So There Was This Computer Case on Craigs List......

This could be a title for my spare time! To me, Craigs List is like a flea market or garage sale that never closes. Living on the outskirts of a sprawling metroplex like Dallas makes it both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you can just about find anything, on the other, it can be just about anywhere. In the case (unintended pun), of this case.... it was in the far northwestern reaches of Carrollton! If it wasn't such a phenomenal deal, I would've let it pass. But it was $25 (the guy let me have it for $20 since he gave me bad driving directions), and I was headed up that way to go to IKEA to pick up things for my son's room anyway, so..... after a Saturday morning of daughter soccer, and a funeral, I found myself driving up to Frisco.

Did I forget to mention that it's huge? Oh yeah.... it's really big! There are 4, 5.25" bays, on top of 2 drive cages that hold 4, 3.5" drives each. And if that's not enough, you can actually order another drive cage to replace a fan that sits on the floor behind the bottom one, or move the bottom one back in case you want to put a big water cooling "rad" up front. The possibilities are pretty much endless. As it sits, you can put in 8, 3.5" regular HDDs, plus install one of those 5 in 3 cages in the 5.25" drive spaces, giving a total of 13 hard drives, AND still have room to have an optical drive as well! This case can be configured to hold a extended ATX motherboard, plus up to 3 water coolers of various sizes and just about as big of a PSU as you can possibly imagine. What are my intentions for this monster?

Although I don't have room for this, I've outgrown the little Silverstone PS07 that the "Spectre" file server calls home. As it sits right now, there are 4 hard drives in it. For a FreeNAS machine running ZFS, 4 drives is pretty much a minimum. As I become more serious about building a really secure storage solution, I need to do better than a bare minimum. Although, processing power isn't a "thing" with these sorts of builds, other issues, such as ECC RAM is, plus ZFS likes a lot of it. Although older server RAM is cheap and plentiful, it's expensive to buy in higher density sticks than current spec RAM in the. These higher needs require more motherboard real estate, thus requiring full sized ATX boards vs. mATX style. 

Based on my research so far, it appears that, what I need is something along the lines of this Supermicro X7DCL as depicted above. Although, I don't have a need for the dual CPU sockets, everything else on boards of this type is just about perfect:

• 6 RAM sockets that'll take ECC
• 6 or more SATA connections
• Dual Ethernet adapters
• PCI-e AND PCI expansion slots

The only thing that doesn't fit? The form-factor, of course! There-in lies the use of another big PC case. This time, it's a Fractal Design XL R2. You might have concluded that the "XL" stands for extra large,  and you'd be right. This version is the second revision or "R2" of the original design. This series from Fractal is of the quiet variety with sound deadening foam everywhere and a solid door which is perfect for a constantly running file server. That it was bought for $20 is just icing on the cake! OK, a little more than just icing since the original retail price ran north of $150! The only "fly in the ointment" will be where am I going to put this thing? It's predecessor, the Silverstone PS07 cased server lived inside of my "side-desk/credenza". However the XL R2, is a 22" tall by 22" deep case, so that's kind of a big question. At least, now that I'm not sharing the office, there are more options!