Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Serverama - Update! 28th July - I swear it'll be done this year...

Over the next few posts i'm going to recap most of the previous work done in this project log in the current archives. For the benefit of the people who havent already seen the log, this will be the shortened version the full one can be viewed in the archive from the above link.

If you want to skip to the first post fo new work, click here

So, going from the begining...

Frame Construction

The case is of faily simple contrustion, using 12 pieces of L shaped aluminium angle to form the box and 3 triangular brace pieces to hold each corner, 24 in total held with 4 bolts per plate.


To make sure the corners are square i made a jig to hold each piece with the corner plate for drilling


The jig produces a perfect, repeatable set of 4 holes always in the same place on the sides of the case.


Once the pieces fit and all four holes are drilled, the ousides are countersunk to keep the bolt heads flush.


Eventually four pieces are connected and a full side is complete


To attach the connecting (shorter sides) a second bracket is needed, however the the template i had used needed to be notched around the nuts on the existing template to ensure the holes would be the same.


The outcome however is worth it as they all line up properly.


With all the corners attached using 2 corner plates a third is needed to join the two sides together


To make the third corner plate fit properly another template is needed to fix it solidly.


Eventually a box is done


HD Rack next, should be moved soon.

 

HD Rack

The Hard Drive rack, space for 26 drives (later revised to 24 drives and some other electronics) made form 52 equal rails and went through several builds due to poor adhesives and accidents.
(Theres a lot of stuff in this, so it'll be heavily cut down from the original)

The rack went through 2 designs, the first was ok,but not great or particularly strong. It was too complex to mount to the frame, so it got rebuilt from scratch. (wasted a couple of weeks)

The new design used 2 3/4"x1/8" flat bars betweent he sides of th case top and bottom, this supported the front and back of the rack.

(sorry, i keep turning this pic round and i ahve no idea why when i upload it, it turns back)

All the vertical supports are attached to the main lateral rails and readied for the HD support rails.


To attach the rails, starting at the bottom proves a problem. The supports which hold each rail in place are inverted against the rails, but where the bolts hold the vertical supports in place are, the supports need holds to see the bolts.


The rail is then attached to the support and held inplace to set.


The first set of rails can then be attached with epoxy and held in palce.


Sometime later... All the rails are in place


Barring some unfortunate accidents tearing rails off, thats the rack done for now. onto the panels next...

 

Back Panel and Motherboard Tray

The panels of the case came as ~1mm sheets, cut to the right sizes. Most of these are fine and just need attaching, but some need work.


Getting these panels pointed out a couple of flaws in the case, as two pieces of aluminium L bar were slightly too short causing some sides to be out of sqaure. With this corrected, the panel fitting continued with a test fit.


The doner motherboard was from an old Coolermaster case long since destroyed in project Plan Lazy.


The motherboard tray runner at the bottom is made from Double-U channel, cut down to U section as no 1/4" ID U section channel is available locally


The channel is mounted on more small L brackets in 2 places.


The top rail is mounted at the back with a bolt and form the top of the case with an extended version of the lower bracket, holding the motherboard tray securly.


The backpanel needs to be cut down for the motherboard tray to fit, this is done using a small saw i aquired which trims the aluminium easily.


The backpanel, along with the other panels are attached with M4 countersunk bolts, threaded directly into the corner brackets.


The countersunk bolt head is held slightly raised in a cup to avoid bending or sountersinking the panel. These are attached to the panels (athough this hasnt been doen yet)


The backpacnel also needs a hold cut for a PSU. Using a template made for Plain Lazy the layout is transfered to the panale then cut using a holesaw and various other drills and saws.


The holes cleaned up nicely and eventually the piece between the fanhole and the power socket hole was removed.


Witht he back panel basically finished the next step was taken, live testing
I took the case to a LAN and loaded it with the drives i had, it served the weekend well, a few lessons were elarned, tho the biggest was about the PSU which was moddified as above.


Next post should rbing the log upto near where i am currently at.

 

Door, Cooling and Current status

This update should cover all the work ive done upto the revival of this project earlier this week.

The hinge went through a number fo incarnations, all using piano hinge to hodl the door, the first was a poor deisgn and was ultimately unsucessful. the second build was badly planned and so went almost imeadiatly to the third and current build.

This uses 18" of piano hinge mounted to the front of the case to hold the back plate of the door in palce.


The backplate is attached to a sheet of 2mm alu which holds the plexi inpalce. More on this later.


The hinge itself is attached to the side piece and then added to the case. The hinge is held in place by a 1/16" piece of alu bolted through to the main L piece.


The hinge on the case, more on the door later.


In another conversation in the original project log the HD rack was seperated from the rest of the case to provide a contained cooling area. with 5 fans down each side, 5 intake, 5 output. This needs a partition betwen the 2 made from 2mm plexi.


