Hercules is Getting "All Pumped Up"

Recently, I wrote a post on my file server (aka Hercules) getting a promotion. No....I'm not finished just yet, but the parts are on their way.....AND, I've made some interesting adjustments. 

After looking at virtually everything in the around or less-than $100 price-point, I settled on the SilverStone SST-PS07b. Now, that's a mouthful! Here's was my buying parameters (other than less than $100): it couldn't be taller than 16" (which is the size of my cabinet space), had to hold at least 5 drives, take a micro-ATX motherboard and designed to be a quiet case!

If you can't tell from the pictures and aren't familiar with SilverStone; this is a feature packed case for the money ($79 before $10 rebate). It's drive cages will hold 5 regular sized 3.5" drives, another 2.5" drive and has 2, 5.25" externally accessible bays for optical drives and such. It also has two fans in the front with integrated dust filters, and other random items like USB 3.0 connections in the front. Of course I've already gone over the Asus E35M1-Pro board, and HighPoint RocketCache RAID controller that's going to go in it. So having all those drive bays will be critical since I'm already at 2, 2Tb, 3.5" Hitachi drives for storage, 2, 32Gb Patriot SSDs for caching, plus I'm sure I'll eventually add more storage as my finances recover.

Here is my latest idea on the build: the Seagate Momentus XT, 500Gb Hybrid hard disk drive with 4Gb of SLC NAND onboard. Last night as I was ordering the RocketCache controller ($138 from Amazon Warehouse), I came to the conclusion that I really didn't want to spend any more money! I know, I know.....it's been a cheap build so far, and I've gotten good deals on everything. Plus the new 160Gb Intel 320 SSD for less than $100 was a good deal for a boot drive, yet something was holding me back. I don't know whether it was just that I didn't want to spend another $100, or the miscellanious articles I've read that have alluded to server OS's creating lots of little writes on the boot disk (killer for MLC SSDs with their 3-5K write limits), but I just could do it.

 

Then this morning, while driving my school bus, it dawns on me that I didn't need to buy another SSD! I had one under my very nose in the form of that Seagate hybrid. So, that will be the boot drive, giving me most of the SSD performance after it boots a few times. I know some of you might be thinking that I'm being a little obsessive with this "frugal" business, but hey; just the concept of buying new equipment is stressing me out. Next update hopefully will be after a fully reloaded and running server.