I'm a huge fan of unraid. I bought my first license in 2010, evangelized ever since, then just bought my 2nd license in May.
Huge improvements since 2010 and I look forward to what future releases bring.
Happy Birthday!
Hey guiri.
I admire your passion and enthusiasm but I'm not interested in making a business of this.
The bread box is not for sale. It replaces a 4-bay DROBO (circa 2007) to become my home storage server.
Good luck with your future builds and I look forward to seeing your build pics.
Dylan
Thanks for the info guiri. I think the toaster-server will have to be for some unknown time in the future. The breadbox was fun but unless I need an additional server (or a friend commissions me to build one) then I think I have all the storage I need for the foreseeable future Thanks for the links though -- and feel free to build your own toaster server if you want!
Dylan
Thanks guiri. I think a toaster is an AWESOME idea for an enclosure.
Check out this photo and imagine each toast slot was a hot-swappable drive bay...
Perhaps the motherboard could go in the bottom? Separate power brick like the mac mini?
Dylan
Thanks for your comment storagehound. The non-standard re-used enclosure also appealed to me. I paid special care to leave the front/top/sides relatively untouched so the illusion of just a simple bread box remained. The box is fairly quiet as well so that helps too.
Some other non-obvious points:
- The hard drives are mounted with 3 screws each from the underside of the bread box. For the minimal disruption this thing will see I'm hoping just bottom mounting is sufficient.
- The screw visible on the top of the bread box is to hold a mounting bracket down the front side of the PSU. Although the 4 mounting screws through the back of the bread box seemed enough I decided to add this to prevent the PSU from slumping onto the motherboard.
- The PSU is mounted 0.5" above the motherboard with the PSU air intake fan pulling directly from the main motherboard heatsink. Nice and cool (though surely not required).
- The flash drive plugs into the single female USB plug directly behind the 6 sata data ports. It sticks up and rests snug right against the PSU. You can see it sticking up behind the swirl of red sata cables.
- The only air intake for the case so far are the grid of holes I drilled through the case bottom along the front. Although the HDDs seem to peak around 43C with this setup if I just crack the door an inch the airflow increases dramatically and the HDD temps drops to the mid to low 30s. I have some honeycomb mesh on order that I'll incorporate where the grid of holes now reside and I'll see how that works.
- Rather than actually mod the sata power cables (to get the spacing and length exactly right) I twisted the two lengths of cable with 3 power plugs on each and offset the plugs so there were 6 spaced evenly and facing the same direction. I held the entire thing in place with a good many zip-ties and the end result is pretty neat and tidy.
- Parity check ran at about 56MB/s.
The motherboard has a secondary gigabit NIC. Any suggestions as to what I could use it for?
Dylan
There is a Flickr link but I can embed some here as well.
Check out the Flickr set for more photos and higher resolution versions.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antidigerati/sets/72157624261884036/detail/
Hey all.
I've recently switched to unRAID after having problems with my DROBO and getting frustrated with how difficult it was to debug. I found a $10 metal bread box at a second hand store and thought it would be fun to get a PSU, MB and 6 HDDs in there.
Build hardware:
PSU: Corsair 400W
Motherboard: SuperMicro X7SPA-H-O
RAM: 4GB Kingston
Fan: 120mm NOCTUA NF-S12B
HDD: 6 drives ranging from 500GB to 1.5TB
USB Drive: SanDisk Cruzer 4GB
I've attached the before/after photos of my build below but you can also see more photos on my unRaid Breadbox flickr set:
Enjoy.
Dylan