BUILD Ultimate Home Server/Media Atom Build

[Nick2253]

I have the DS380, and there ain't no way in heck you're fitting a matx mobo in there. I could barely get the itx mobo in there. Check out the size comparison from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboards_form_factors.svg

One thing about the DS380 is the airflow over the drives sucks. My drivers are constantly hitting 40C+ unless I have the side off with an floor fan pointed at the NAS (and I only have 6 drives). If I had know about that in the beginning, I would have gone with a different case. I think there are some options, but I'll have to mess with it. This coming weekend my dremel and I are going to have some fun at trying to fix the problem.

 

[zeigerpuppy]

So the build is done. The DS380 worked out OK with some mods.
I decided to stick with it instead of the Lian Li Case because having the drives in trays is much easier for changing them over and also aluminium cases tend to be noisier. The noise is not too bad, should be fine once it's behind the couch.

Temps on the drives aren't too bad (I'm happy with less than 50C).
Also, power consumption with 8 drives is pleasantly good (less than 125W under load).
I had to use an 4x PCIe to 16x PCI ribbon cable and a bit of tweaking of boot options but everything works well.

The mods were pretty easy:
- I had to move the HDD fans by about 5mm
- I moved the power supply to the other side
- I made a cutout in the plastic part of the drive cage to allow the graphics card to fit (bay is still usable for HDD)
- used velcro to attach SSD to bottom part of case
- used velcro to hang HDA from power supply

Running Linux Mint Debian Edition with zfsonlinux and xbmc. Audio goes out from HDMI from Quadro 600.
Seems plenty fast for the purpose as an archive machine/media server/media player/browsing machine.

Only slight issue is one of my drives is running hotter than the others (early sign of failure maybe), and I think I can lower temps by using a coarser mesh on the side filter.
I am going to break out a Blu-Ray burner using an eSATAp bracket.
Software wise, this build has been the easiest ever, the only minor issue I had was the PCI bus throwing a few harmless errors (think it's a NVIDIA driver issue) but they were suppressed using the pci=nommconf boot option. Also had some issues rebooting with NetworkManager running, but that's mostly for Wifi, so I disabled it.
I may try port aggregation as the array is faster than the gigabit NIC at the moment.

The ZFS array looks like this:

Code:

    NAME      STATE    READ WRITE CKSUM
    data                 ONLINE      0    0    0
      raidz2-0             ONLINE      0    0    0
        scsi-35000...       ONLINE      0    0    0
        scsi-35000...       ONLINE      0    0    0
        scsi-35000...       ONLINE      0    0    0
        scsi-35000...       ONLINE      0    0    0
        ata-Hitachi_HD...    ONLINE      0    0    0
        ata-Hitachi_HD...    ONLINE      0    0    0
        ata-Hitachi_HD...    ONLINE      0    0    0
        ata-Hitachi_HU...    ONLINE      0    0    0
    logs
      scsi-SATA_MK...-part6  ONLINE      0    0    0
    cache
      scsi-SATA_MK...-part7  ONLINE      0    0    0

Photos attached