Its spring cleaning around the 2purls1knit offices and the computers were a bit on the dusty side. Armed with a screwdriver and a can of “compressed air dust remover” I peeled away the skin of my workstation to reveal a ghastly sight. Dingos eating my baby! Not really, but the amount of dust was surprising.

My case has a window in the side so I usually take a peek and if it looks bad give it a quick blast with the air duster and be done with it. This time I wanted to give it a more complete and thorough cleaning and I screwed it up.

It’s been a accident waiting to happen. The case I purchased when I was picking out my parts was a little on the smallish side. When I started assembling all my parts I realized just how small it really is. There was less than an inch between the front of my power supply and the back of my hot swap drive bays. Tight fit for all the power and drive cables but it worked. For a whole year it worked. I guess I looked at it funny because one of the SATA cables broke off its connector on the hot swap drive bay it was attached to.

I went into full panic mode. This computer is my baby. I spent the better part of a month researching the parts for it. It’s got an ASUS A8N32-SLi motherboard, AMD Opteron 170 dual core server processor, XFX GeForce 8800 GTX, PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 and all the hard drives are Western Digital Raptors. This is no lightweight machine.

I immediately started pulling parts out one by one and cleaning them. I looked at the hot swap bays and it was bay one that broke. No problem, just scoot the drives over a bit into 2, 3 and 4, don’t use number one and I still have number five for that terabyte drive I plan to get soon. Thats when I realize I won’t be able to fit the bays back into my case like this. The cables are in the way of the power supply cables, it won’t fit back in.

Quick thinking reminded me that I had an old Compaq ProLiant ML330 server sitting in storage waiting for a case mod project. I grabbed it and a screwdriver and went to work. In about 20 minutes I had removed everything in the case down to bare metal. Gone were dual Intel Xeon 950s, a SCSI raid card, a pair of 36gig SCSI drives and some other crap that was really broken when I got it.

And like magic everything fit into the case. Fired it up and realized that it only has one case fan and my old case had five, not counting the ones on the processor, power supply, drive bays or video card. I let it run just to see how bad it would be. It got into the high 40’s/C. and didn’t think much about it until the next morning. I checked the temp then and it had spiked up to over 70C. One hundred fifty-eight degress farenheit and that was just the case temp. The processor was hotter than that.

I quickly shut it off until I could find a way to cool it. Whil I’m thinking of ways to put case fans on it i start thinking of potential case mods. Its a pretty plain beige case with a door on the front covering the drive bays. An thuse begins: Frankencomputer.

I get some measurements of the side panel and put those into Adobe Illustrator. I create some 80mm and 120mm fan graphics. Get some measurements of the placement of hardware inside the case. The fun begins when I start importing potential graphics for the side panel. I settled on an Alan Parson Project [italic]I, Robot[/italic] theme. That being my favorite album probably of all time.

And sitting next to my computer is my “server.” Its just a plain jane Compaq D300 with 3 hard drives in it: the factory 40gig, a 250gig and a 320gig. About every two years I buy a new bigger hard drive. My new case has room for these drives so I pop them in the mix and they fit. They wouldn’t fit in the old case because the 8800GTX was such a long card it extended into the lower drive bays. So in the process of rebuilding this mess I’ve combined the need for two computers into one case and probably saved myself a few bucks a month on my electric bill.

Armed now with a layout for the side panel of my case and a dremel tool I start cutting holes for the 80mm fans. I’m putting three along the bottom edge of the case as intake fans. In about the center of the side panel I’m putting a 120mm fan for exhaust. The back of the case has a hole for a 92mm fan, but the one that was in it has a plug that won’t fit the pins of my motherboard so I’ll be ordering a new one soon. The door on the front of the case has enough depth to fit an 80mm fan between it and the hot swap bays so I may squeeze one in there too. Three Western Digital Raptors can produce quite a bit of heat. Noise is not a concern so I’ll be using the highest capacity fans I can find. I’m more concerned with the safety of my data and components than a little bit of noise.

I’ve gone on for long enough, back to the Dremel tool.

Now playing: Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky
via FoxyTunes