It was a bit like Christmas -- I got some UPS lovin' and had a great time unboxing all the components I received.
First and foremost let me describe the Chenbro case I ordered -- and I HIGHLY recommend you read the LogicSupply review on it.
They have some essential notes on building with it, as well as some cool pictures:
http://www.logicsupply.com
The Chenbro ES34069 is pretty cool -- it has a fairly small form factor (10"x10"x5" or so), fits a mini-itx mobo, a 2.5" system drive, 4x hot-swappable 3.5" drives, and a slimline optical drive.
The motherboard I went with, the KINO-690S1 supports 4xSATA 2, IDE, 2GB RAM, and a 64-bit AMD processor.
Luckily, I ordered the heatsink/fan combo from them that does fit.
I'll describe how *I* built this thing, and then note how it *should* have been built.
- Take everything out of the boxes.
- Take side panel off case.
- Take front off case.
- *NOTE: there are 5 little plastic tabs holding the front on. 3 of which you can reach by taking the side panel off, but to get the last two you need to pull the drive caddys out and reach your finger in. Hope you have small bendy fingers :)
- Test fit mobo in case
- Snap back connection template panel in case.
- Screw mobo in.
- Realize the heatsink needs to screw in to something. Oh, there it is... and it goes under the mobo. Sigh.
- Unscrew mobo.
- Put heatsink socket thingy in place.
- Screw mobo in.
- Assemble heatsink to CPU w/ silver paste.
- Screw cpu/heatsink/fan assembly to mobo.
- Attach 40-44 pin adaptor to 2.5" laptop drive.
- Realize there's only a single molex available to power both the 2.5" drive & the slimline optical.
- Do some creative re-wiring (molex Y-adaptor would have been nice, but I didnt' have one on hand at this point).
- Wonder where the system drive goes... (look up some pics online). Oh. Dang.
- Realize I can't get the 2.5" drive in place.
- Unscrew mobo (unnessesary if I had found the LogicSupply blog entry prior to this & realized I could pull the mobo tray out).
- Place system drive & screw in.
- Screw mobo in.
- Prep slimline optical drive - screw the adaptor into the back, screw assembly into removable drive tray.
- Realize the flat IDE cable I was using wouldn't reach with where I had the 2.5" drive pointing.
- Unscrew mobo.
- Remove 2.5" drive & rotate 180-degrees (so back of drive is under cd drive).
- Screw mobo in.
- Damn, forgot to screw drive in.
- Unscrew mobo.
- Screw 2.5" drive in
- Screw mobo back in.
- Shoehorn the IDE cable in place.
- Put RAM in.
- Hook power cable from case to mobo.
- Hook CPU fan power up.
- Move CPU fan power after noticing that CPU fan power connector was in a different spot.
- Hook up switch & LED wires from case to the header on the mobo.
- Realize that the Power LED header is 3 pin (live, center null, live), and the wire is 2 pin.
- Do some creative re-wiring using a jumper block I had on hand.
- Test fire for POST, etc.
IT BOOTED! WOOT!
After the fact:
I replaced the flat IDE cable with a round cable I ordered. I had to cut the little rubber boots off the round one to get it to fit, but it works much better than before.
Also as you'll read in part 3, I had to remove the hot-swap sata backplane... which would have been much easier if I had done so before installing anything in the case.
So assuming you'll be running Opensolaris like me, here is how I would recommend putting this together:
- Completely disassemble case:
- Remove the side panel (there's a thumb-screw in the back).
- Pull the four drive caddys.
- Remove the front panel (don't force it - remember there are 5 plastic tabs).
- Remove the mobo tray (unroute the cables).
- Remove the metal perforated backplane panel.
- Remove the two backplane boards from backplane panel -- they're not compatible with opensolaris. Bye bye hot-swap :(
- Mark & cut notches in panel for sata data/power plugs.
- Re-install modified backplane panel.
- Snap the back connection/port template panel (comes with the mobo) into the case.
- Screw the 3.5" drives into their caddys.
- Slot the 3.5" drives/caddys into the case.
- If you notched the backplane panel like I did, you'll want to:
- Cut the zip-ties that hold the cable bundle together.
- Replace the data cables that go to the top two drives with the ones that have right-angle connectors on one end.
- Plug the various sata/power cables in (you'll need the molex to dual sata power adaptors).
- Re-zip-tie cable bundle if desired.
- NOTE: Both the 2.5" drive location and the optical caddy have little metal pointy bits that are supposed to take the place of the screws (occupying the holes) on one side.
- NOTE: You will need to jumper one of the drives to be the slave. I couldn't find the right jumper on the optical, so I set the 2.5" drive to slave instead.
