I bought this bitfenix prodigy case for about $30 off craiglist, someone didn’t like that it was white, and for $30, couldn’t be beat for this case. As it was retailing for about $80 at newegg/microcenter. I was going to build my girlfriend a new PC and thought ITX was the way to go, after building my own gaming rig on ITX, but using an SG05 ( linky to build ). We went to go look at some monitors at mirceoter, and ended up coming up with a sweet touch screen Dell for her. Nice and neat, and it saved us $1500 from buying an imac, LOL!
So what to do with this case, well, my current NAS was about 3~ years old, had about 2TBx7 HDD’s, and was running JBOD, so nothing fancy. It was a neat little water cooling server in an Antec 300, but I wanted to do something different. I actually had 7 WD 2TB RE4’s laying around not doing anything, so I thought lets build an awesome ITX NAS box! So here we are, throwing together a 7 HDD + 1 SSD NAS box running Windows 7.
I love building PC’s, and I love the fact I do it without cutting, or modding (maybe someday i’ll cut and mod), but I like to keep things stock as possible.
I purchased:
Adapec 5805 off ebay for $100, which has 2 8087’s internal, so I could use 2 fanouts for at least 8 drives. It also has 512MB of onboard memory for the raid 5 I wanted to do. Kicker was it came with a working BBU!
I also snagged a 150mm PSU that I read would fit nicely: Seasonic 360W 80PLUS Gold ATX12V Power Supply SSR-360GP
I got a Intel Pentium Processor G3220, nothing fancy, but it is a slight upgrade to my Q9550 that the server is currently running. No worries though, as I need ZERO cpu to RDP and just make sure everything is hunky dory.
I got a ASRock H81M-ITX, which is my first ASRock mobo, so far so good running this thing.
Couple with 4GBx2 DDR3 I had to purchase as well.
So far i’ll be using the intel CPU cooler, and might swap it out for something decent if I find this thing’s too loud.
I got some molex to SATA power adapters, as the PSU only came with 5 SATA power connectors. I also got some 8087 fanout cables I did not have, ran about $15 bucks for the 2 8087’s, and $10 for the 2x molex to sata connectors.
Swapped out the stock bitfenix brushless fans (model BFF-SCF-12025KK-RP) for my scythe SFLEX SFF21G’s hooked up to some devolts to 9v, so they’re nice and silent. I also purchased a nice bitfenix spectre 230mm fan, threw it up front to see it push some air. If this does not work, i’ll grab a 140mm or 120mm scythe i’ve got laying around and use that. I don’t need a LOT of airflow, but the more I can get while keeping silence would be great.
Here’s what 5 of my 6 drives look like … the SSD and other 2TB are in the 5.25″ bay.
[zp src=”P1040631.JPG” album=”blog/Bitfenix/” width=”600″]
I had one problem where I realized the 8087 connectors are a little tight … so I am not snapping in the 3 bay disk set as to not stress the card. This is what it looks like snapped in/stressed:
[zp src=”P1040629.JPG” album=”blog/Bitfenix/” width=”600″]
This is how i’ll leave it:
[zp src=”P1040630.JPG” album=”blog/Bitfenix/” width=”600″]