Mini P180 Core i7-860 File Server

AznJason · Post by **AznJason** » Fri Jan 29, 2010 7:06 pm

This was an absolute pain to do, mostly because I decided to have a giant hardware RAID card and because I chose to do it with a mini P180. Anyways, here's the specs:

Antec Mini P180 (Black)
Intel Core i7-860 (Xigmatek HDT-S1283 w/ Nexus)
Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4
8 GB G.SKILL RipJaw Series
Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 512mb
Intel SRCSAS18E RAID card
320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black
6x1.5TB Seagate Hard Drive (RAID 5 + Hot Spare = 6 TB free space)
Samsung SH-S223L
Seasonic X-650

And here are the pics:

(No, there will be no pictures of the "cable management". Those blue SATA cables from the RAID card are 36" long or so I think. It's a mess back there, but I managed to close it with much pushing. I'm not about to open it up again.)

I've got Windows Server 2008 R2 running on it and I've set up everything for it to WOL. Time to do... something...

diver · Post by **diver** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 6:49 am

Nice build, but your photography needs a little work.

bonestonne · Post by **bonestonne** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 8:03 am

To help out airflow, I probably would have put all the drives together, and taken out 1 or both of the upper hard drive cages....just me though.

It doesn't look that bad, but is that RAID card bending up? that doesn't look healthy at all.

AznJason · Post by **AznJason** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:47 am

diver wrote:Nice build, but your photography needs a little work.

Yeah, I threw it together at work, so it's a cell phone pic. I'll swap the pics later probably with actual digicam ones.

bonestonne wrote:To help out airflow, I probably would have put all the drives together, and taken out 1 or both of the upper hard drive cages....just me though.

It doesn't look that bad, but is that RAID card bending up? that doesn't look healthy at all.

How would you mount the drives without the hard drive cages? I tried putting them all together, but the length of the RAID card interfered with the drive, so I put the WD Scorpio Black there and, with a lot of work, managed to fit it. It's also why the RAID card is bending up. It's not as bad as the picture makes it look, the stress is pretty minimal since it's only an x8 card.

danimal · Post by **danimal** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 12:40 pm

that thing is a bit more than just a file server! it's cool that you got it all in there.

you can buy or fab up a bracket that will hang a hard drive over the top of the video card, it bolts in to the card slot retention screws... with my p183, there were some existing holes on the bottom of the top compartment, that i used to hang a fan off of.