5:44
It's tough out there. This one is more for the small business system administrators, the people that are doing this commercially because even though the supply chain is at apocalyptic levels of collapse, sometimes the server dies and sometimes you have to replace it. Most of the time you would just, you know, buy a new server. It's not really that easy currently. And uh you may have folks that depend on you to figure it out. Again, I say this to my fellow computer janitors out there. Sometimes at the small scale, sometimes at the really large scale, the heart of America has been kind of squeezed by technology and it's like, "Oh, let's just try to
get a few more years out of this." Some businesses are in the unfortunate position of, "Oh, it'll probably be better next year. We'll just wait." No, you shouldn't have. You should have upgraded. Should have listened. Should have listened to me. was like, "Hey, we should upgrade." This is like two years ago. It's like, "Hey, we should plan our infrastructure a little better. Hey, we should do that. We're gonna have to just build it." And it gets weird. We're gonna do things that nobody likes. Going to start with the case.
We're going to build a server in Silverstone's workstation case that's also rackable. You can convert it into a rack mount configuration. I'm going to configure it for the old under the table configuration because again, small business. Uh, we're also going to talk about the CDA H2. The CDA H2 is on sale on Amazon, but not it's in kind of limited quantities, so by the time I publish this, it's probably going to be sold out. I did a review on a Ca H2 a long time ago. I bought two more. There are many plates we must spend in the janitorial business. These are fantastic workstation cases because they'll hold. They've got eight slots. So, you can put a two slot GPU off the end if you need a little bit of GPU or
you got a two slot card, you know, two slot 100 GB networking card, whatever. But this is a fun case. It's model is the WS380E. So, it's not just a case. You also get uh eight 3 and 1/2 in hot swap bays. It has two 5 and 1/4 in bays that are externally accessible. a three and a half inch bay and a really neat front. But let's go put it together and then bring it back here and talk about parts choices because that's also really tricky. If you can get a barebones server, that's what it used like a long time ago. You would buy a chassis that had a motherboard and power supplies and then you would bring your own CPUs and RAM. Um, sometimes integrators would sell you a system that had specific CPUs
and RAM and then you'd bring your own drives and operating system, PCI addin cards. It's kind of that way again with supply chain headaches for small and medium businesses. Again, this is not for home labers. And I know that the pricing and everything else is just completely out of this. We're we're not even building Zen 5. We're going to build a Zen 4based system. And we're going to talk about Zen 3 and Ice Lake may actually still be vi like everything from Ice Lake on forward and everything from Zen 3 and on forward are still viable, perfectly viable in 2026, just depending on what problem you're trying to solve. If you're rocking a socket 2011 server, which is what died, which
is there's an open source project that was running on uh a couple of 2680 V3s. I'm trying to help them out. Hopefully we'll do a video on that project after Computex, but I'm trying to get this set up so that we've got something that can run a bunch of VMs for CI/CD because uh I've been squeezed out of the cloud and I am single-handedly trying to just keep it together. Let's build. So, this is the workstation version of their case. And you look at it, it's like, wait a minute, this looks like a 4U rack. Ah, yeah. I can't fool you. You can pop the side panels off and get a kit for it, but you know, you probably should just buy the rack mount version if you want a rack mount. But this is a
professional workstation chassis and it has support for 360 mm radiator. If you watch this channel for a long time, you know that I love the Silverstone Xe 360 and I use it in a bunch of stuff. We're going to use the XC360 here. If you look at the midplane of this case, it looks like, wait, we've got three pre-installed Silverstone fans. It's doesn't look like this layout is going to support that and cabling is going to be a nightmare. No, this bracket is removable and you can remove it and mount your XC360. Now, because this is going to go under a desk in not exactly a server area, I am swapping the fans for quieter Noctua fans. The Silverstone fans can get quite loud, I think. But I'm not sure. I'm going to need to 3D
print some duct work to direct air flow over the memory. We've got our Super Micro XE14 motherboard with a 32 core Zen 4 CPU and 768 GB of memory. Unfortunately, they procured the memory for this upgrade a while ago, so they're not paying current, you know, they didn't pay current prices for memory, but good lord. We're going to use a PCIe add-in card for U.2 storage and then probably mechanical storage at the front in our 8 3 and 1/2 in. the included drive hot swap bays, those are SAS 12. And so we're going to go to a SAS controller. Some motherboards have the mini SAS HD connection that is designed
for SATA, not SAS. SAS has better signal integrity and again longevity. So I'm going to add a SAS controller to this case for them to be able to use that. Also going to use an old Hercules 1600 power supply that I had laying around because it's a reasonable power supply. In order to do that, you have to take off a mounting bracket that uh is in the way of the power supply. Fortunately, you just have to pop the black side panel off, unscrew a couple screws, and then the power supply mounts just fine. This case does support redundant power supplies, like real redundant power supplies, not the redundant retrofit
