Ok, time for me to show what your help has brought me! My orginal thread asking for some advice can be found here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9192.0
My hardware list is:
Case: Sharkoon Rebel9 Pro Economy € 49,00 x 1 = € 49,00
Case fan: Nexus 120mm Real Silent Case Fan D12SL-12 - 120 mm - orange € 4,94 x 1 = € 4,94 (not included in my case, well tested and the orange version is cheap )
RAM: Kingston ValueRAM - 2 GB - DIMM 240-pins -DDR3 - 1066 MHz / PC3-8500 - CL7 - 1.5 V - non buffered - non-ECC € 24,09 x 1 = € 24,09
HD: Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS - 2 TB- intern - 3.5" - SATA-300 - 5900 rpm -buffer: 32 MB € 91,88 x 1 = € 91,88
HD: WD Caviar Green WD20EARS - 2 TB - intern- 3.5" - SATA-300 - 5400 rpm -buffer: 64 MB € 83,70 x 2 = € 167,40
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 240e / 2.8 GHz Energy Efficient - Socket AM3 - L2 2 MB ( 2 x 1 MB ) - Box € 57,99 x 1 = € 57,99
HD cage Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Intern 3-Bay - 3.5" - SATA-300 - 300 MBps - SATA-300 € 56,54 x 1 = € 56,54
HD cage Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Intern 3-Bay - 3.5" - SATA-300 - 300 MBps - SATA-300 € 40,00 x 1 = € 40,00 (slightly used, local private sale)
Motherboard: ASUS M4A78LT-M - micro ATX - AMD 760G - Socket AM3 - UDMA133, SATA-300 (RAID) - Gigabit Ethernet - video - High Def € 52,73 x 1 = € 52,73
PSU Seasonic S12II-520 Bronze - ATX12V - 220 Volt AC V - 520 Watt - active PFC € 70,35 x 1 = € 70,35
During the order I added another 2 Gb of RAM, bringing the total costs of my initial build to 358 EUR (excluding disks).
All the components together (was only awaiting one Sharkoon HD cage which was delayed)
Starting unpacking
A closer look at the Sharkoon Rebel9 Pro case (the economy version comes without fans)
Showing the cable management
The Sharkoon HD cage (sold as Kingwin in the US)
I covered the case with damping plates for car-audio. Don't know if it helps much, but was cheap and at least it dampens the case down so less vibration.
Ok, on to building the box!
First, before I forget, jumpers on the WD EARS disks. Also checked the Seagate disk, no firmware update needed!
Getting the CPU in...
A populated motherboard!
And in the case it goes...
Mounting the PSU, cable spaghetti!
Attempting to hide it using the cable management room of the case
Time for a break. It's really cold here in the Netherlands, so time for a traditional Dutch winter meal: pea soup with smoked sausage
Ok, it's about ready. Also I mounted the USB stick internally
It's alive! You can see the print with BIOS settings I got from the forum.
A few days later I added the second HD cage
Tidied up the cables
The first three disks
I'm currently fiddling with the airflow. I've covered every air entrance except, and use the case fan and PSU fan to extract air from the case. In this way I aim that all air sucked into the case is pulled through the drive bays. There is an opening for an 140 mm fan on top of the case, I'm probably adding a low-speed fan here to maximize air being pulled out (and removing need to cover this hole). As long as not all 5,25 bays are filled I've closed these 'ghetto style' with plastic to stop air entering the case here.
Some further comments:
*Was a bit surprised by the motherboard SATA port, ports 2 and 3 seem to be reported mixed, my disk on port 2 was reported correctly in the BIOS, but in unRAID it appeared on 'host 3' and as 'sdc', with the disk on port 3 as 'host 2' and 'sdb'. So I swapped the SATA cables for port 2 and 3.
*The Sharkoon/Kingwin cages are ok, but not the most convenient. First they use a SATA power plug per disk, so you don't reduce the number of power cables needed. Furthermore the fans and HDD lights only work by using a molex to SATA + HDD/fan cable adaptors supplied with the disks. As my PSU has 6 x molex and 6 x SATA, that means I have to use molex splitters to get more molex plugs, and then use the adaptors. A bit messy, as opposed to using the free SATA connectors.
I've now worked around this by mixing the molex cables + adaptors and SATA power cables over the cages. So the top cage has 2 x molex + adaptors and 1 x SATA power. The bottom cage has 1 x molex + adaptor and 2 x SATA power. This means that the cage fans work if a disk is present in the slot powered by the molex + adaptor. The HDD leds of the SATA powered slots do not work. So it's a working solution, but not very 'professional'.
Also Ive broken the plastic part of the SATA power plug on one bay of the cage. Managed to fix it though.
But the cages are on a friendly budget, and I like the trayless design which is very hard to find here.
I've set up the shared and split levels, and I'm now transferring files from my Vortexbox (music) server with rsync using the instructions on: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Transferring_Files_from_a_Network_Share_to_unRAID.
But only getting around 20 Mb/s max...?