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PostPosted: Wed Nov 12, 2014 3:46 pm 
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Hello

Home servers can be noisy.
I am proud to share a housing I designed and built for my home server. It perfectly fits the HP MediaSmart but could be also useful for other, similar devices.

Attachment:
untitled.jpg
untitled.jpg [ 830.22 KiB | Viewed 26771 times ]


features include:
- a vinage outlook inspired by old '60-'70 radios
- a beautiful, polished wood finish
– thick, 4 cm walls reducing the noise for about 70%
- a solid key lock preventing access to the server for unauthorised persons or animals :o
– a quiet, 12 cm exhaust fan
– intake air filters preventing building up the dust inside the box and in the device

more details and photos: http://mattr.co.uk/meet-aretha/

I could build a similar one for anyone interested. Let me know!


Last edited by req7777 on Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 11:26 pm 
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Not even going to lie that's awesome. How you keeping air flow? More pics would be appreciated.


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 10:23 am 
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Hi, Thanks for the nice comment. Yes I'm not going to lie either, it is awesome to use, too. It's totally paid back the effort. :encore:

The box works constantly for over a year now, the noise is unnoticeable in our fairly quiet studio flat.

Having said that, the project is still ongoing,
there are few bits and pieces that I would love to add to it, but simply don't have time or free funds to buy parts, usually both.

First of those features is the cooling system. It requires an additional, internal module to be built. As for now the air is coming in through a hole in the front panel.
This 'temporary' solution keeps the temperature usually below 43-46C even with the room temperature above 34C (it's a modded unit, with a dual core processor).

I have attached an image with the initial design of the air intake module. It would consist of 6-8 slowly-spinning blowers that pull the air through the air filters located at the back panel and push it through to the front of the box. The unit will need to be easy to remove, just in case I need to take the server out for the maintenance. I suspect that with the front hole closed the box will be even quieter, and thanks to removable air filters, virtually there won't be any internal maintenance required.


Initial design of the air intake unit:

Attachment:
Screen Shot 2015-08-29 at 16.58.18.png
Screen Shot 2015-08-29 at 16.58.18.png [ 475.9 KiB | Viewed 26826 times ]


Air filters in the back wall:

Attachment:
render-back.jpg
render-back.jpg [ 752.84 KiB | Viewed 26826 times ]




One of the other planned features is to put that really cool miliamper–meter from the 1950s in the front hole and rig to the server somehow – perhaps to show the temperature inside, or disk load. I was even considering placing a small minicomputer such as Raspberry Pie inside the box and create some programs to take care of the temperature monitoring, remotely initiated reboots etc. But I that would require lots of digging and learning as well. Perhaps when I'm retired... :banana: :chicken:

Attachment:
Screen Shot 2015-08-29 at 17.03.46.png
Screen Shot 2015-08-29 at 17.03.46.png [ 1.34 MiB | Viewed 26826 times ]


:whs:


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 4:42 pm 
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I like that very much. Have you thought about a custom built machine instead of using the MSS? I like the design of the case a lot and I think if you can get More processing power and a drive or 2 more then the MSS in there a lot more people might be jumping to get one. I only say that because Im looking at getting a HP Gen8 but love your case and makes me thing about just building a custom server and finding a case that would work. as for the meter I like that could be neat if you can select what you want the meter to track on a day by day basis, as in today heat tomorrow disk activity or so forth.

I really like this so much potential for sure.


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 30, 2015 2:41 am 
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Thanks T-bone

It makes perfect sense what you're saying, and I could probably built a case for any other NAS or computer available in the market.
The reason I've built one for an old Mediasmart was that I already owned one :-)

My project started from a really simple idea to make the server quieter by putting it inside a simple, wood-and-plexi case, then I started drawing...
Then I started doing sketch-up visuals... :-)

It took couple of months, few hundreds dollars and many of the carpenter's overtime hours, but we arrived to where we're just now :-)


Other reason that I've decided to stick with 470 was the drive-extender which is unique to that machine. I can't afford buying 4 big HDD of the same make at one go (to hook it up with a Linux based machine with drive arrays for instance) and as far as I know drive extender is only one that allows me to use whatever HDD I have in stock at the moment.

Its power is still sufficient to use it as a cloud backup drive (with GoodSync). Also good to run the massive and/or long running Torrents on ;-)
I wish I had a little more processing power for encoding and streaming content, but as they say – you can't have everything...


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 9:33 am 
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This would be so cool! I hope you roll this out into production!

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups


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