into an ATX footprint. The accessories that come with the case include several different brackets for the several different kinds of redundant power supplies. I would recommend splashing out for a proper redundant power supply. one that has an a PM bus or an SMB bus connection. You could run from that directly into the motherboard. Because the supply chain is as messed up as it is, our Super Micro uh H14 motherboard can be difficult to obtain by itself. Super Micro is pretty much just selling chassis and they're selling every chassis they can make, which is wild. Build notes on this thing. It is a joy to build in. Most Silverstone cases are a joy to build in. The H2 the front
drives crowd the motherboard a little bit. That's really the worst part of it. But you can take the drives out before you struggle with the oversized motherboards in those cases. Isn't the aesthetic nice? Now, I know what you're thinking. Wait a minute. This is a tower case. It's got feet. That doesn't look rack mount. It's like Clark Kent. Now, do you see Superman? You have a lockable top in front. It's got some air flow through here. And yes, the little squares do have a built-in dust filter, which is a nice touch. I really like this H14 SSL motherboard from Super Micro. And again, I'm sure Super Micro's preference would be to it's like, oh, get a barebone or a full server, but
this was much more cost effective to just DIY this. I think ASRock rack is going to show up in force here because ASRock has suffered a little bit more on the consumer side and um the production facilities are probably getting a workout from the production of everything else which maybe will be a little bit of relief to the computer janitors among us where it's like we have to replace a machine that has failed with something reasonably modern and this is still Zen 4. No one would fault you for going Zen 3, and that's DDR4 memory, which is a better deal right now. The front is lockable and has a built-in dust filter. You can also choose whether or not this there's a punch out here that snaps in and out.
And if you want to lock the front, but leave the power button and USB accessible. You can remove this little door, and that's entirely possible. For the front panel, we have two 5 GB type A, type-C, headphone, and microphone, as well as our power button. There's also an array of indicators for two lands, fault and hard drive activity. Our 3 and 1/2 in drive bays at the bottom have green and purple indicators, which is nice. And then you can see our two 5 and 1/4 in bays and our 3 and 1/2 in bays at the top. There's lots of little details. It will take way too much time to go over every single little detail, but there's tons of little quality of life improvements here. Like the midboard
here that has the fans and the pump for the radiator have rubber mounting grommets which will absorb a lot of vibration and a lot of noise. So in the workstation configuration, even though this is, you know, copy paste from a rack mount design where sound isn't a consideration, little details like that will help minimize the amount of sound from this. There's also a locking peg for the top cover. You know, pretty standard rack mount configuration, but it is toolless, so you can screw it together if you want. If you're going to rack mount it, you will have to pull off this uh top bracket as well, which is just a couple of Phillips screws back here. In terms of other expansion options, the motherboard has three MCIO headers.
Those can be broken out for two U.2 connections each. So, we could connect a total of six U.2 directly to the motherboard without using any PCIe slots. Zero. Our four MBLs 8 TB U.2 are in there temporarily just so I can do testing. The kind of plan is to use that as a fast ZFS pool and then uh as much mechanical storage as we can get at the front for uh slow ZFS pool. This motherboard has built-in 10 GB Ethernet networking, but we're probably going to add an old Melanox Connect X5 or possibly a new Intel E810 dual 25 gig adapter to this. And then bam, we've got a modern server. It's definitely more expensive than it would have been last year by a lot, but it's probably half
the cost of a bigname big box provider all in for the costs on this. uh depending on what you're looking at online because the whole market is depressed. Cases like this sometimes are being sold at a discount. I get the CDA H2s for just over $200 each, which is probably a blood bath for Silverstone, but it's a good deal. So, you should check it out. Oh, I also got a one UU. Let's take a look at the one UU. So, it's pretty bare bones. You get three cooling fans. You don't even get the riser bracket that goes with this. and it's going to take a slimline power supply, but this is actually a standard power supply form factor. So, that's not really a big deal. This is pretty inexpensive for what it is. Minis forum motherboard goes
here. Right angle, just a cheap right angle cable uh goes here. And then I'll have one x16 expansion slot. I think there's going to be enough air flow front to back from our three fans that are mounted here to cool the built-in heat sink on that minis forum motherboard. The minis forum motherboard without a fan installed is just about one U. So, if that's something you want to see or you want to see a configuration like for this build, let me know in the comments below if that's sort of exciting and interesting. I think that could be a good option for a home lab if you want to rack mount one of those and have it not take up a lot of space. Cuz look, this is, you know, it's like not even half depth. I'm This
is level one. We got a whole community of computer janitors. If you would like to show off your Janktastic janitoring, we have a forum for that. And I love pictures. So, I'm signing out and I'll see you there.
