It’s going to be a sad day, but it is coming soon – my trusty Windows Home Server is soon to be retired in favour of the new shiny soon-to-be-released Windows Home Server 2 (or “Vail” as it is known at the moment). My little Dell Optiplex is not up to the task of running the new 64-bit only server Operating System so unfortunately that means new server hardware. As you of course all remember, I recently installed a data cabinet in my garage so the obvious choice for a new case is the Compucase S400-J04 – a 4U rack mountable chassis which can take a standard ATX motherboard. Not only this, but due to its height, it can accommodate as many PCI/PCI-X expansion cards as your motherboard can take, a standard ATX power supply, four 3.5” hard drives (or three + one external bay), three 5.25” drives, or one 5.25” and three hot-swappable drives (if you have an optional caddy). It also includes four internal fans, each with 3-pin motherboard connectors and Molex power supplies to be fully flexible, 2x front USB ports and a lockable door. BUT…. those are not the main selling points. The reason this chassis is the best out there for me is due to it’s ultra compact depth – it measures in at 410mm deep. This is an absolutely perfect depth and when racked up in my 550mm deep cabinet it exactly fits front to back with a few mm spare at the front for the door, and enough at the back for the power cable.
This is the server before I started playing with it:
I then loaded it with the left-over components from my last PC upgrade, including an Asus P5B motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, an NVidia something-or-other-nothing-special PCI-X graphics card and 4GB RAM.
Finally I hunted around my boxes of bits in the garage and found an old DVD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and an old 80GB IDE hard drive (well, I found three of these for some reason) and bunged them in for good measure. Once completed, I plan to put at least one new 2TB SATA drive in, but for playing around with at the moment I threw in whatever I had lying around.
Now the observant amongst you may notice one critical missing component. Got it yet? Riiiight, the power supply. Well I don’t have a spare one of these to hand and will have to purchase one later in the year. I only got the case early because I wanted to make sure that I had one. The dimensions were so perfectly matched for my cabinet that had I not been able to get hold of one when the new server operating system is released later this year I’d have been eternally miffed. So, to do: 1x power supply, 1x 2TB SATA drive, 1x custom made laminated sticker to put on the front, then wait for Windows Home Server 2… install, play, test, migrate.
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Tags: Compucase, Gadgets, New Server, Windows Home Server
