Home (sleeper) server rebuild... out of necessity.

[manikyath]

So.. first some history:

This thing started out as an acer prebuilt desktop. i've bought it when my main desktop was starting to seriously fall behind, and i needed a quick solution.

It's life as a desktop was not too long lived, and it was phased out maybe a year and a half later, and found its new purpose as my "home server".

 

All in all, this will be the fifth "reincarnation" of this box, and the second major rebuild.

Fact is, the case is staying, because as long as it's the same case, i do not need to defend it's purpose, as the entire household is 'used' to its presence.

 

the primary reason for this thread.. is forcing myself to *not* half-ass the rebuild for once.

 

the before of this rebuild, starting out with the exterior:

 

 

One endless frustration.. is the upside down power supply.. which is just a result of the case design, and also the first indication this prebuilt has had a weird life...

 

The 'before' parts list:

- the original case of the prebuilts, its already missing some parts here and there that were in the way, but from the outside is essentially original.

- the original corei7-4770

- noctua NH-D9L cpu cooler, that replaced the original coolermaster 'block of aluminium with a fan'.

- asus B85M-E motherboard, that replaced the acer OEM board when the pcie slot decided to crap the bed.

- 4x8GB corsair vengeance, totaling 32GB DDR3-1600

- mushkin triactor 480GB SSD as boot drive, which is showing signs of wear, so it's time for change.

- the original DVD drive.

- some noctua fans

- a refurbished HP 4-port gigabit ethernet card, with a radial fan taped to the front.

- a seasonic prime titanium 650 watt power supply, because overkill

- 4 WD Red 3TB hard drives, in a linux software raid5 array, which has been lacking in reliability.

 

Including, a picture of the crammed interior:

 

The upgrade list:

- a HighPoint RocketRAID 2840A raid card

- a new boot SSD, staying on the cheapskate course upgrading from a mushkin triactor to a kingston A400 240GB.

- 4 extra kingston A400 240GB SSD's, to be put in a RAID0 array for blazing fast active data.. on a platform that doesnt do nvme storage.

- some customized cables, bits and parts, and a ridiculous plan.

 

The ridiculous plan:

Writing this on a saturday evening, i've got the next week off, and the plan is to have this thing completed before the end of my week off.

 

topics to be touched on during the rebuild:

hardware:

- the rebuild itself, obviously, because it needs some prettying up.

- the ugly plastic bodge keeping the DVD drive in place.

- the upside down power supply.

- the RAID card, and propper cooling for said card.

- cable management, and most likely partially custom wiring.

- a slimmer front fan, so there's a touch more space between the drives and the PCIE cards.

- more pretty. not 'average gaming build on the forums with RGB' pretty, but an understated clean pretty.

software:

- a reinstall of the OS, for now xubuntu is staying, but the SSD needs to go, and the install has gotten rather messy over time.

- AUTOMATIC backups this time.. i havent fixed my backup scheduling since i got the 4x 3TB drives

- replacing the "every share is mapped/forced to a single user" system with actual account/user management.

- propper instancing of the game servers i run on this thing, including implementing minecraft servers as a system service.

- probably some more shit will come up along the way.

 

Some numbers, and the first update: "Day 0":

my SSD's and the fans will arrive on monday, but there's already things to be done.

i've taken two backups of my storage array, the plan is not to restore from these backups, but to create a new folder structure and migrate things into that folder structure.

did some "initial" performance testing using gnome's builtin disk benchmarking utility, all tests in this thread will be done on the same settings:

100 samples of 10MiB, and 1000 random access samples.

old SSD results:

Read: 476MB/s

Write: 404MB/s

access time: 0.03ms

old software raid array:

Read: 216MB/s

Write: 24MB/s

access time: 16.62ms

hardware raid with the 4x 3TB drives: (the array is still initializing, so these numbers are in a less than ideal scenario)

Read: 205MB/s

Write: 65MB/s

access time: 19.66ms

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

Fact is, the case is staying, because as long as it's the same case, i do not need to defend it's purpose, as the entire household is 'used' to its presence.

I mean, the smell just wouldn't be right otherwise

[Drama Lama]

Oh a firesafer PSU great 

[manikyath]

10 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Oh a firesafer PSU great 

a what now?

[Theguywhobea]

Nice, I love these types of builds.

[FloRolf]

15 minutes ago, manikyath said:

a what now?

I guess he meant to say Firestarter but I don't think the seasonic prime titanium is anything like that. 

 

I wonder though, why is the position such an issue for you? My main PC has it on top as well and I don't see any issues with it. 

 

35 minutes ago, manikyath said:

One endless frustration.. is the upside down power supply.. which is just a result of the case design, and also the first indication this prebuilt has had a weird life...

 

[manikyath]

Just now, FloRolf said:

I guess he meant to say Firestarter but I don't think the seasonic prime is anything like that. 

 

I wonder though, why is the position such an issue for you? My main PC has it on top as well and I don't see any issues with it. 

the logo on the back is upside down

[manikyath]

First custom part is ready to load up on the 3D printer, it's gonna be a thing for tomorrow however, because it's 11:45PM, and it's a 3+ hour print..

the plan is to replace the bracket for the optical drive bay with a 3D printed piece, and finish it in aluminium tape to create a metal finish.

