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Mod a Case With Me......... LOTS OF PICS

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Well I finally did it, I surpased the hard drive and fans to power supply ratio. When I reboot the rig, I have to unplug the fan controller until the machine has totally booted.

If I dont my newest 80gig drive wont show up.

Looks like I need to find a good 400w PSU to run this rig now.
 
I have to weigh function, vs need vs price.

This rig started out as a $50 spare junk rig to put a simple 2gig os drive and a 4 gig web files drive to host web pages using an old P120mhz cpu. It has changed over 4 motherboards and now has its 1800+ AMD, with a total of 6 hard drives hosting, music, movies, tv shows, and web pages. The case was at first an old AT 12" case. If money was not an object I would toss in a 550w Antec True Control or Neopower. I am trying not to buy new parts just install hand me downs from the other computers in the house. We have an old Antec 400 SL in an AMD 3200+ rig that should be upgraded.
 
somewhat of a thread resurrection, but if you're still wondering how to hook all the harddrive leds up, all you need to do is splice the positve of the led to pin 39 of the harddrive you want monitored, and the negative to ground.
 
Hmm, I might just have to bring this rig to the front for attention now. It got the new MB and CPU and RAM, and a total of 6 or is it 7 working hard drives now. Got a new PSU and some cooling tweeks. Then pushed to the corner with a cat5 cable running to it and just left to run its daily chores of getting me new torrents and sending out all my web traffic.

The way the box is sitting I cant see the front panel of the rig, but I can see the side panel and see the rear of the HD's. I might just do that put LED's on the back of the HD's so I can see which one is being accessed.

Which pin is 39.

Thanks for th heads up.
 
with a 40 pin cable, pin 39 is the second to the leftmost on the cable, and the top left on the drive (viewing drive from rear)
on an 80 pin cable (prolly what you have), it is the third to leftmost on the cable, and still the top left on the harddrive. (still viewing from the rear)

The drives are usually numbered if you look closely, and the cable usually has pin 1 red instead of gray on a normal ATA Ribbon, on my rounded cables there is no way to tell by color.

I've heard this doesnt work for optical drives, only harddrives, but if you wanted to do an optical drive, you could just solder onto the activity light.
 
Sorry no photo updates, but to update this thread,

Server has now been running over 12 months with a single Sparkle/Fortron 400 powering all 6 hard drives and the FX5600 card as well as the 1900+ AMD Chip. I just added a second 512mb stick of ram to bring it up to a nice gig.

However I tried to add a 7th hard drive and the machine refused to boot. So I am guessing that the PSU is at its limits.

Trying to decide, mod the back plate and add a 2nd cheapie PSU or just buy a single larger unit.


Aside from that, the machine is running AWESOME. Runs 24/7 doing my bittorrent bidding. I upset my ISP a couple of times going over 100gig per month in data transfers, my limit is suppose to be 50 gig. However all I got was a warning. The guy said off the record keep it under 100 and they won't say anything, but over 100 they start sending out warming notices.

I never did wire up the LED's to the drives, as I got so taken up in my car hobby. (just put a V8 in my Fiero) However winter is on its way so the car will be garaged for a bit and I can play with computers again.
 
I hope those LED fans arent the ones I had. They were jet engines that didnt push any air :p. keep up the good work and stash me one of those cases (if you can) :)
 
Went on a bit of a bing for storage on the server.

Just added

2, 200gig Maxtors and a 300 gig Maxtor DM 10 16mb cach drive.

An extra 700 gig should help for a while. Formated I think I got 600 out of it, plus the other 250 or so worth of drives in there makes a total of 865gig across 8 yes 8 hard drives in the machine.

Smalles drive is 30gig largest is 300gig.

newgigs.jpg I will post up some new pics later on.
 
^&*^(*&&*( ^*&(*&&(* ^*&(*&(*

I was all happy today, everything was great, 860 gig of super sweet storage.

Then I was about to start putting everything all back together and I went to reboot and I smelled that nasty burning smell the one that makes every geek cringe in horror, worse than the smell of evil itself. The machine went to reboot and then a boot error. I thought crap there goes the PSU.

Then I got in a bit closer and it was the OS drive. I have been using an old slim drive 30gig as the OS and it fried itself. No warning no nothing POOOOOOF.

So I am at this moment formating an old 40gig storage drive that use to be a music storage drive as my new OS drive. The worst part is I can't find a backup copy of my Apache config file anywhere. It took me months to prefect that file.

Well I am going to get back to work on it. See ya all when the dust clears.

P.S. if you had not guessed it yet......... the pics are hosted on the same server.
 
It got messy just sitting. Been running in the corner for a long time, and over the time the only reason to open the case was to add or swap a drive and at the time I was not caring about making it look pretty I just wanted to update or upgrade the parts as quickly as possible to keep the uptime as high as possible now the rig has fallen to a mess, but I just want to get it running straight. I have to keep rebooting over and over again to get all the stuff right at the moment I am going nutszoid over it.
 
Yeah the way the case looks reflects that really well. Anyways good work man, and good luck in the future!
 
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