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In my main workstation I have used a custom water cooling loop with a triple 120mm fan radiator since the Intel Core i7-920 came out. That loop is great, but requires a lot of maintenance. Not only that, the setup requires a lot of tubing inside the chassis so I decided to look at some of today’s closed loop liquid cooling solutions. I also decided to move to a new desktop chassis, a Corsair Carbide Series 500R. A quick search did not produce any good results for an installation guide for installing the Corsair H100 in the Carbide 500R, so I decided to write one up. Continue Reading

For the Supermciro X7SPE-HF-D525 pfSense appliance I discussed in the linked post I of course wanted a chassis for my appliance and decided to purchase the CSE-502L-200B for just under $70 (see ebay and NewEgg). Oftentimes one does not need a massive chassis for a server. Frankly, with all of the mITX and mATX form factor boards out there, and all of the onboard features the boards have, there are a lot of applications where people do not need a large/ deep chassis. Using a shallower rackmount chassis allows one to use much smaller lightweight wall mounted network rack or telco post rack which saves a lot of space. As a result, for my Atom based pfSense appliance, I purchased a Supermicro CSE-502L-200B. Continue Reading

Supermicro contacted me about reviewing their SC842TQ-665B chassis a few weeks ago and I thought it would be a good departure from the pure storage chassis.  Sometimes, a large 4U 20-24 3.5″ bay enclosure is unnecessary. With today’s 3.5″ disk prices, adding a 4TB usable  RAID 6 array plus hot spare and a few SSDs for caching in ZFS L2ARC style configurations can be a very viable alternative when massive amounts of raw storage are not needed. The SC842TQ-665B has a mix of hot-swap bays, 5.25″ expansion bays, and solid cooling all in a small, 20.5″ deep, chassis. Continue Reading

While visiting a local retailer I saw a Supermicro SC-731i-300B on the shelf during the same visit that I was purchasing the Core i7-2600K and ASUS P8H67-M EVO that were used in the Sandy Bridge and H67 chip set for the home server review. It is one of those items that came close to making the cut for the Entry DIY Storage Server Buyer’s Guide, December 2010 but fell just short. Of course, I promptly placed the box in my cart deciding it would make a reasonable home for the H67 Sandy Bridge system. Continue Reading

After some prodding I am starting to do a few more chassis reviews. To continue on this theme, I recently purchased a Supermicro SC933T-R760B which is a 15 bay 3.5″ SAS/ SATA chassis with a triple redundant power supply. In 2010 low-cost 3U and 4U storage enclosures became popular DIY options. Those low cost enclosures like the Norco RPC-3116 lack power supplies meaning that a user can install a standard ATX power supply and have a working system. What these low-cost alternatives lack are the serviceability features commonly found in Supermicro, Dell, HP, and Chenbro enclosures that are meant to keep the servers online while being able to swap out not just drives, but also fans and power supplies. Continue Reading

I discuss SAS Expanders a lot on this site, primarily dealing with the HP SAS Expander. One option that came out in the December 2010 High-end and Mid-Range Buyer’s guides was purchasing a chassis with a redundant PSU and a built-in SAS expander. Today we will be looking at one of Supermicro’s SC216 series chassis, the SC216E1-R900LPB. Continue Reading

Norco has a reputation for providing inexpensive server rackmount cases that are oftentimes good enough for many home and small business applications. Being server cases, popular models like the RPC-4220 and RPC-4020 are built to be installed in server rooms where airflow takes precedence over noise. Traditional 90mm fans were found in the center partitions of those models. While the typical quality Delta units moved a lot of air, the fan speed required with the smaller fans also yielded a lot of noise, which is not desirable for a lot of users. Cavediver (who can be found on the ServeTheHome.com forums and [H]ardforums fabricated a fan bracket for the popular Norco cases that incorporated 120mm fans. 120mm fans can spin slower while moving a similar amount of air due to their larger fin areas. With the introduction of the RPC-4224, Norco started using the 120mm fan center partition design, and made the bracket available to end users for a relatively nominal amount (something like $11 not including shipping). This is pretty much a simple, install fans on the new, unscrew and remove the old, screw in the new, and hook up fans to a power source job so I have some illustrations to show users what this is like. Continue Reading

Many of this site’s readers have large storage requirements due to a focus on centralizing redundant storage for multiple client PCs. One common scenario is streaming video to client PCs. Personally, I use a mix of mainly micro ITX (mITX) platforms as HTPC streaming PCs. My typical configuration involves a mITX motherboard with a low power CPU, on-board GPU capable of accelerating popular video codecs, 4GB of RAM and a solid state drive. In fact, I have moved away from even including optical drives in these configurations because they tend to add cost without much value. Over the past few months, I have tried about twelve different mITX cases from approximately $35 to $150, and have found the Apex MI-100 mITX HTPC case to be a nice mix of value, functionality, size and feature set. To that end, I now own three of them and figured since I get questions about them quite often, I may as well do a short write-up. Continue Reading