[Drama Lama]

11 hours ago, manikyath said:

a what now?

a PSU that won’t burn the house

[manikyath]

so.. with a few attempts my 3D printer is smudging out the optical drive bracket..

 

in the meantime, the first crige part has been done: i've bolted a noiseblocker fan to the RAID card, and soldered it onto the pcie connector:

 

the reason i went noiseblocker.. is because it's what i had on hand.

i've got a few options of 40mm fans, but they're all rather noisy at 100% speed, and didnt quite do enough cooling if tapping off of the rear case fan's header.

BUT... at some point i bought a 50mm noiseblocker fan, because someone claimed they're better than noctua.. i tried, and was disappointed. not with noise level, but with the fact the noiseblockers at full tilt barely move any air. as a result, it ended up in my box of spare fans.. but it's a perfect choice for a place where i literally only have +12v to tap into.

 

that said.. it's still the loudest part of the system when the disks are idle.

[manikyath]

Before: messy cables, clean desk
After: clean cables, messy desk.

 

the total picture is starting to look very well, the optical drive bracket is done too. aluminium tape didnt turn out well, so i went for a wood pattern wrap;

 

i'm gonna keep the ketchup & mustard power cable, but i may end up sleeving it.

[manikyath]

my SSD's came in... there's something morally wrong about striping 4 cheap SSD's.. hot dayum the speed results...

 

 

same settings as before:

read: 2.0GB/s

write: 1.9GB/s

access time: 0.3ms

 

because the benchmark completed instantly anyways i've tried something else, to really dig into where SSD's shine: 

10000 samples of 1MB, 10000 random access samples:

read: 1.8GB/s

write: 1.7GB/s

access time: 0.3ms

[manikyath]

Two more pieces of bodge while the SSD bracket is rolling off the 3D printer:

 

modified the network card in a similar way to the raid card, to run the fan off of pci-e power.

in this case, it's with 2x 75 ohm resistors in between so the fan doesnt run at full tilt:

 

modified the HDD LED that is built into the front panel, because i've always hated that one cable that's in the way.

solution: made some pressure contacts with aluminium tape, so the front panel can come off without cable clutter.

bonus about this is that this allowed me to sleeve the entire front panel cable in one section:

 

past that, the parts list should be complete for 'final' assembly now:

[manikyath]

Things are coming together...

 

shot with the sound dampening, fans, power supply, and a 3D printed bracket to hold the hard drives.

 

then with everyting except the hard drives and SSD array (the SSD bracket is still printing..), most of the cable management out the way:

 

Few details i want to add:

The hard drives mount with these phanteks brackets, the 3D printed base plate is basicly a copy of the mounting holes on the top side of the bracket, held in place in the case with a royal amount of double sided tape.

i've been on the look for two more, but it seems like phanteks doesnt make them anymore, and they've gone sold out everywhere.

 

on the topic of sold out everywhere.. i've replaced my bright colorful SATA cables with those ultra slim sata cables from silverstone, and it looks like supply of those is about as thin as the cables themselves, because i called the webshop to ask how many THEIR SUPPLIER had in stock, and between the blue 30cm ones, the black 30cm ones, and the black 50cm ones.. they had a total of 5 pieces.

 

because google chrome is arse.. this post appareantly didnt post.. so the "everything is squeezed inside" shot is along in the same update.

the SSD holder is still taped up because glue needs to dry, but in essence it's all set:

 

amazingly, the little sound dampening i managed to squeeze inside, is helping a lot for noise, its cutting a lot of the annoying 'fan motor' noises out, most of the remaining noise is wind being squeezed trough the chassis.

[manikyath]

so.. it's been a few late evenings trying to figure out systemd services, samba configuration, and restoring data from my backup disk..

 

IN CONCLUSION...

- i've made a systemd service that allows me to treat anything that'll run in a terminal as a service. this includes most game servers, my discord bot, etc. this means auto shutdown and startup along with the OS, start/stopping game servers easily, etc. best part: i called it "saucer" for no good reason, other than it sounds funny.

- the hardware work is essentially done.

- the RAID5 array is technically still initializing.. DEAR GOD THIS TAKES ONE ETERNITY...

- my samba shares now have actual password security.

- i have done 3 hours of hard labour to shove two ethernet cables trough a single cable guide, so i'll be able to make better use of the faster storage.

- i've essentially concluded that this will be "the final form". adding hardware in this chassis is essentially impossible at this point. besides the chassis constraints, configuring virtualbox also reminded me that it's *only* a quad core.. which is a bit 'average' at this point.. especially given the amount of tasks this thing is set up to handle.

 

So... some final hardware shots are in order

the outside remains its plain self, i did take the opportunity to clean off some of the warranty labels, and since i had some vinyl scraps laying around from the DVD bracket, i've prettied up the I/O shield.

 

inside's crowded.. i suppose i could add one more pcie card by running the raid card on a riser cable.. and i suppose there's room for 8 more 2.5" drives in the little corners of the system...

 

so yeah.. ready to serve a few more years... i promise the next home server build will have some RGB.