I've got three old Dell Poweredge 700 server boxes ca. 2003.  I've started an unRAID project with the worst of them... 

 

Here's my starting point - note sawdust inside the box.

 

And where we are today.

 

And here's the pile of debris:

 

I've drilled out the rivets holding the back and top of the case on.  Also removed the existing drive cages and SCSI hot swap cage.  So far I have just plugged in a couple of junker IDE drives to get a feel for how unRAID works.  The plan is to run two drives off the motherboard SATA ports and add an 8 port Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller.

 

I have designed a cage that will hold ten drives and three 120mm fans.  It'll just fit in the space available.  Next step is to buy the aluminum extrusions for the cage and start cuttin' & rivetin'.  Once the case is done I'll move a few SATA drives from another machine and ditch the IDE drives.  The DELL power supply should be fine for four or five drives but I'll definitely need to upgrade before adding many more.

 

I won't get much done in the next couple of weeks with Christmas and all.  Hopefully I can get some shop time between Christmas and New Years to get the cage put together.

Here's a shot of the case after I cut out all the interfering bits.

This will become a drive/fan cage

Here's the completed cage:

Cage mounted, new power supply, mobo installed, drive power installed, fans installed.

It's about time a Dell became useful.

Drives mounted.  Still need to run the pre-clear on them.  Then upgrade to the pro version and we should be up and running.

 

heh.. nice franken server..  needs a tad bit of sata cable management. but I like where you're going with this..

 

I'm still waiting to see how you fabricate a front for the server.

 

(please say full mesh like a mac pro front.. lol)

 

if you want 15 more of these servers... well.. actually we use them as a couch in the datacenter.

 

 

That's useful information for all .... Thanks