Slashdot Mirror
Homebuilt 19" Mini-ITX Server Rack
TykSak writes "I started to build this rack with Mini-ITX boards almost 3 years ago and today it holds four 3U servers with a total of 28 harddrives. I made this site to describe the process of the build."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
TOTAL SPACE:
4643Gb > 4.53 Tera bytes (28 Harddrives)
This is pretty useless. The mini-itx chipsets aren't really appropriate for server usage, especially considering the weak VIA processors and the high prices for the boards. I'd much rather just set up a couple of AMD boxes for the price.
4 comments and already crawling. Guess we've melted a few of those hard drives then.
Wow that's soo cool having a server farm right beside where I sit. :)
What does your Credit Report look like?
"This is pretty useless. The mini-itx chipsets aren't really appropriate for server usage, especially considering the weak VIA processors and the high prices for the boards. I'd much rather just set up a couple of AMD boxes for the price." - drivinghighway61
;). On the site:
I don't think this was designed for power
"I think the idea of having a 19" rack at home is every techs dream. This was also the case when I wanted to decomission my power hungry and space consuming server PCs and replace them with a 19" rack, but it seems that when ever the frase "19 inch" is added to any PC part the price skyrockets. "
One after the other, we see people stuff a bunch of hard drives in a box, and end up with X Terrabytes of storage space. Impressive, no more than the individual drives manufactured that allow someone to shove a bunch in a box and multiply X Gigs to get X Terras.
.. I guess we melted the Mini ITX boards he was hosting this on!
Seriously, why does crap like this always get modded funny? I guess I must be new here.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Still looks quite nice though.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This sweet and economical rack was built in september of 2003. The project's worklog shows that the only changes have been swapping hard drives since then. It looks like a great file/web server. It's just not that topical. I'm waiting for a water-cooled Beowulf cluster...now that would be something.
per TFA, it looks like floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
At my house, I have a small box as a household/internet server. I am using the mini-itx/via. In addition, it has a gig. ram, and 4 hard disks (a 40G for the system/swap, and 3 samsungs 160G for data). This set-up is located in a very small networking closet, with minimal ventalation. The system is quiet, and produces just a little heat. Had this been an AMD, there would be a lot of heat and a lot of power consumption.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
thanks.. i would've looked around a little harder but it seems we've brought this homebrew server to it's knees.
It's nice building stuff on your own but this sort of hardware doesn't cut it when you're talking about servers, and I suspect with all the manpower the cost-per-server is actually *more* than if you'd bought it in its entirety.
Places like Sight Systems will quite happily spray-paint a case for you or even etch a logo into it, and the 2U cases they do will happily house reasonably cheap P4 boards (they even do fans for them).
Plus, 4U cases which take standard ATX PSUs are now less than £100 in the UK (you get to do the math if you don't live in the UK). Quite why "bloke makes a rackmount server using rackmount bits" makes Slashdot I don't know.
Oh well. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Smegma.
Yeah, all the noise from 28 harddrives will save you a radio, which you can not hear anyway, and a heater, as they will keep the room warm all year around.
.... why nut buy them big half-tera drives?
who needs the sound of 28whiners when it can be done with 9.
A little foreword
I think the idea of having a 19" rack at home is every techs dream. This was also the case when I wanted to decomission my power hungry and space consuming server PCs and replace them with a 19" rack, but it seems that when ever the frase "19 inch" is added to any PC part the price skyrockets.
That was the end of my dream until a friend told me he was going to build a new 19" rack for his music equipment as his old rack was getting to small. So we looked into it and discovered it used the same dimensions as the PC racks.
Goals of the project:
* Low cost
* Space saving
* Low power consumption
* High disk space
* RAID1 space for importent data
I chose Mini ITX motherboards with their size (170mm x 170mm) and low power consumption they were perfect for this project. I only needed to buy extra controller cards for the extra harddrives everything else was onboard (NIC/GFX).
