Let's start by looking
at the two options we have for rackmount enclosures.
These are both 4U units, and 4U was chosen because
of low cost and size restrictions. First, here
is the Akiwa GHI-480:
Between the two cases, you can see
there is a tradeoff between quality and quantity.
We feel that the low cost of the Norco case puts it
at even par with the Orca-16. So either way
you've made a good choice. It really just
depends on how many drives you need, and whether
dual-port SAS is critical to your application.
For us, we needed the 20-drive capacity more, so we
had to live with some of the shortcomings of the
Norco case. For one thing, the drive bays are
super tight. We had to lube each one with
lithium grease to ease installation.
Next is the motherboard. We
opted for the MSI K9N2GM which has the nVidia 8200M
chipset and built-in firewire:
Our CPU choice was AMD's Athlon 1660B, a 2.8GHz
single-core processor with the ability to throttle
down to 1GHz. At around 10 watts or less, this
CPU offers ultra-low power consumption when idle,
can be reduced even further with software such as
RMclock. 1GHz is plenty for a server not doing
much, but has the ability to shift to high gear at
2.8GHz when needed.
Cooling the 1660B, we have the Thermalright SI-128SE, probably the best-performing
heatsink which can fit in a 4U enclosure. It
comes with a multitude of mounting hardware,
allowing you to use the same unit on a 775 system as
well. Notice how its design specifically
addresses clearance issues with the memory sticks.
Speaking of memory, we chose
Kingston's HyperX modules for great stability, and
lifetime warranty. Power consumption of memory
modules is not easy to measure or determine from
data sheets, so we figured that we'd let the power
requirement slide this time. You can actually
save power by using only one DIMM as well, but it is
not clear if one 2GB DIMM uses less power than 2x
1GB DIMMs, which also have the advantage due to
dual-channel performance.
Our SATA RAID card is
the monstrous Areca ARC-1261ML, good enough for 16x
SATA HDDs. The remaining 4 drives will be SAS,
and its controller is the Promise TX4650.
However, if we decided to replace those four SAS
drives with SATA units, we can remove the TX4650 and
plug in those 4 drives into the motherboard SATA
connectors.
ARC-1261ML on the left, and the Promise TX4650 on
the right
One thing we did to upgrade the
ARC-1261ML is boost its cache to 2GB using a
SimpleTech DDR2 DIMM:
As for HDDs, our 20x
data HDDs would ideally be Western Digital's Green
Power 1TB RAID Edition drives. But since we
don't have them, we had to use a mish-mash of drives
from various manufacturers. These have
definitely the advantage of low power consumption
without too much loss of performance.
Our choice of boot HDD is one with
low power consumption, and has to fit somewhere in
the chassis other than the already occupied hot-swap
drive bays. We decided on a 2.5" notebook
drive. Although not super fast, its consumes
very little power, and can be cleverly mounted in
the case through grills or other holes. Our
choice is the Hitachi 5K500. Being 12.5mm
tall, we knew it would not be of any use to nearly
all notebook users, so it can be effectively
implemented here.
Powering this beast is a
CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 850W power supply.
This handsome unit is one of the most efficient
we've seen, and delivers clean, quiet power:'
Now for the tuner - the
HD Homerun. This amazing device has two tuners
capable of tuning into ATSC or clear-QAM signals,
and outputs the digital feed over a 10/100 Ethernet
connection. And because it has BDA drivers,
recording clear-QAM channels is as any other antenna
or analog cable channel. Yes, it's not technically part of
the server, but logically, it is.
There are two coax antenna inputs - you can connect
both to the same cable feed through a splitter, or
one to an antenna for ATSC broadcasts
