
It seems every other year I do a major build and in the interims I do upgrades. This year was a major change for me as it's the first time I'm using a rack chassis at home. Prior to this I used a Lian Li PC-343B case with six x 5.25" to 3.5" backplanes. Whilst that build was functional it was rattly. The backplanes were expensive but poorly manufactured. I eventually turned to stuffing bits of paper between the drive slots just to stop the case from vibrating to pieces. You can see a photo of that here: http://i.imgur.com/pJPxpNC.jpg
So the new server. Before I post the pictures lets just detail the specifications:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition, not pirated, legit license.
- Intel XEON E5-1650 (6 Cores, 12MB Cache, 3.2-3.8GHz) CPU
- 64GB (8x8GB) of Kingston ECC 1600MHz 1.35v UDIMM Memory
- Dual Socket Asrockrack EP2C602-4L/D16 Motherboard
- X-CASE 4U 24 Bay GEN II Rackmount Case
- Seven x SAS SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 Cables
- SuperMicro CPU Heatsink for LGA 2011
- Corsair AX1200i 1200 Watt Power Supply
- Arctic Cooling 80mm silent fan (I use this to cool the RAID and SAS Expander Cards)
- Corsair 120GB Neutron GTX SSD (This is for the Operating System)
- 1TB Western Digital Black Hard Drive
- Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SSD
- 9x4TB Hitachis 8x2TB Samsungs 7x3TB Western Digitals
- LSI 9260-4i RAID Controller with 512MB DDR2 RAM + LSI CPU
- HP 32 Port SAS Expander Card
- 900 Watt CyberPower UPS Battery Backup (21 Minutes run time at current load)
You're probably wondering based on the specifications what the server is used for, well I host a lot of Minecraft servers on it. That is what the high end CPU and lots of RAM are for. My servers in the past year have served upwards of 100,000 unique players. That was on my old server which had a 3930K and 24GB of RAM. This upgrade was mostly about increasing RAM and using ECC memory as the server is powered on 24.7 for years at a time.
It's also why I went with the AX1200i, at our load levels its fan doesn't spin, it doesn't get hot and we are just within its lower efficiency range of 92% (it peaks at 94% at 500-700 Watt loads, we are at around 270-300 Watts). Plus its 7 year warranty and generally great build quality means it'll last a long time.
Now of course I don't only host Minecraft servers from this. I also store a lot of personal media, work files, it runs a web server and two websites and software that I've written and distributed also use this server for many of their functions such as API calls, update notifications and downloads etc
And of course I have a lot of Virtual Machines running on it too including XPEnology, PFSense, Windows 7, Vista and XP for software development testing.
So lets get on with the pictures!
Memory:


Power Supply:

Case Pictures:





Installation Pictures:








Build Complete





Specification shot from within Windows

If you have any questions feel free to post those below
