I wanted something to store films and tv programs on, but an HTPC would be unnecessary as I already have a chipped Xbox which is hooked to my tv and plays all my files. The computer will go in the spare room so size isnt really an issue either. Basically I wanted something that was: Quiet but kept the drives well-cooled Had enough case room for 6 or 7 3.5" hard drives Used RAID5 for redundancy Had at least 700-800gb of space (1TB is the target if possible ) Was as cheap as possible! As luck would have it, we had an obsolete Dell server at work, so I declared it dead and "threw it away" Anyway this is what I bought home: Check out that huge front grille! A 120mm fan running at low speed should fit nicely behind that, and if you look at the back... Another 120mm fan, so once I dremel out that chunky grille then the case will have 2x120mm fans to keep the drives cool. I had no idea what was inside the server as it had been in a cupboard for years and wouldnt power on, so I took the casing off to find: Its a dual P2 333 with 256mb of EDO Ram. Now this was a stroke of luck, as the pc is only going to be used as a fileserver it doesnt need to be very powerful. Those P2's are passively cooled making them totally silent. The 2 120mm fans should be perfectly adequate for cooling the whole rig. It was about now I noticed a small problem. Checked the HD - its SCSI. Checked the CD-ROM - its SCSI. Looked for the IDE ports...... ah - no IDE ports! It would seem that Dell only fitted an onboard SCSI controller and not an IDE one, and having 1TB worth of SCSI drives would neither be cheap or quiet! At least I found why it wasnt powering up - the motherboard power was loose, plugged it back in and Voila - the beast lives. Time for plan B - which was try a PCI-IDE card I had which supports 4 drives. Luckily both the Bios and the Win2k server that was installed both recognised the card and the 250gb WD HD I had plugged into it. Look at the drive out of the Dell next to one of the WD's I plan to put in it: The WD is half the size and has 25 times the capacity! Gotta love progress. That old SCSI drive has got to go though, it sounds like a turbine when spinning, and a bag of spanners falling down the stairs when accessing. Ok for testing though. So far I have 4x250gb WD2500 PATA drives, and 1x WD2500 SATA. At the moment the plan is to fit 4 to the IDE card, get a PCI-SATA card, and plug the SATA drive to that. That should give me a formatted RAID5 capacity of 932gb. I'm a bit worried about the PCI slots though. The board only has 3 PCI slots - the other 3 are EISA and I've never even seen an EISA card before. I need at least 4 PCI slots - 2 controller cards, 1 network card, 1 VGA. I`ll worry about that later... So progress to date: I have most of the parts, the case is stripped and I started painting today. Front before: And after: The grille pops out for painting which is handy: Few coats later: Sanded the shell down, just need to buy some primer: Should have it painted by the weekend, SATA card and fans are on order, so far everything going to plan Look at the size of those heatsinks! My A64 cooler is about half the size of one of those!
To save yourself some space you may want to look into getting one of those 8 port SATA controller cards and then get some SATA-PATA converters to run your PATA drives. that way you'd only be using 1 PCI slot
U think thats fun? I have dual celerons, and it is quicker than a single I tested it. Only thing is that p2's are better for smp. BTW nice server. I have a chance to get one of those things myself but I dont wana carry a dust bag server on the subway. Same spec as your server too minus one cpu. Btw look into upgrading to dual p3 cpu's. If the machine can hit 133fsb then you can use two solteks and two ghz copermine cpu's. those are cheep. If not then get a cuple of 533mhz celerons as those will be a step up from dual p2 233's. Just make shure the celerons you get are the older kind with the black packaging as those still have smp enabled versus the copermine celerons dont. OH btw a celeron from those days will perform just as good as a p2 from those days even with 1/4 of the cache as the pentium 2 has external cache that moves at half the clock speed of the cpu versus the celeron has ondie cahce moving the same speed as the cpu.
They are a little on the pricey side for this project I think. I know we have a Dell box at work which has a 6 channel controller, but I think people would notice if our exchange server stopped working jaguarking11 - I checked and the Dell will only take PII's. Its already got the fastest PII's it can handle so I cant really make it any faster. No pic updates today - just gave the the front panel & grille another coat of black paint, and primed the casing. Tomorrow - time allowing - out comes the dremel to remove the rear 120mm grille
Actualy nope. Any machine that can handle a 233p2 can handle at least a 333p2. And posibly the celerons I was talking about. Just like my compaq that stated that the fastest cpu I could have on my machine was a p3 550 but with a converter I was able to fit a celeron 1.4ghz witch was conciderably faster than my 500mhz p3.
Thats looking nice, i've got a server here i aquired from where my dad works, 21 (yes thats twenty one)x 4.2GB SCSI drives running through dual P90's, not on one board, 2 completely seperate boards, each with 128MB of ram, given that this is circa 1995, 256Mb of ram and 2 P90 boards and cpu with 86GB of raided space... its no wonder it weighs 80KG Good work tho, gotta love old dell cases, business ones anyway, they com appart really easily, yet remain stable... ahh those were the days...
I have that same exact server also. I also have a dual p3 hp server that i should atleast hook up. haha
Looks sweet and promising. Im sure you have thought of this but dont forget to swap psu's if your gonna be powering 6 drives and dual p2s. You never said how many watts the psu it came with is but im guessing that is pretty small. I had a P2 333 on an Abit(i think it was abit) mobo and had the thing overclocked to 550mhz stable (600mhz but it allways crashed) with one of those pasive heatsinks that I added a 11,000rpm squirril (sp?) cage fan too. It was my old CS server for lans. I just this past month got a free Celeron 1.2 system and it became the server.
I'm watching your thread with interest - although I think you may beat my capacity slightly Thats something else on the "to worry about" list. The psu in there is a 230w unit, but annoyingly it has an extra connector that is unique to Dell. This means adding a more powerful psu will be difficult if not impossible. I plan to find out the wattage rating of the old SCSI drive in it, as the server aparently can handle 4 of those. From there I can work out the power needed to run the newer hard drives and compare. Thats the plan anyway
I think you can wire a normal psu to work on dell's you will just have to find the pin out diagram for the dell psu
I HAVE A DELL SERVER TO! With Dual P2's, they are 333mhz, 256mb ram, 20gb hdd , thats my server and im going to get about 500GB hdd to it and make it my file server. Wish you luck man, i really like when someones making on servers.
Whoa, lucky you I need to "help" myself with 80 gb in total well good luck anyway, looking forward 2 pics
I may have an old ISA IDE card laying around... Check out your local puter repair shops: they may have scads of old 386/486 cases with ATA/IDE EISA cards still in them. Granted, they would only be ATA33, but it's better than nothing. Unless of course you can find an EISA video card... Being a file server, I don;t think you'd miss the 3D or even 2D accceleration. froogle to the rescue! and again! Wheee! dude, low tech is the new high tech. I'll dig through my boxes of old cards and see what I have available...