The partition is cut around the side supports to get a better seal in the Hd area.


The door was to be made of 2 piece of 2mm alu sheet with a piece of 4mm plexi sandwiched between to create the door. The sheets were cut to have a window with 1" border of alu. The front panel has since been dropped and will be better explained why in the first new update.


There was going to be a graphic on the door, but this has since been left for now, it may comeback but currently it is not as important as getting the case finished and working.

The door is attached using 7 M3 screwes through the piano hinge into the door back plate,


The door when hung on the frame sits remarkably well and swings freely.


The plexi is attached to the metal back of the door using 7 holes holding the nuts which the bolts attach to.


Thats bascially where my logged work got to before a long dead spell. but work has continued in small amounts over the summer and more updates will follow in the coming week regarding the door and its construction.

 

Project: Serverama

All the old work from Serverama has been moved over in a shortened version to the new Logs forum and covered in the first 4 posts.

Project Serverama - Revived 26th Sept

Each update will be linked to in a new post here to make life easier. Work has ben done this week and will be updated soon.

 

Door Redesign

Further to the previous post about the redesign of the door, this post covers the reasons and work done around the problems.

The originally with the three layer design, the idea was to have a channel made of 1/8" alu wrapping around the sides, holding all three layers together. After researching alu channel at my local metal shop, the nearest i could find was 1/4" ID U section which was slightly too small to fit. The answer to this was to bevel the metal to squeeze it into the U section. this was impracticaland after a rethink i settled on using a router to remove sufficent material to alow the U section to fit.


Unfortunatly this didnt prove as successful as hoped, the amu had to become paper thin, and gave little or no support.


This is how the previous design should have gone together.


The new design uses only the back of the door and the plexi with 2 1/16" pieces of aluminium which fit inside each other to build the thickness up to the desired size of 1/8".


This is how the front of the door will be laid out. At the top of the picture is the plexi, moving down the picture the back of the door which mounts to the hinge is first visible, then the new outer wrap which is staggered in 2 1/16" layers.


A new piece of plexi is needed for this door as the previous on was damaged during the attempted routing process. This will be drilled tonight or tomorrow for the new holes for the nuts to hold the door piece together.


The only problem with this door is that the new door wrap will not cover the holes in the plexi, so something needs to be designed to try and cover these, although i dont know what it will be,probably some sort of alu shaped piece.

 

First new work

New work added to the log on the new door.

Update - 28th September

Another update hopefully tonight or tomorrow.

 

More Door Work

Done some more work this week and had camera problems, so couldnt do pictures as most of this was done.

The door held on the bolts supporting the plexi and alu back panel fine with the nuts knocked into the holes and secured through the hinge as before.


So, the new door trim needs to be cut and fitted, the edge of the door had to be prepared and cleaned.


The internal diameter of the trim had to be 1/4" which was a problem, as only 1/16" stuff was available. 2 different sizes of 1/16" U section made up a full 1/8"


The pieces need cutting at 45 degrees to fit properly (praise the mitre box )


Next few pictures show the edging fitted.




The edging al fits well and the overall look still works, despite the back plate being larger than the front edging.


The big problem with this design is the edging down the hinge side, as seen below.


As you can see, the metal for the edging wont cover over the holes for the nuts holding the door on. Problem.
The solution i worked out was to use some 1/2" L section to cover over the holes.


The L channel cut down to about 1/4" in depth and then fitted aorund the existing trim to coer the nuts completely.


So with a bit of tape, 90% of the trim is done


the top of the door fits well along to front of the case so should give a good seal eventually.




Thats basically all the work that was done over the last week, today ive started a little more work on the seal between HD rack and the rest of the pc. The plexi needs to be fixed in palce, to do this i'll use 4 brackets, one each corner attached to the main HD Rack supports.


The space (aove) is fairly tight, and 5/8" L section is too big to fit (by about 1/16" damnit). However the 1/2" strips i had trimmed from a large sheet sometime back were perfect.


To make the bracket, a piece no more than 1 1/4" long would be needed to fold over in a metal vice to be small enough to fit and hold with sufficient strength.


The bracket folds easily enough (only 1mm alu) and gives a nice accurate bend, and fits in the gap by the frame.


To make the other brackets, 3 identical piuece fo alu...


Attach to some wood with the test piece...


Clamp in metal vice...


Carefully persuade with a small hammer and a scrap piece of wood ...


Remove and trim.


Should be fitting these tomorrow and doing a little more work on the door. Need to order mroe fans too for the HD cooling and think a little more about some future work thats needed.

 

New work added today, some work on the door and a little more on the HD rack.

Update - 2nd October

Comments on the work appreciated and how to improve it.

