The size of SATA drives has been getting larger and cheaper lately, so I
wanted to look into building a File Server with SATA drives
When looking for a SATA controller I found a
HighPoint
controller that supports 16 SATA drives, it fullfilled my wishes for
amount of drives it could handle, but I would need a mother board with a PCI Express
connector.
So I went to VIA.com to see
if they had a board with a PCI
Express slot and I selected the:
This will give me room for:
2 IDE hard drives (VIA onboard)
4 SATA hard drives (VIA onboard)
16 SATA hard drives (RocketRAID 2340)
a total of 22 hard drives
Even though the VIA motherboard consumes very little power, spinning up 22 drives will take a
lot of power and I did kill a cheap noname 400 Watt PSU when testing
with 10 drives. So I went searching for a PSU and found the
Corsair Model CMPSU-750TX
Its a 750 Watt PSU
that supports:
24 Amps on the 5 Volt rail and
60 Amps on the 12 Volt rail
It also has:
8 SATA
power connectors
8 IDE power connectors
So I will "only" need some IDE power splitters and 12 IDE to SATA
converters
Time for some testing!
I installed
Windows Server R2 Standard SP2
with 4 Gb RAM
it has been running stable for over a month now!
This is the state of the
project at the moment!
January 26th 2009
I plan to build a 19" enclosure when I have time an figure out the
design!
