Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Multilane SATA enclosure, 5 July, 2008.

Design change

Alrighty. The case has taken a fairly dramatic change. It's now more radial and less compartmental. It's built to contain five motherboards, four micro-atx and one mini-itx. The first four motherboards will get inexpensive P4s initially but will eventually be upgraded to quad core procs. Each with 4GB of ram and booting from a 2.5" hard drive. The fifth board will be connected to twelve hard drives. It will essentially be a FreeNAS box to provide storage to the other four. There are four 600w power supplies and one 800w. I will have an 8-port gigabit ethernet switch built in and the four motherboards will be water-cooled on two loops. It will have eight 140mm fans and six 80mm fans, all thermal-controlled for noise reduction. In the pictures below, the black slot below the LCD screen is the slot-load Apple Superdrive.

I picked up parts for a bending brake today and started work on the custom radiators, but I don't have any new real-world pictures yet.

 

HOLY CRAP!!!. This is gonna be a monster. Nice new cad.

 

Okay, now you need to name it WOPR.

 

Base design

Thanks for the interest in the project. I ordered aluminum this morning, enough to complete the base of the case, as shown below. It's to be constructed of 0.05" thick aluminum, which is 1.27mm or between 16 and 17 gauge. The floor will start out as four 12"x12" squares. Keeping each segment as much one piece as possible, I will measure out the footprint plus a 1.5" fold on any side that will fit in the square. Anything that doesn't fit within that sq. ft. will be cut from another sheet with seams welded to form the shapes you see below. The four will then be bolted together, then the four segments will be welded together. The red acrylic is made from a single 24" x 24" x 1/8" sheet and bolted to the aluminum structure. The two motherboards toward the center sit back-to-back and the two toward the outside will face the center. Once I have positioning for the motherboard holes, the top edge will likely have two threaded rods that tie all four boards together. As for the 1.5" space below the boards, I have ideas about what to use the space for, but I'll leave that for later.

 

Nice design. Should look great.

 

Most interesting mod on the forums.

 

wow man cant keep up with how this is gonna look, the design always changes!

 

if this goes to plan it will be awesome

 

Could it be this bending brake by any chance? -> http://www.ch601.org/tools/bendbrake/brakeplans.pdf =)

 

Changes

I promise, the design of the case isn't going to change drastically again. And, the two style changes weren't entirely by choice either. Through it's development, I've made the same mistake over and over, being that I designed the case for the sake of the case, not for the sake of the parts. In the first design, there wasn't enough ground clearance to allow the doors to fully open, and the thing kept getting larger and larger in order to fit motherboard and power supply. In the second design, there wasn't enough space to allow for a motherboard without it sitting horizontally. Placed at the top of the tower, it seemed out of place and if I put it in the bottom, it seemed to just be asking for a water leak. With the final design, (even if the diameter is a little big) it should be better segmented, isolating hardware from water components. In the end, if there is a leak, electronics should be protected. Each redesign, especially small adjustments last night to get radiators to fit (had to widen the outer lugs by 1/4") has been a great source of annoyance. I found myself griping at the computer many times as just a small adjustment resulted in the modification of more than a dozen individual objects.

If you think having 4-5 motherboards is nuts, let me explain. I do a lot of work with Lightwave 3D, from designing tables for my workshop, to desks and other woodworking projects, or designing a frame and trailer for my Jeep. In the second revision of the case, once I started adding water lines, transparencies and real textures, I started to see render times taking more than 2 hours for a single 1680x1050 frame, Athlon64 2.2GHz, single core. My MacBook Pro renders in half the time. So, I set my sights on a render farm. I want one quad-core processor system, probably 780i to be used for everyday plus four aux systems, each with quads and sheet GHz for rendering. So, if I'm rendering a single frame, playing games, designing things, I only need the one system online. If I'm rendering more than one still frame or transcoding video, I bring the other four up to do the work and I can still use the 5th system for normal tasks.

(Video card doesn't really seem to make a difference. Whether running onboard video, a 5700GS or my 8800GT, rendering in Lightwave is purely a function of the CPU. In April of next year, I'm seriously considering buying an 8-core MacPro.)


