One of the primary functions of the server is to host my collection of DVDs/Blu-rays for streaming to a Windows Media Center PC. That said, I need a lot of disk space. It’s predecessor had 6.75TB of disk space; this one will have 16TB. Here’s the hardware list:
- Lian Li PC-A71F case
- Corsair CMPSU-750HX power supply
- Asus M4A78T-E motherboard
- AMD Phenom II X4 945 processor
- 4 2GB ECC DDR3 RAM
- Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i SATA controller
- 2 3ware CBL-SFF8087OCF-05M SFF-8087 to SATA cables
- 2 160GB Seagate 7200.12 hard drives
- 10 2TB Seagate hard drives (ST32000542AS)
- Intel EXPI9301CTBLK GigEthernet NIC
- Cooler Master STB-3T4-E3-GP 4-in-3 hard drive cage
- Sony DVD-ROM SATA drive
A few notes about the build:
- The case is awesome. Room for 10 hard drives in vibration-isolation mounts, completely tool-less, good cooling, and it looks cool.
- I added the Cooler Master cage so I could squeeze in two more drives. It has a cheesy blue LED fan. Fortunately the case has a front cover that hides it.
- Went with AMD since Intel doesn’t support ECC RAM with recent (consumer-level) processors.
- Newegg doesn’t know how to ship hard drives. The drives were simply wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap then dropped loosely in the box. 2 were DOA. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me with a Newegg order.
- The Supermicro SATA controller is intended to be an add-on module for their motherboards/systems. As such, it won’t fit into a standard case without some modification. Fortunately, all you need are a couple of plastic spacers from Home Depot.
Overall, there was nothing all that special about the build. I dropped in an OpenSolaris LiveCD and had the system up and running in minutes.
Thanks for the post! I’m putting together a storage box myself and I ordered that mobo without checking the compatibility beforehand. Now I’m relieved. What version liveCD did you use? I’m guessing 2009.06?
I used the build 127 live CD (which you can download here). The only reason I used this build instead of 2009.06 is because guest access to CIFS shares requires build 118 or later. If you don’t need this functionality, then 2009.06 should be fine.
One note about the motherboard: while researching, I saw some reports of problems with the onboard NIC. I didn’t try it out myself, so I can’t comment on whether there actually are problems, but I threw in the Intel NIC just to be safe.
Good luck!