- Screw 2.5" drive in place (with its adaptor) -- remember, back of drive is located under optical tray area.
- Assemble the slimline optical drive: adaptor screws back of drive, drive screws into removable tray.
- Prep the round IDE cable (cut off the boots) & plug in to the system & optical drives.
- Build yourself a 3-pin plug for the power LED. I glued a jumper oriented 90-degrees to one side of the 2-pin led cable end, and ran a wire from the center to the side.
- Put the heatsink/fan socket thingy on the bottom of the mobo.
- Screw the mobo on to the mobo tray.
- Route the cables back through the mobo tray.
- Screw the 3.5" storage drives into their caddys (remove the black plastic placeholder)
- Slot the drive assemblies into their locations
- Plug the SATA power & data cables into the drives
- Screw the mobo tray back in to the case.
- Assemble the CPU/heatsink/fan & screw on to mobo.
- Add RAM to mobo.
- Connect the rest of your cables (good luck w/ the USB headers for the front of the case... I didn't end up getting them working correctly.).
You'll find some pictures I took during the assembly process out on flickr.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjaminellison/sets/72157605600122163/
That should be it. Stay tuned for part 3, or "WTF, doesn't Solaris speak Linux?"
[edited to add some pics & a few assembly points I had forgotten]
8 comments:
so in part 3 I'm expecting you'll follow up on your comment to the Logicsupply blog about how the hotswap backplane doesn't work with opensolaris 2008.05? I'd be really interested if you make any progress tracking down what's going on here. This problem destroys much of the case's value IMHO.
I'd also like to know at what temperature the drives settle according to 'smartctl -a' so I can compare it to my existing case.
I like this case because it is the right size. I would like about one CPU/powersupply/fan/maintainable-unit per four disks, because these other things go bad, too, not just disks. The other case problems besides the backplane, I'm not worried about. My ZFS setup is already, for better or worse, using iSCSI. and booting the storage nodes over PXE and NFS. so I don't need any optical drives, round IDE cables, 2.5" disks, or any of that. and the hotswap feature not working is somewhat mitigated by iSCSI also because I put the two halves of the mirror in two separate cases, and can 'zpool offline' all the drives in one case if a drive needs inserting/removing. (but I think the latency problems of iSCSI are making it extremely slow, and make it basically unavailable while resilvering/scrubbing, and cause huge goofyness in booting up the node with the iscsi initiator on it).
thanks for your detailed writeup.
This is techincal support from Chenbro. We get your URL from one of our customer and we are looking into the hot-swap issue right now. Basically, our backplane just passes SATA signals to HDD directly. So, no dirver is required for backplane. we also download the OS2008.05 and test with our SATA drives. However, all drives are recognized well. Therefore, I suppose it could be an incompatible issue between backplane nad HDD. Can oyu please try to solder pin P11 to p10 or p12 on CN11/CN21? That will disble "staggered spin-up" function to improve the compatibility and it may resolve our problem. If you have any question, please fell free to send your question to technology@chenbro.com.tw. Thanks!
@Anonymous #1 (Miles Nordin?) -- I still need to compile the tools you mentioned. Last time I was working on compiling them, something screwed up. ... unless you know of a pkg that has them I can just install.
@Anonymous #2 (Chenbro tech support) -- it worked, thank you! I've posted another blog entry on the fix.
Nicz job
I just wanted to comment your blog and say that I really enjoyed reading your blog post here. It was very informative and I also digg the way you write! Keep it up and I'll be back to read more soon mate
Hi there, nice info on the Chenbro case, read it with much interest (and LOL'd about taking everything out again and again, sounds like me getting all excited and forgetting to think at those times...)
I was wondering why you chopped up the metal plate like you did? Can't seem to find it (or my reading skills need attention...)
Originally, I had to directly connect the drives to the mobo via sata cables because I couldn't get the hotswap backplane to function correctly. With the drives in place, there wasn't room to pass the sata cables through. After the tweak I ended up making with the backplane to get it functioning, I was able to put everything back the way it should have been (except, of course, fixing the notches I cut in the metal plate).
What a coincidink! I built a NAS using this very case and installed OpenSolaris on it too. I can vouch for the fact that it's a great little case.
As an alternative mobo may I suggest the Supermicro X7SPA. It comes in a couple of different configs and is an excellent board.
My choice the X7SPA-HF has IPMI and 6 Sata connectors. Alas, no sound but if you're building a NAS what do you need sound for.
Anyway, bottom line: No matter what hardware you're using for your NAS this case is compact and awesome.
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