Converting rack server for home storage

porina · February 29, 2020

TLDR:

What options are there for a quiet/silent PSU to fit a 3U server case? ATX does not fit (but it does use ATX mobo connectors). Needs 6 molex connectors, ATX 24 pin and 8 pin. bunch of SATA would be nice too.
What options are there for an 8 port-ish SATA card? Dumb ports best. No hardware raid.

I saw a free 3U rack mount server, and seeing it had 10 3.5" drive bays I grabbed it. Now starts the process of converting it in a way to make it usable at home. Photo above is work in progress, and I need some thought on how to progress at this point.

The original server hardware is pretty ancient, with some AMD CPU and DDR2 ram on it. Out that came, and in went a Xeon with ECC ram. I swapped some heatsinks around, and the Noctua pictured is a perfect fit for this 3U case.

Firing it up the first time, I was greeted by a loud beeping noise. Turns out the board bottom right of photo is a fan controller of some sort, and it wasn't happy I disconnected a bar with 4 fans on it which goes in the middle of the server. I'll put it back in later (maybe with different fans) so I just disconnected the controller for now.

The PSU is also very noisy. The connectors are ATX at least. Here you can see I got a regular ATX form factor unit in place while I test the mobo installation. ATX PSUs will not fit in here, and I do want to replace the PSU. So, what home environment friendly (quiet/silent) options are there that fit in a 3U server case? I guess I could look at one of the smaller sizes than ATX, or is there such a thing as a quiet server PSU? There must be some niche out there for them. I have no idea if there is a standard size for server PSUs or do they each do their own thing? The mobo only needs the standard ATX 24 and 8 pin connectors. The front drive area is powered by molex, not SATA, although it does take SATA drives on the other side. So the PSU would need at least 6 molex connectors. Might be interesting on a modern unit as I think most have gone towards SATA.

And finally, I need some way to feed the 10 drive bays which I may fill up over time. The mobo itself has 6 SATA ports, one taken up with an OS SSD for now (might change to NVMe or USB later). I got a spare SATA card adding another 2 ports. I probably want to replace that with say an 8 port card? Haven't look for one yet.