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

[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.