A little info!
A "U" is the measured height of a server case
1U is 44.45mm (1.75inches)
19 inches is 482,6mm
Oh, and yes, a counter on the bottom spinning while the server bursts into flame.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
As everyone is melting the servers..
http://rack.modzone.dk.nyud.net:8090/
Seriously if this was - Man makes own Blade server using Mini-ITX motherboards that would be damn impressive.
Imagine having a home cluster in a really small space with hot-pluggable units.
But this is just Man makes 4 PCs and puts hard drives in them - and spends more than if he'd bought the units anyway.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Sure, you can get a better solution for storage, but the performance will probably be better with more drives
I wouldn't want to be within 100 yards of this vacuum cleaner.
Why is this something to post about... measureing 19" is not that hard.... Hell i do it on a daily basis as i work in Pro audio/lighting.
t ml
What would have been simpler to me is to just by a Mid-atlantic rack, get the shelving unit (U1 or U3).
Find a computer case thats 19" tall. Throw it on its side. screw it to the shelf and then mount it in the case.
Also could have gotten some 19" blanks and lined the back with fans/outtakes, put an AC Plug on there. along with RJ45 jack that goes to the switch. so it looks cleaner with less wires hanging out.
http://www.rit.edu/~ajw8557/computer/rack/index.h
I think these guys did a much cooler job making one that this dude.... at least they did it with an old fridge!
Nice rack!
Thanks, I'll be here all week...
"I think the idea of having a 19" rack at home is every techs dream."
Know what I mean, know what I mean? Say no more! Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Is she a . . . goer?
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
He lists his e-mail as 19inch@gamil.com - I would have thought that the pr0n guys would have been using that already?
</snarky>
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=915364&p age=1&pp=40
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
My question is what is he serving with that much storage space? After reading TFA, I didn't what he is using his servers for.
I bet one thing, his prOn selection on the fileserver is TOP NOTCH!
Anyway, the web server is melting :) I have coralized it
"A little info! A "U" is the measured height of a server case 1U is 44.45mm (1.75inches) 19 inches is 482,6mm"
Actually, the historical roots of the U are traced back to Bonnie Scotland. The U was the designation of how many sheep could be stuffed into the small slot of a server rack. The server rack would then be set afire as the rack doubled as a barbecue on the weekends. (This is where Al Gore studied the creation of the internet incidentally) The phrase "rack of ribs" was also coined in Bonnie Scotland during the infamous "Troy McLure Cuefest of '79" (1879) during a rendition of "Laddie, fetch me ha'notharack o them ribs" performed by, who else, The Scotsmen.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Happy Hacking keyboard! I saw that and I was impressed, but then again I'm running a 900Mhz Duron, Yeah baby!!!
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Because clearly, he doesn't realize that he cut the life of his hard drives by 75% by stacking them 4 or more in a stack with NO space between them. That and the box seems to be made of wood. I don't know about Denmark, but in North America it wouldn't be too difficult for him to get nailed with an electrical violation.
Via mobos only have 2 ide chains = 4 drives max. And one PCI slot (although you *can* run two cards on it). How does he get 8 drives onto some of these things?
Jesus christ. 4.53 terabytes and 500 watts power draw. What one person could possibly use that much space as of today? And I wonder how much his electric bill is ... doubtless at least $300/month
Ads? What ads?
As he has used VIAs I can only imagine the throughput and CPU power are not a serious priority. So just get one of those s754 boards with lots of PCI slots and room for 6 drives off the board. Add 4 dual channel IDE cards = 22 drives. Hell you could even just strap on a load of USB2 external drives.
/. material this is not.
Big deal.
Mini-ITX boards drive the Internet Archive, for instance:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/22/ 0418253&tid=198&tid=126&tid=137&tid=106
But lets face it, your e-penis is going to be four times larger with 28 disks.
