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Homebuilt 19" Mini-ITX Server Rack

Posted by timothy on from the mother-of-invention dept.

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."

4 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Cool, but... by drivinghighway61 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Cool, but... by spagetti_code · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps - depends on the application.

      If its IO bound, these may function just fine. Given they run cool (low cooling requirements), quiet and with low power usage, they may provide a good mips-per-operating-$$. They are not that cheap on a $/mips from a capex point of view though.

    2. Re:Cool, but... by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're fine, even ideal for home server usage. If you don't need the CPU power anyway (and honestly an athlon XP 2000+ is way overkill for most home servers) the power savings are nice. A file server doesn't need more than a crappy CPU and some good SCSI/SATA cards. This is especially true because the server will likely be on 24/7.

  2. But what did it cost? by matthew.thompson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.