Well folks, today I ventured out to Wacky WIlly's in Hillsboro, Oregon and picked up a Sun Microsystems Netra 150 nfs server. It didn't include any drives or ram, but that didn't matter since all i wanted was the case! The case is friggin huge measuring at 22.44"H x 10.31"W x 26.77"D weighting in at 135 lbs! This was one big mamma-jamma! Anyways, I got it home and started to rip the sucker apart. Here are some pics.... The front of this beastly box. Quite a unique design A side picture showing the detail along the lower edge This is the full front open reveiling all the drive bays Here is the rear of the case featuring the common goodies I preceded to take the shell off only to find....another shell! Umm...ok. I take that shell panel off to find...uhh....foam?! WTF?!? Upon removing a section of foam I find a motherboard! I just KNEW there was bound to be a computer in this thing SOMEWHERE. It appears the CD drives, floppy drives and main HDD were held in place by the foam. Hmmm....truely weird. The motherboard removed. Quite heavy for its size! In my opinion, this is WAY too much foam for ANY computer to contain! Everything in this case was held together by foam! ...aaaaand the case, free of all foam and electrical components. Quite roomy! The front panel's small LCD screen. I wonder if I can interface this into the new computer innards??? And here is the reason why this beast was so damned heavy. A built-in UPS device! SWEET! I wonder if it still works??? Now I have just got to figure out what kinda theme I wanna go with this case. I'm kinda thinkin of doin a HellBoy mod since I just saw the movie and LOVED it. I'm planning on making it remote controlled so I can RIDE it into LAN parties and fir it to have a built-in drink dispensor that distributes Mt. Dew...the same color as the future water cooling setup. Anyone else have any good ideas?? Please lemme know.
There's gotta be room for some watercooling in there . The pics didn't make it seem that huge until you saw the motherboard in there for comparison .
throw in a p4 computer with a amd computer next to it, making it a 2-in-1 pc. on the top of the case place a peltier(sp?), and have it so you can flip it around to cool, or heat up your drink. i like the idea of having it remote controlled, it may be too heavy to carry. I wonder if you can buy those movable monitor supports that are on those new white IMACs. attach that to the top and attached a 19in LCD or PS1 LCD monitor. Making it movable. Damnit i need a case like that for all my good ideas.
Still, using remote controls...If you wanna do that, you are either going to need some good torque on the motors..or keep it as lightweight as possible. Regards,
A fellow Portlander! That is one hell of a case, I'm sure you can do something pretty innovative to it. Just make it a tad prettier, the design of that case will give me nightmares. As well, I think if you found a way to use all of that space, that would be QUITE impressive. Good luck!
and to think that server was $25,000 when it was released in 1996 methinks the beige would look nice if you painted it black/cobalt blue, leave the light blue as is.
First of all i would put in a fridge. The case looks awesome as it is, so personally i would just clean up the case and not repaint it unless the paint is really bad.
with all the foam u could restuff ur pillows!!! lol ....get a whole crapload of harddives...lieka terabyte ...get a t1 line and host people...youll easily pay for the t1 line...that is after u get a good mobo,proc,ram lol grand totaling to about 4000 US for the first month....lol whats the conversion for us to euro
nice case, how much for it. the foam is truly puzzling since foam keeps heat in. fridge,despenser,dual cpu mobo instead of 2 and mini tanks treads on the bottom powered by the back up battery
Wow...people are still replying to this post! Work on this case has been super slow as I am just damned lazy. I've almost completed transfering the triangular cut-out design from the lower sides of the case to the lower front section. I've got some nice extruded aluminum mesh from the local Michael's craft store and picked up some 1" angle aluminum stock for bracketry and for construction of the heater core housing. The other day whilst poking around the local Lowes store in the plumbing section. I got an idea that just may work out for the resevoir. My original design for the resevoir was to make it rectangular with the aluminum angle stock and 1/8" plexiglass, but that changed when I saw these... All assembled it will look a bit better than this... The completed resevoir will be stood off from the base and the hose barbs and tubing will be installed underneith the base of this unit to minimize the ammount of visible tubing in the system. UV LEDs will be installed in the base firing upwards to make the blue UV die in the coolant glow. I'm shifting the theme of this case a tad bit towards the heavy industrial look. Complete with lots of piping. All the visible wiring will run through unsoldered copper piping. Even the tubing for the water cooling system will be incased in copper tubing that will have slits in them so flow can be seen. UV leds will be strategicly installed so that they will highlight the blue UV coolant die. The whole case will have a slightly dirty industrial look with very light rusting in small areas. I'll keep this thread updated as progress is made.
Dude, your mod will look awesome and it's testing my will to resist modding the AlphaServer 4100 I just scavenged for dirt cheap ( and that I'm not yet sure if it still works, I'll see about that this weekend prolly ) FYI, the Alpha server is a mid-range server from 1998 or so, housing up to 4 Alpha 21164 600MHz 64bit CPUs ( mine has 2 * 300MHz ones ) and up to 8GB ram .. the monster is about 1 * 1 * 0.70 in size - I'm counting in METERS - and weights 120-140 kgs EMPTY - just the bare case, mobo + CPU/ram boards and pannels.
