So finally, after so long...not sure why I didn't post pictures sooner. These are about as good as I have. I should take some more. I always regret when I make major hardware changes and forget to take a lot of really good pictures.
Here is our household main (and really only) server. It has sliding rails which were not yet added in the photo (and couldn't be seen). Notice a slim DVD-RW drive, 3 top (non hot-swappable) drives, and 16 hot-swappable drives. The case is Chenbro. I have the bezel added so the handles have been removed. It also has two USB ports. The motherboard I'm using doesn't have a network LED nor does it have two network ports so I use Network 1 for the motherboard HDDs and Network 2 for the RAID array. My card has pins for a complete LED light. There still are 16 lights (for each drive) and essentially, if any single of the 16 is on, the network 2 light is on. It's nice for quickly seeing if activity is going on. Plus, the other LEDs are not the greatest. They bleed across and don't work very well. The network lights are separated and work better.
Here it is with the bezel and wireless keyboard/mouse running scandisk. When I started the full scandisk I had no idea it would take (was it) 48 hours or so. It really messed up my day because I had a 20KB file I absolutely needed and we had no internet due to a service change that same day (what horrible timing) so I had to drive back home to get what I could normally have downloaded over the internet.
This shows the three top hard drives and the slim DVD-RW drive. You can also see the 4 of 5 hot-swappable fan and a small portion of all the cables. The serial ATA cables are below where the picture was taken and are all in a bundle to the left (19 of them).
One of the worst pictures ever. I think that adds up to 10 My Book's, all 500GB and opened for their precious contents. What a nightmare opening all of them. I got them because they were less expensive than the same internal drives. I have a few of them in use and the rest are in a box. I'd really like to get rid of some of them.
You can see my previous server. It was an Antec case which held 4 + 4 drives comfortably (HDD + 5.25" bays) plus one in the floppy bay (two wouldn't fit) and the 10th was literally sitting in the bottom of the case. Behind this was a much older system with 10+ drives that were used as intermediate backup while I made the switch. They are stacked and tugging the cables in the case. It was just temporary. In the large case, I added a large fan with screen over it to add airflow to the four upper drives before closing it all up. All ten of those drives are now used in my 16 drive system. Scambling for temporary backup space is never fun. I don't have enough space currently, though, so I think my only upgrade path is a fresh, brand new server. Of course prices keep dropping so I'm going to wait as long as possible.
So there's some pictures. Hope they aren't too blurry.
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Topic: Finally, Pictures of my Server (Read 3066 times)