Fitting 3 motherboards, 2 psus, 5 hard drives, a network cards and a 4 port switch in a 1u case
What is it?
it is a 1u high case, containing 3 VIA EPIA boards, each running at 800Mhz, and containing 1GB of RAM. The boards are linked by a 100Mbit USB powered switch. The case contains three 2.5 inch hard drives and one 3.5 inch hard drive. Two of the notebook drives are in a software raid configuration. The whole kaboodle is powered by 2 1u power supplies, each providing 150 watts, using a splitter to power two of the boards from one PSU. There is a special flexible PCI riser for the 3com card I used as the main interface.
Ultimately, this is a useful design as it presents only 1 mains connector, and one network port to the outside world.
Software
All of the boards are running debian linux. Console access is via the serial ports, although the colo currently only supplies one terminal server connection per box!
How it was made
- Purchased standard 1u case
- Removed Hard drive/cdrom mounting bracket
- Milled off superfluous Motherboard mountings
- Milled custom button mount for the front
- Made custom Hard drive mounting brackets
- Countersunk holes from the base for brackets
- Sticky pad spacers for front two Motherboards
Suppliers bits
- PSU, Motherboards, case: linitx.com
- LEDs, Mounting posts: www.maplin.co.uk
- Network cards: ebay