Finalising the hardware design.
So, in the meantime, the servers hardware setup is finished. I placed the motherboard on an aluminium rail on one side and a aluminium sheet on the other side, that serve as adapter to some of the existing mounting points on the G3 door. You can see the rail on the first pic, you also see more unused mounting points on the left, as the original board is much bigger.
In the back you see the only fan in this computer, a 120mm housing fan. I am using a „be quiet! Silent Wings 2“, I have had good experience with that in the past. The max. rpm of the fan is 1500, but it’s controlled from the motherboard and runs smoothly at 1000rpm, making almost no sound.
What does make sound, are the three hard drives, and I am astonished how much. Maybe this is due to the design of the housing, the metal sheets taking heat from the drives may also transport and amplify the sound of the spinning disks.
Here you can see the aluminium back plate I made for the boards connectors. In contrary to the former bunch of boxes, power supplies and connecting cables, this is a really clean solution now – only 3 cables going in. Power and network, and the third one is an eSATA connection for an external driving I use to back up the media disk once a week.
I am not so happy with the power supply just hanging loosely in the servers housing, but thats something to optimise later on. Next, lets concentrate on the software setup. Remember the small USB thumb drive you see in this picture 😉