Project Silver Tower (PC-75 Windows Home Server)

[thebeephaha]

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:

Any suggestions on what else I should do?

I will post new pics as I go along.

 

[mullered07]

wow sweet deal on that case buddy well done

also i dont suppose that server class board is dual socket? that would be awesome
im guessing (lol) your going to raid them seagates (and who the hell has 7 320gb' hdd's in their "stash" lol), what array are you thinking of running them in ?
is there onboard video or are you going to grab yourself a cheap graphics card, damn that would make a sweet 2nd rig/server

 

[thebeephaha]

Thanks,

Well sadly the board is a single socket, but it runs pretty fast even for a P4. I'm going to stick with the onboard video as it only has a single PCI, two PCI-X, and only a 8x PCI-E which is filled with my SAS card.

As far as my stash, I pulled the 320s from my main rig as they were replaced with 750s and I got some more from a friend who owed me.

 

[thebeephaha]

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.

 

[wtf8269]

I love old school Lian Li's. Nice score there. Going to be using the server for anything in particular, or just mass storage in general?

 

[thebeephaha]

Well I think I may use it as a backup server and for bittorrent use.

My main rig in my system specs has much more drive space but I don't like to leave it on all the time, it uses way too much power for its own good which is why I kinda wanted this server.

 

[thebeephaha]

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?

 

[Widjaja]

Really like the look of the monster case.
Whats better is you tried to do all of this on the cheap.

 

[thebeephaha]

Yea, I'm all for good deals when I can get one. This raid card dying really puts a dent in my plans though. I wanted to stay under $1000 total cost but I don't see that happening now.

It sucks because I ordered new cables and a cache module for this card too and now I am stuck with them as well.

Oh well, it happens though, I will just have to see where this project goes from here.

 

[thebeephaha]

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!

Check out that sexy power cable too.

 

[wtf8269]

I love stacks of hard drives. Why didn't you use the 6-drive cage that was in there in the first place? Didn't you say you were going to run 8 drives?

 

[thebeephaha]

I love stacks of hard drives. Why didn't you use the 6-drive cage that was in there in the first place? Didn't you say you were going to run 8 drives?

Case was stripped bare when I got it so I had to improvise, I stole switches and LEDs from other cases and the PC60 HDD cage from a friend.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I would remove the grills from the fans on the back,i think they block airflow and you dont really need grills on the rear fans.Overall though,sweet pc for peanuts.

 

[thebeephaha]

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.

 

[MKmods]

very nice job reusing parts. One thing I notice is a lot of exhaust fans and very few intakes (try to even them out)

(I remember how excited I was when I got my first 20 gig Hdd, thats a lot of Hdd space you got there. lol)

 

[thebeephaha]

I'm getting two Lian Li 3-in-2 HDD bays that will also have an 80mm fan in each, so I will have four 80mm in / three 80mm, one 120mm, and the power supply for exhaust. So it will be a little more even.

 

[MKmods]

Nice,
PS: good job on the clean wiring too.

 

[thebeephaha]

Thanks but you haven't seen it with the 13 hard drives connected yet... SATA cables everywhere.

 

[thebeephaha]

Behold it is finished!

^ Best I could get 13 SATA cables.

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

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

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

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

^ 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.

 

[wtf8269]

How do you like that Silverstone muffler? Big difference? I wanted to get one for when I still had my PC Power & Cooling 1200w.

 

[thebeephaha]

Cuts down noise by about 1/3 but also reduces the efficiency of exhausting air out of the PSU so you need to think of the balance heat vs noise before considering one.