 

looking good so far, can't really see anything that needs improving as you have a nice clean door and case. how many hard drives are you planning on keeping in this case?

 

Theres 26 HD bays in there currently, although they wont all be used now, ive decided to sacrifice the top 2 bays to electronics and stuff like power switch and LEDs rahter than put them in the frame.

so in theory theres 24 drive bays, im aimaing for an eventual 10TB which should be easy as Hd sizes increase, i tend to buy drives around £100ish, but currently ive been buying 250Gb drives

current storage total is 1700GB between 2 computers. For the actual server though theres 1x120GB, 1x 160GB, 2x200GB and 3x250GB which is around 1.4TB (unformatted)

 

1700GB, Insanity. But in a good way

 

Indeed, i got one fo the western digital 250's from Aldu for £60 as i was due to run out of space on one of my drives (ive got all my media sorted to certain drives and dont mix them) so needed another one soon, so through why not
S'empty atm, but should get some stuff on it in the next few weeks

 

Small update tonight. Been to B&Q to pick up something to hold the door closed easily without using a mechanical catch. A small mednetic door catch top and bottom should hold the door closed enough without being a pain to open.


The magnet is actually made of 2 small magnets seperated by a non-magnetig core. The plastic shrowd comes off fairly easily and the overall OD is about 10mm. Instead of having the brown plastoc cover, i'm goignt o find some 10mm ID alu tube and use that to hold the magnets in the frame.


The other main work was on the door and HD Rack. The edge of the door over the hinge needed a second piece of metal, to achieve this some 3/8"x3/8" L section need to be trimmed down.


The L section fits nicely over the hinge... afetr about an horu swork and 2 attempts


The door and 2nd piece of the hinge cover fit well and complete the door for now.


The other major piece of work was to the HD Rack, fitting the sealing plexi between the 2 parts. The small brackets from the previous post attached to the HD Rack vertical on the extisting bolts.


The bracket holds the plexi in place well but drilling is a pain to do out of the case, so in situe drilling had to be done.


Using the same rings which hold the side panels help support the bolts on the plexi.


The only thing which is needed now having fitted the plexi is that it does rattle (as i expected) so needs some rubber edging to absorb the vibrations. Not a big deal but something else to do.

With as much done to the HDRack as possible the door needed more work, the problem is with the new design it shows some of the internal side of the back panel.


After some time with 600 grit wet and dry the bigger but still not excessively deep scratchers were not removed. Removing them would take ages and probably give an uneven finish across the whole area.


The solution ive gone for is smooth finish hammerite spray pain, thinly applied to both sides while suspecnded.


This should dry by morning and i'll see how it is in a day or tqo when i go back home to do more work, the finish looked even when i elft and shouldnt run, if it does then i may just strip it and redo 1 side at a time. So, realisticly antoher update in a dat or so.

 

Another Update

Small update this time, just a bit of work on the door (nearly done now) and some internal work.

Update - 4th October

More in a couple of days.

 

How are you connecting all of the drives to the mobo? A SCSI controller or SATA?
Just curious as a mate of mine is after a cheep way of putting more IDE drives in his system...

 

Well the motherboard has an onboard promise IDE raid controller so theres anough for 8 IDE devices. But after that i'm going to use PCI RAID controllers, probbably SATA and then use SATA->PATA convertors for some of the drives, it'll cost me in convertors but should be worth it to be able to use the old drives.

Sadly seems this is a very bad time to put a huge disk array together using older and new technology

 

You could consolidate old data on to new hard drives so you can use newer technologies like SATA...so if you buy a 300GB SATA drive then move the stuff off the 120 and you can sell it at a sidewalk sale. That way you're on new tech without takin up IDE slots

 

Another small update tonight, wasnt planning to go home but had a look at the door while i was there after spraying.

The coat of paint that went on yesterday hasnt completely covered all the of the marks (slightly deeper marks than i thought and a really light coat of paint)


The spray isnt too different to the raw alu finish and although it isnt shining it is quite good. So much so im considering doing all of the frame like this. Partially because its not a bad finish, and partially because it IS sufficiently different to be noticable :|


Even with the plexi the colour doesnt change (i didnt think it would, but it could have given more of a sheen)


Finally as i was around i gave the door a panel another coat of spray after a light rubbing with 600grit wet and dry.


Another update tomorrow, see how the 2nd coat comes out. Any opinions on spraying the whole frame outside welcome in the comments log

 

Right, another update tonight, wasnt planned but happened to be home.

Update - 5th October

Pistol: Eventually even the 160's, 200's and maybe 250's will end up replaced, but for now i'll use a PATA and then after uni when i buy a new main rig and upgrade mobo, cpu, gfx etc. i'll go fully SATA for new drives and just use a single PATA card in the server for these drives till they are replaced. Hopefully i'll have a job by then tho