Da god box

[greatbear]

Some of you geekier types wanted to see my latest insane PC build since my last post showing the drive array screenshot. Well, here it is:



Kodi gives the box some scale. I built this inside a Lian-Li V2100 series all-aluminum case. that's about 25 inches deep and high, and about 8 inches wide. I needed a huge case to stuff all the accumulating hardware and drives I had.



I have two RAID 5 arrays, one internal to the machine using 4 SATA drives, and an one mounted in a front-access drive bay thingie using 5 SATA drives. I can easily upgrade or repair this set without turning off the PC.



Here's the guts. Most of the drives are tucked into the lower space, 12 in total. I tried to wrangle the cabling into some semblance of order.



This is the mobo and add-in cards including the RAID controllers putting on their own light show. There are more pictures and descriptions at my Flickr photoset.

A shortlist of specs:

Motherboard: Supermicro X7DWA-N Dual Xeon mobo, 5400 (Seaberg) Intel chipset
Processors: A pair of Intel Xeon 5410 quad-core 2.33GHz
RAM: 4Gigs of Kingston Hyper-X PC6400 DDR2 FBD registered modules
Video: ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI-e, 256MB GDDR (for now, this might or might not get an upgrade depending on how the latest iteration of this card is better or not)
RAID controller 1: Adaptec 31605 Unified SAS/SATA 16 channel controller with 256MB of cache RAM
RAID controller 2: Adaptec 2230S dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI w/ 128MB of cache RAM
Additional interface: SIIG Firewire 800/400/USB2.0 add-in card
Drives: 4 Fujitsu 300GB 15000rpm SAS drives, in two pairs of RAID 1 for two independent OSs,
4 Fujitsu 300GB 10000rpm Ultra320 SCSI drives JBOD (for now) for everyday data usage,
4 Seagate Barracuda ES2 500GB 7200rpm drives in RAID 5,
5 Seagate Barracuda ES2 1TB drives in RAID 5,
Pioneer BD/DVD/CD burner,
Asus DVD/CD burner w/ Lightscribe,
Silverstone 1200W modular power supply
Lian-Li V2100 anodized aluminum case
Acom umpteen-in-one flash memory card reader with graphical fanbus and temp controller
Lots of wire ties, Thermaltake fans and other stuff.

This will be both a server as well as a remote media center and uber jukebox for audio, video and photos, as well as a TiVO-like DVR. As gorgeous as the case is (the rather lousy pics I took do not do it justice, it will eventually be hiding in the basement where the web server resides. Lian-Li makes the ultimate line of PC cases, each is a work of art, and no plastic is used anywhere. Nothing but sleek, brushed anodized aluminum in black or silver.

I cant help myself. I am an incurable geek. And newegg.com loves me to death.

Comments

[microautoe.livejournal.com]

nice! Lian-Li case are great. Newegg love all of us :D

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I wish they had a tiny tower case like the ones I made the little PCs for Jeff and I. They recently came out with a small microATX case, but it's more like a cube, and I wanted a thin tower.

[msclwolf.livejournal.com]

...........I want to have your 'geek tech' babies........ (drools)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Well, as long as they turn out as cute and muscly as you, I'm all for it. :D

[normalcyispasse.livejournal.com]

That is fantastically over-the-top.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Since I like to rip all my media to disk and keep the media itself safely put away, this gets it all in one spot, plus it's a repository for regular backups as well. And I built it to last, which I hope it does.

One day though, it will be considered underpowered and quaint. Just like the one time god box it's replacing. Sad, isnt it?

[cpj.livejournal.com]

Damn! I think I'm in love.

I always wondered what it'd be like to build a box with those 2.5 inch SATA drives in a 5.25 inch bay chassis. You'll have to let me know how they work.

Actually, I'd be curious to get more detailed specs on the overall setup. I've been thinking of setting up a central fileserver of my own using ZFS.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I have a Star Tech ATABAY425BK backplane that I got from Newegg. Currently I have three 40 gig notebook drives mounted in the thing just for testing. This model will do both SATA and SAS drives, and also has the second interface used by SAS drives for redundancy for a total of 8 interfaces (two per slot). It seems reasonably well made and can accommodate the taller 12-15mm drives like the Seagate Savvio SAS drives and the WD VelociRaptor SATA drives. Typical 9.5-10mm notebook drives seem lost in the thing. The whole thing gets powered with one Molex connector from your power supply. There are a pair of fans that keep things cool and each drive slot has a power and access LED.

When I get the thing more tuned up and decide on some other hardare options I will post more notes. Is there anything in particular you wanted to know about any of this stuff?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I tried to use it to make loads of julienne fries, but it made a mess out of the fans.

[bearinslc.livejournal.com]

god and I geeked out when I got a terabyte of storage, I can just imagine the hours of media you can put on that thing. And the speed at which you can rip media

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

That's what I designed it around. I can use it for encoding and transcoding and ripping without it taking forever (hopefully).

I still have my first gigabyte drive. I thought that was the greatest thing way back when. It's still in the server I made around it. The thing is still intact, but has not been powered up in probably ten years. It's a huge, heavy 5.25" full high SCSI drive. I bet it still would work.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

That is some serious shit you got there, Nice indeed!

The case I have now I purchased back in 2001 and it is not tooless, has a teal accent around the front plastic faceplate but is of white painted metal otherwise and came originally with a 300W PSU, has 4 5.25" bays and all can be internal or externally configured and a floppy drive bay and space for two 3.5" HD's and is considered a mid tower and was originally fitted with an Asus MoBo, and 800Mhz Athlon processor, 512MB RAM, well, you know what it has now and it's on it's 3rd PSU, 400-450W that could be had over a year ago for $35 or so.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

One thing I will not skimp on anymore is power supplies. I've had crazy intermittent issues that I ended up tracing to failing power supplies, and I ran into a lot of substandard supplies that have literally blown their guts out and taken with them the mobo. A good power supply (and they are pretty easy to find these days, unlike a few years ago there was PC Power and Cooling and no one else of note. All of the PCP&C supplies I bought going back to the 286 days are still working and have been transferred at least once into a new build. Unfortunately, PCP&C was bought up by OCZ technology, and they denied me the rebate I submitted properly for the last supply I got (they have a huge history of doing this), so I will no longer buy anything sold by that company.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Well, my next power supply will be at least 400-450 watts now with the dual core 2 processors and all that go with it.

Re: *GULP*

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Well, the PC is inspired by one of my old cars. Both are dual quads. This has two quad core CPUs, the car has a pair of four barrel carbs. :)

Re: *EEP*

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I can see that now:

*boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle* *boggle*

STOP THAT!

*SPLASH*

;)

Re: *EEP*

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

And I am one hell of a plumber too, believe it or not. *g*

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

OMG you have all your drives mounted in proper mounts, not dangling on the floor of the case! And your power supply, it's on the *inside*!



They do things weird up there...

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

At least you are using a case. Some of my computers are simply parts spread out on a table. I find it easy to test and optimize things before committing them to a case. I'd like to get one of those 'test bench' racks that allow mounting a mobo and cards to a frame and keep airflow over all the parts while testing and tinkering. The big plus there is the whole mess can be picked up and moved as a single units, as opposed to dragging a pile across a table or dismantling it to take elsewhere.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

If you let me use your naked body as an assembly bench. *eg*