After working on this project on and off for over 2 years I'm quite happy and that I finally finished it
Especially since - in those two years - the cost of rack systems has fallen into your price range.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Actually my maths was rather bad there, 9 * 4 != 28, but the point still stands.
Because that sure is a nice rack !
It depends on what you mean by "performance", doesn't it?
We have a database server that is limited by seek speed. For us, splitting our databases and adding more disks is the way forward (until we hit the next bottleneck). So in this case, yes adding more drives equals more performance.
But, if by performance you mean "throughput", then you are correct that adding more drives will help - to a point. At some point your controller won't be able to keep up with all those drives, and adding more will actually give you no additional benefit.
For instance, the Maxtor Atlas 15K II has a top transfer rate of over 90 Mbyte/sec. Even the highest-speed SCSI interface only has a throughput of 320 Mbyte/sec.
Racks are cheap - a brand new Chatsworth telecom rack (just 2 rails - you know, what you put switches and routers in) goes for less than $150. A four rail rack is a bit more expensive but not that much more, and those prices are the result of a quick search. Which of course means you could easily find them cheaper elsewhere.
The harder part of setting up a rack for servers is proper airflow. Servers are designed to be cooled in a specific way, usually front to back. But there are exceptions to that. If you have some older Sun servers, be warned, they cool side to side, and putting them in a rack with sides on it will cause them to start loosing processors.
Back to normal servers. When you put a rack into a server room full of gear, you generally want to have it setup to provide cold airflow down (or up) the front of the rack so that the servers can pull cool air through the gear. Then you want to pull the hot air out the back of the gear. In data centers or server rooms you set this up as a cold aisle and a hot aisle.
As for this guys gear, it probably won't over heat (though I'd be worried about how he stacked the drives) simply because most small form factor desktop machines no longer put out enough heat to make it an issue.
Hell, I have been building my own rack cases for music gear, computer DAW's and such for years, It's quite simple and typically the home build case can be built heavier and stronger, you can drill and mount fans wherever you want...
My last was a full desk with rackmount cases on both sides made out of beautifully stained wood with a granite top...
Most rack mount gear whether it be for music gear, computer racks, industrial equipment or whatever is all 19", it 's not an IT standard, it's pretty much a global standard...
dB Masters
19" rack for servers - $3000.
1 U server - $1500 (nicely equiped).
1 Disk drive (of many) for 4 terrabyte server - $200.
Weeks to load with content - 5.
Look at admin's face when a new 4 TB software raid fails - Priceless.
If you dont know what your doing you could reverse it and fry the drives
Some pretty simple cutting for the corner bezels and he gets it wrong...
FTA: "I had some problems with the angles on them but that was covered by the bubble corners anyway"
Dude, its just 45 degrees lol. How could he get that so wrong?
Those hard drives look like they could fry at any moment. He has them in tight stacks of 4.
Until a year later when you have a single 2U server hanging in a 42U cabinet....
Anyone wanna buy a 42U Dell Rack?
Shipping cost is murder though.
-- www.WhereHaveIBeen.com
Just had to do some googling after I read this. I was amazed to find that one can get a rack mount cases from $69. See here.
Holy shit.. that dude in the skirt just looks retarded. Seriously.. what's with this guy's fashion sense? He must be a Slashdotter. Perhaps he's even reading this post..
What is your penile percentile?
that looks kind of neat. How is the web interface coming along?
Looks nice, thats for sure, but even I have a 19" rack next to my desk at home! Nothing new to see here. And my rack systems can actually COMPUTE stuff. No wussy CPU's here. Granted the power bill sucks sometimes :)
http://www.auctionspice.com/myroom/
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Because in 2002 when he built the array you couldn't buy half-terra drives. Actually, you can't even buy them now. The biggest I see on the market are 400GB, or roughly 372GiB for those fluent in newspeak.
