PROMETHEUS

[NorwegianCraft]

Where do you get all this money from?


Can't wait to experience the results

[Pri]

From being an adult with disposable income.

[Pri]

The PSU arrived this morning

[Pri]

Our case has been dispatched today. It's coming tomorrow I'm excited. I'll take a bunch of pics.

[Pri]

Case arrived today. My god it weighs so much. I found it difficult to lift on my own and it's empty. When I fill this thing up with Hard Drives it will become the immovable object.

This is one of the hot swap fans, it comes with three of these. Hot Swap basically means the fans can be removed from the case while the computer is still powered on. I'm actually not happy with these because I was lead to believe by X-Case's sale force that this used the same fan assembly as the RM 424 Pro, this is not the case. Instead of being powered by a PWM header as picture in their own photos it is actually powered by a single Molex and there is no circuit board to speak of, it's just a daisy chain cable to each of the three fans. I'm really pissed off that they lied to me during our sales call and that their pictures on the site are either doctored or of a different case entirely. But whatever I'll work with what I've got, this case is too heavy to send back at this point and the next case up is another £100 I've already spent way more than I should have on this one.


Hard Drive caddy, there are 24 of these on the front of the case.


Front Hard Drive Bays, again there are 24 of these. Each one has two lights to indicate drive activity and power.


This is what the back of the hard drive bay area looks like, these circuit boards are called "backplanes". Each circuit board handles four hard drives and contains a single SAS-8087 connector which our HP SAS Expander card will connect to.


And this is where that fan I showed before slots in to.


So apart from this fan situation I'm quite pleased with the case. It is very well constructed, feels very sturdy. The front drive bays are leagues better than what I was using previously these all slot in very tightly which means no rattling!

The build should commence on Monday or Tuesday. I'm waiting for the E5-1650 CPU to arrive, that's the last part I need to build the server.

[Pri]

Tried the fans and they are actually quite silent so I'm not as pissed off as I was. The main reason I wanted the higher end fan system was for the temperature based fan control from the motherboard. But these fans running 100% are still quieter than our old servers fans under temperature control. These fans in the new server also move an enormous amount of air so I'm quite impressed with them in general.

They are Dual Ball-Bearing fans. These are the highest end type of fan you can purchase, they last the longest and the acoustics stay the same throughout their life. Most case fans you can buy in the shops are what's called Brushless fans and they tend to get noisier the longer they are used and fail sooner.

[Pri]

The build went without a hitch and you all obviously know by now that it's online as you've been playing. I'm really happy with the new server especially the case and motherboard which were big question marks as to their functionality due to lack of reviews. Server boards don't get much love review wise and the case was so new that I had to pre-order it more than 14 days in advance of it releasing.

So I know a lot of the specifications changed during the build so I'm just going to list the final specification in full. Anything in purple was a new part, anything in black was an old part from our current server. I'll be posting the final build photos later probably tomorrow.

• 1. Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition, not pirated, legit license.
  2. Intel XEON E5-1650 (6 Cores, 12MB Cache, 3.2-3.8GHz) CPU
  3. 64GB (8x8GB) of Kingston ECC 1600MHz 1.35v UDIMM Memory
  4. Dual Socket Asrockrack EP2C602-4L/D16 Motherboard
  5. X-CASE 4U 24 Bay GEN II Rackmount Case
  6. Seven x SAS SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 Cables
  7. SuperMicro CPU Heatsink for LGA 2011
  8. Corsair AX1200i 1200 Watt Power Supply
  9. Artic Cooling 80mm silent fan (I use this to cool the RAID Card and SAS Expander Card)
  10. Corsair 120GB Neutron GTX SSD (This is for the Operating System)
  11. 1TB Western Digital Black Hard Drive (this is where our LogBlock & Core Protect databases reside)
  12. Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SSD (This is where our Minecraft games live!)
  13. 9x4TB Hitachis 8x2TB Samsungs 7x3TB Western Digitals
  14. LSI 9260-4i RAID Controller with 512MB ECC DDR2 + LSI CPU
  15. HP 32 Port SAS Expander Card
  16. 900 Watt CyberPower UPS Battery Backup (21 Minutes run time for power cuts)

[Pri]

More pictures from the build. I didn't unfortunately take a picture of the final completed thing but I'll make sure to do that.

Here are the pictures I took during the build though.

As you can see, it is a very big motherboard!





And it has a very big Power Supply to match!



More motherboard shots with the PSU installed.





CPU Installed



CPU Heatsink Installed. That Yellow SATA and the two Black SATA cables were later removed. I just had them in there for testing purposes. I replaced them with nice blue server grade cables afterwards.



The SFF-8087 Cables. Each one of these cables handles the communication for 4 hard drives. Thus the case can take 24 drives at the front. Each cable is capable of 48Gb/s of bandwidth. That's 288Gb/s of total bandwidth just with these six cables combined!

[Pri]

Operating system picture from Task Manager and also CPUz showing the specifications.

[Pri]

Here are the final build pics which I just took.

Internal Pictures







You may be able to see in the picture below how I've mounted the two SSD's below the 3.5" Hard Disk.



And one more picture, an external shot, ain't it pretty!