It's In With the New At the Frugal Propellerhead House

It was all "elbows and knees" at Case Del Propellerhead today. With the weather a mess, everything closed down and everyone elses computers out of the way, I started the new year off right! 

With the exception of our various laptops, every computer in the house got worked on. It ranged from the major overhaul of the server to add-in cards for the Blackbird workstation.

The work on the Blackbird was pretty simple, in that all I did was put in a PCI combo USB/Firewire card. You might ask.... what on earth would I need that for given now new that machine is.... at least to me. You won't believe this, but I'm all out of USB ports in the back! I've got so many devices, that I've used them up. Plus, I've still got some Firewire drive enclosures that I do a few things with now and then, so it's nice to be able to access them. I also switch out one of my Hauppauge tuner cards for another one, putting the more sophisticated HVR-2550 vs. 1800 that was in it since I'm much more likely to do video editing in it vs. the HTPC in the living room.

Then it was on to the Viking HTPC (bedroom) rebuild. I haven't discussed this, but in the middle of getting everyone elses' machines done, I picked up a a Silverstone SG08-Lite case. The original (non-lite) version was about a $150+ case, but it included a power supply that I neither needed nor wanted, so I was lucky. Plus it was less than $40 in "like new" condition. Earlier last week, I moved the entire contents of that machine from the Cooler Master Elite 130 case over this this much nicer case. Although almost everything fit nicely, there were a few items that required changes. The location of the drives forced me to switch out the SATA cables to 90 degree versions, and I have a slot loading optical drive coming; although I'm not sure why I'm bothering with that. Old school I guess. Otherwise, this machine is pretty much done and back online again.

 As much as I'd love for this post to be about me rebuilding my HTPC into one of the cool cases with the built-in screen, this is as good as it gets right now. I had previously pulled the old Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard out and removed all it's parts with the exception of the drives. Now came time for the other half of the upgrade. I had pulled the Asus E35M1-Pro board out of the Spectre server and now finally having it do the work it was designed to do. These board with their AMD "Brazos" APUs were really intended for media work in set-top boxes and the like, hence the no-fan heatsink set up. Unfortunately for the poor thing, I've had it running a file server up until this point! As we speak, it's running it's 4th round of updates and will soon be able to go back into the living room A/V rack.

All that was great, but the big ticket item of the day was the Spectre file server. Up until this point, it was a Windows Home Server 2011 (Vail) OS machine running 2, 2Tb Hitachi drives off of a HighPoint caching RAID controller. I've grown increasingly annoyed with the controller and now that the WHS has been orphaned....... Anyway, I've been considering moving over to one of the FreeBSD based OS's for some time now. Apparently, now is the time! So the machine got a Core2Duo generation Intel motherboard, along with an additional Intel NIC, 3, 2Tb Hitachi drives (soon to be 4), so I can get 75% efficiency while using ZFS RAID with parity. So "stay tuned". This is liable to be interesting!