You can use more than one SCSI host adapter (they're not really controllers), you know. But then your PCI bus is going to be the bottleneck. Heck, even a 64 bit 66 MHz PCI bus can only move 533 MBps.
Actually, though, drives are constantly seeking; real world transfers are always bursty; so it's never as bad as the raw drive numbers indicate.
It is a well done piece of manufacturing. I am wonderinfg how the front panels were cut out so well. You can do that commercially at shops. but it takes time and a great deal of care to make such nice cuts with dremel. As for having a rack, well i've had a rack for a few years now http://www.furrystuff.com/~trapa/comp/gen-info.sht ml and http://www.furrystuff.com/~trapa/comp/pictures.sht ml for pictures if you really want to see it. Anyhow, rack mounts are not that expensive really. Rack computer cases are quite a bit more than the standard ones. But they also do quite a bit more.
He's got 5 mobos, 28 hdds and something like the equivalent of about 3633GHz of processing power. (yeah I know you can't just add them like that, especially when youve got 4 copies of windoze sucking the life out of your CPU, but still...)
All that for the power usage of a typical gaming system. 500W when all active, 235 with HDD spindown.
I run a via system for my PVR - loaded up its 72W at startup, and stabilizes to 30-40W when running. Equivalent to a dim bulb - very nice.
In soviet russia, electric violate you!
All that would have to happen for him to get an electrical violation would be..... for him to do something that is in violation? There aren't alot of laws, if any, telling you what you are allowed to plug into an outlet. Not there are codes for buildings, but that is a different story.
Thanks for talking out of your ass though, we all appriciate it.
it will cause them to start loosing processors
You cannot possible have meant this. A women can be loose. A bolt can be loose. The only way to be 'loosing a processor' is by pulling the ZIF socket bar. I think you were intending to use the verb 'losing' instead. Please be sure to use the correct word next time or there will be strict penalties for you.
p.s. If you feel you must construct a sentence with 4 or more commas, it is almost assuredly a run-on sentence.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Hehehe. Here is a link to my full rack built into a wall project. http://www.iliveinpublic.com/setup.htm/
Posting.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Technically, it's against electrical code to build electronics inside a wooden box, which is what that appears to be.
If you want a decent home storage server, get youself a nice AMD server board with a PCI-X slot, a Promise SX8 8-way SATA card, 8 identical HDDs, and use linux md software RAID5.
You idiot. Maybe if you tried to SELL it it won't be able to get UL approved. However, there is no 'electrical code' against putting electronics in a wooden box yourself. Until about 1989 most tv's were big wooden boxes that sat on the floor. Unless someone went around to everyone's grandma's house and rounded up all the old console tv's, we have an awful lot of violators. Not to mention old record players and radios. I don't recall RCA getting busted for the millions of wooden tv's they sold.
But once again, thank you for talking out of your ass, since you clearly have no idea what in the hell you're talking about.
Okay, I want you to do something and we'll see. Make a wooden box, toss in some circuit breakers, run 5 or 6 amps through it and invite an electrician over to approve it as a breaker box and let me know the results.
Listen Captain Stupid.
You get electricians to approve things which are PART OF A BUILDING. You don't get consumer electronics you build yourself and plug into an outlet approved.
Listen one more time! If it is inside the wall it has to be built to code, if it is plugged in to an outlet THEN NOT.
When you buy a new TV do you invite an electrician over to approve it as a breaker box? Dumbshit.
I never said he had to get his box approved. I did say that if it was checked out by an electrician, it would be considered an unsafe appliance. If you make modifications to your TV or any other device, or build a device like a server rack made of wood, and it catches on fire and it can be proven, then chances are you can kiss your insurance goodbye.
You ass. You said that in north america he could 'get nailed with an electrical code violation'. Now you're trying to say something different. First you say it is illegal to do it, now you say that it *might* not get your insurance money if something goes wrong.
You're one of those people with a pathological need to always be right, even when you're wrong. How's that working for you?