Hey. Question. There's one post on here about a house door that was made with a pair of acrylic panels, etched on opposite sides to illuminate the sword and dragon. Has anyone ever put something like that to use with a computer case? I need to somehow put together a display to show activity lights for 17 hard drives and 5 power lights.

 

That just screams "LCD display" to me. I would look into programming one to show activity on 17 Drives. The 5 power lights should be easy enough as "standard" though.

Kudos on the farm (Are you Clustering these 4 for Lightwave?), I'll be watching this with interest, and waiting until Terragen2 gets Multicore support before embarking on a Multi-System project myself (I feel your pain with Rendering Times!)

 

Clustering mostly for Lightwave and sometimes maybe for Mencoder, if I can get that one figured out.
I did some looking around, and a working LCD touchscreen seems a much better idea than an etched panel. Due to the space requirements of a screen, I'm thinking the slide-out screen of Thermaltake might be the easiest solution. I wonder if a Samurize module could be made to query multiple computers at once.

 

Their web site says it works for multiple computers over a network, so yea. What are you going to use for the internal network?

 

Thoughts

I plan to have the four cluster-nodes connected to the initiator through a gigabit swtich built within the case. If I use the Thermaltake LCD, I'd also put a mini-itx board in the case specifically to drive the LCD. I don't know if that means I have to be running multiple applications on each system like Motherboard Monitor and others, or what. I'm assuming that each box will be running a Samurize server of sorts. Not sure. Haven't looked into it that much. I would certainly have a custom interface running on the LCD. No generic XP desktop.
Something like this, a project I was working on years ago.

 

Cool theme. Mechwarrior?

 

Nice design. Nice monster. I like to see it build

¿you are going to do custom radiators? i am looking at you it sounds really interesting

 

Rather than going through the effort of custom radiators, I'm going to go with Black Ice GT 120x2 radiators, but I'll need four of them. Although, I will still be doing custom-fab work for the wedge-shaped radiators between the hard drives. I can't get away from that. Aluminum will be here tomorrow. I can then test out my homemade bending brake. If that works, I'll post a build log for it on the forums.

The application layout is for a Battletech game that was abandoned around a year ago due to the lack of cross-platform ability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I've just started working with Flash CS3 and Adobe Air, and I still have all of my graphics in Photoshop, so I may be back in the development again. I got a basic opening screen working and confirmed that it's usable in Windows Mac OS X and Ubuntu. That's another project that will take a couple years to finish.

 

we want to see photos of this monster render farm

mod on!!!!

 

Updates

I got a bit of work done on it over the weekend. 0.05" aluminum is thicker than I anticipated, but not a bad thing. Initially, I had some trouble figuring out how to measure the cuts, then it occurred to me, to measure them out the same way I did within Lightwave 3D. I taped everything down, cut a paper template and measured angles. Marked the lines and cut with the Dremel.




I got the first two cut, then took a break to work on another urgent project. My Jeep started leaking oil this week and I feared the worst. Turns out, the oil filter had worked loose and was leaking through the seal. I switched it out without making too much of a mess and cleaned the underside of the engine.





So, the pieces that make up the bottom of the case are done. For the 1.5" spacer, I think I'm going to cut 3" strips of aluminum and have them fold over the bottom 3/4" to add more strength than just a bead weld. I hope to start on that tomorrow.

The rest of my time goes to working on this project:


The Battletech project started mid-2006 and had been abandoned most of the past year. Originally written in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, it was horribly slow and most of the reason it was stalled is the lack of cross-platform. I recently got Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional and started it up again. Granted, most everything was already in the computer and I simply needed to copy and paste, but I've gotten as much done in Flex Builder in a weekend as with VS2005 in several months work.

 

Good to see it was only the oil filter. My Element's pcv system completely filled with ice this past Feb driving out of Alaska. About a day into Canada it blew the back of the valve cover gasket out and ended up going through 11 quarts of oil before we could find a place to look at it. Luckily it just pushed the gasket out of the channel and not break it. We pulled the valve and attached hoses off and took them inside to thaw out. Pulled the cover off in the freaking parking lot at -30F and reset the seal. Made the rest of the trip without any problems, well without any problems with the engine. It still stinks of burning oil, I've run it through the car wash with the under body wash I don't know how many times.