllers + drive fans + rear fans)? The TX750 has an incredible array of cables/connectors, but certainly not enough molex connectors to support a fully stocked Norco 2040. So, did you make use of a Sata > Molex converter like this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816038 ? Or did you do some custom cable mod'ing? Think I saw some neon colors in yours :)

Here's what I was thinking of doing and maybe you can tell me if you think it's reasonable or if you did something similar...
a) Take the two molex cables of the TX750, replace the mini molex connectors on the ends with reg molex ones (or buy an adapter, if one exists) for a total of 10 connectors. Use these two cables to power all the drive bays.
b) Use Sata > Molex adapters to power the drive fans and the rear fans (I suppose if a PCI-E > Molex adapter works, I could use one of those for the rear fans).

In your worklog you mentioned that you replaced all your molex connectors, but I can't tell from your photos (low res?) which ones and how you routed the cables to power everything. Any advice/suggestions on the power cabling would be much appreciated!
 
Jeffe said:
Well, I've got the Zalman 9900 and once my system is up and running (next week or two), I'll test to determine if it cools sufficiently. Most reviews I've seen on it have been positive so far.

And your response on the RocketRaid 2340 made up my mind (thanks!). Mine should be here on Wed. I realized I would need extra SATA ports on my mobo to support 20+1 drives + optical (though may leverage an older IDE DVD burner). As for RAID, I think JBOD with WHS is fine for my purposes, though it's nice to have the RAID option. sweet!

BTW, I noticed we're both using the same PSU (Corsair TX750W). Can I ask you how you managed to connect power to all the molex connections (drive controllers + drive fans + rear fans)? The TX750 has an incredible array of cables/connectors, but certainly not enough molex connectors to support a fully stocked Norco 2040. So, did you make use of a Sata > Molex converter like this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816038 ? Or did you do some custom cable mod'ing? Think I saw some neon colors in yours :)

Here's what I was thinking of doing and maybe you can tell me if you think it's reasonable or if you did something similar...
a) Take the two molex cables of the TX750, replace the mini molex connectors on the ends with reg molex ones (or buy an adapter, if one exists) for a total of 10 connectors. Use these two cables to power all the drive bays.
b) Use Sata > Molex adapters to power the drive fans and the rear fans (I suppose if a PCI-E > Molex adapter works, I could use one of those for the rear fans).

In your worklog you mentioned that you replaced all your molex connectors, but I can't tell from your photos (low res?) which ones and how you routed the cables to power everything. Any advice/suggestions on the power cabling would be much appreciated!
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Good choice on the RocketRaid, you won't be disappointed. Works like butter with WHS / JBOD.

Ahh... The PSU modding madness. What you see is far from the finished product. Me and my friend went on Performance-PCs.com and spent nearly a grand between the two of us on power supply mods / PC gizmos. I have basically enough tips, pins, sleeving, and cable to do anything or make custom cables. My 3 other PCs are also getting PSU tweaks here and there, it is truly an awesome feeling to be able to completely modify power supplies. Currently I just changed the Corsair's tips to green UV. I am thinking about making the Corsair modular on my next order. I have so many cables that are not being used, for example the PCI-e power, that is taking up space. By cutting it 6" before the PSU, putting on the male end of a 6-pin crimped on there, and then a female end on the other cut part so I can easily attach the cables back up. I think it will look slick, I am going to do it with many of my cables but currently it has not gone under the knife.

On the Norco, of the 5 backplanes, only about 2 of them are "doubled up" with the cabling, the others have only one connector each. This is all you really need, if you were dealing with multiple PSU 12v rails or something I would see a need for connecting both connectors. For the sake of awesomeness, I am going to make a cable to cover them all in one strip but sheer laziness has prevented this. Sooner than later, I'll re-do the cabling.
 
n1ce_hat said:
On the Norco, of the 5 backplanes, only about 2 of them are "doubled up" with the cabling, the others have only one connector each. This is all you really need, if you were dealing with multiple PSU 12v rails or something I would see a need for connecting both connectors. For the sake of awesomeness, I am going to make a cable to cover them all in one strip but sheer laziness has prevented this. Sooner than later, I'll re-do the cabling.
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Oooooh! So with the TX750W (single 12V rail), it's not necessary to hook up 2 molex to each backplane - is that what you're saying? This makes things a bit easier to start. Do you gain anything by hooking both of them up?
 
CPU UPGRADE!!!

Ghost is now rocking a Core2Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz.

6MB L2 Cache.

1333MHz FSB.

9.5 Multiplier Lock.

Don't really plan on overclocking it... Actually I have the EPU enabled on the motherboard to see how much better power savings I get, and it's quite a power-sipper. Hardly changes the amount of power the computer is drawing but a difference is there.

Jeffe said:
Oooooh! So with the TX750W (single 12V rail), it's not necessary to hook up 2 molex to each backplane - is that what you're saying? This makes things a bit easier to start. Do you gain anything by hooking both of them up?
Click to expand...

Ah, yeah I would say so. If your PSU has multiple power rails you could distribute the power across multiple rails but in a single rail setup I can't see much of a benefit, although I do use as many of the molex's as possible.
 
So I had two 750GB Seagate 7200.11 drives in here from my friend. The first one died a few months ago and I had to reload the whole drive pool... Now a few days ago my other 750GB died. The only drives to 'die' in the server are two of the same batch. Coincidence?

Replaced with a 1.5TB...
 
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