For the past few days I’ve been hard at work selecting parts, ordering and building a new storage server for work – the results of which can be seen below.
Read on for a full list of parts.
Case – X-Case RM 206 HS – A custom 2U chassis that allows you to use almost any standard ATX power supply of your choice, it sits to the side of the hard drives.
The rest of the hardware components came from Novatech.
Processor – AMD Phenom II 840 X4 – Most AMD based servers would have a Opteron processor inside however in this case we went for consumer class hardware and as such the best possible is the Phenom series. Windows Server 2008 R2 (which we will be running on this server) can take advantage of this processing power to speed up the transfer of files over the network.
Power Supply – OCZ ZS 550W – I must say I was a tad worried about the CPU power cable not being long enough to reach the motherboard but all the same it got there with no issues.
Hard Drives – Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green – Capacity not speed is the requirement of this server – these basic 2TB SATA drives do just that at a very low cost.
Motherboard – Asus M5A87 – Using the AM3+ 870 platform this motherboard allows for RAID5 and 6Gb/s SATA ports. Just remember you are going to need extra SATA cables as (anyone would expect) this motherboard only comes with 2 cables.
RAM – Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB RAM – With the height of the cooler I went for instead of using the A DIMM channel on the motherboard I had to opt for the B DIMM channel to put the sticks in instead – just a point to note to make sure your motherboard supports this as well.
CPU Cooler – Coolermaster GeminII M4 – Our server room has air conditioning but all the same decent cooling in a server is vital as it will be on 24/7. This cooler is about the only one I could find that I could be 100% sure that it would fit in such a low height case.
Thumbs up if this article helped you 🙂 Inside a new Storage Server,
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