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So...No, this is not a post about a flying dragon-dog, it's actually another episode in the long drawn out agonizing story of my server rebuild.
When last we visited my version of the "100 Years War" (really 116 years), I had changed directions with the motherboard, and moved on to the much newer version of a Supermicro server board based on the LGA-1155. It has subsequently gotten a low powered Xeon processor, and matching 8Gb of ECC memory. All this along with the installation of 6, 2Tb drives and the PSU, you'd think that I'd have been done and moved on by now.
Then, I got hung up on this.... OK, there's been other stuff like my garage workshop, but this has been a head-scratcher for me. Oh, not of the can't figure it out variety, but of the "do I really want to do this" sort. "This" is an Icy Dock Black Vortex 4-in-3 drive cage. The concept being that you can stick one of these things in 3, 5.25" drive spaces and give yourself 4, 3.5" drive bays that are actively cooled with a 120mm fan. It's a pretty cool (no pun intended) concept, and it would give me expansion in the ridiculously large Fractal XL R2 case that has 4, 5.25" bays in it. Unfortunately, this thing requires that the drive mounting tabs that hold those 4 drives would need to be cut off or bent back out of the way. That bothered me. Don't ask me why, but permanently altering this hither-to unmolested case was not something I wanted to do. So, there it sat. The XL R2, with the Icy Dock sitting on top of it in my office for the last 2 months.
Then, I bought another case. Looks familiar doesn't it? Looks kind of like the Silverstone PS-07 that the old server was built in doesn't it? That's because it's a Silverstone CS380.
There it is for reference. The difference? Despite it's shape, it's NOT Micro-ATX. It's a full-sized ATX case, with....
8 drive-bays.....
on a "hot-sway" back-plane! And don't forget the on-board dual 120mm cooling fans for the drives. Despite the off-the-shelf ability to hold the same number of drives, this case is fully 7" shorter than the XL R2! Given where it's going to go in my office (inside a cabinet), this is a much better solution. No, the Icy Dock won't fit, but hey..... I'll find a place for it to go. Time to finish this build!
"WHAT THE....... !!!" .....as my brother-in-law would say. Yup; that my friends is a "Molex to 4-pin adapter".
...... and that is an "8-pin EPS extension".
This? A "24-pin PSU extension", of course. Is there a point to all this random wiring vocabulary lesson? Well, yes of course.... only if you want to get your build off the ground! Oh it gets better! I promise!
This is an ID Cooling DK-03, heat-sink fan combo.... coming from China. Yup, my server/HTPC builds are in that excruciating stage of waiting for random parts to show up from random places, ranging from Katy, Texas to Shenzhen, China. This is the part that nobody talks about and the videos on Youtube never show.
I'll have to admit it that some of it is my fault, in that I'm a bit of a stickler. Like the HSF issue. I actually do have perfectly adequate ones sitting around, but I'm not about adequate. I need a "low-profile" assembly, so solutions like the Cooler Master EVO 212 are out. Can't fit a "tower" style cooler in a HTPC, and the stock AMD models are notoriously noisy at least partially due to the small fans being used as is typical of virtually all low-profile systems. I could run out to Micro Center and pick up a Noctua or Silverstone HSF for about $35-40 a pop, but that's just too expensive for me. Did I mention that I'm stubborn too?!? Yes; I want my cake and eat it too! So I started to dig, and came up with the ID Cooling DK-03 which is not only low-profile, but uses a 120mm fan on top! That make for a slow rpm, which equal low noise..... MAGIC! The only fly in the ointment is that they are shipped out of China! So it'll be about 2 weeks before they get here.
Some of the delay issues are kind of unforeseen. See where the power supply sits in this image of the Fractal Define XL R2 that I'm using? Yup, the PSU's cables won't reach the board's headers way up top. To exacerbate things, it's a full-on dual processor, eATX server board from Supermicro (which was the cause of the ginormous case to start with), which requires not only a 12 volt, 8-pin EPS cable, but a 4-pin one as well..... hence all the extensions.
Then, there's all this. You'd think that I'd have enough memory laying around right? Well, here's the thing. These machine are a little different. The two AMD APU based board take faster RAM than is typical of this generation's machines. In general I use Intel based systems, so if you're talking PC3-1600 memory, I'm good. But 1866mhz.... not so much, so I had to order some. Again, my stubborness rears it's ugly head! I'm just not going to pay retail prices on anything! The SO-DIMM? Yeah, the B75 "Slim" Mini-ITX board...... yeah, it uses laptop RAM. I had one stick of 10,600 4Gb RAM (along with an mSATA SSD for it), but I want to run 8Gb as a minimum standard this generation, so I had the find another one. Hey; I got it for $12.54 though!
So, here I am. Iiving in my own special purgatory of waiting for computer parts......
