Project : 5th gen - 20TB gaming rigs

Molex to SATA adapters and RAID controllers, problem solved lol.

The 1200W Thermaltake Toughpower PSU's each have 8 SATA and 8 Molex connectors. That makes 32 connectors in total. The other 16 connectors needed can easily be made up from Molex "Y" splitters and molex to SATA adapters. He could always borrow a few connectors from the 300W Chieftech PSU powering the Atom system. Plus he needs to power the DVD drive.

Attaching the drives to the system may be hard though.
The ASUS P5Q Premium motherboard he is using has connectors for 10 internal SATA drives and a single IDE channel so that is 12 drives in total. The other motherboard, the ASUS P5K Premium, has internal connectors for only 6 SATA drives and a single IDE channel, that makes 10 drives total. So combined both motherboards support 22 drives (18 SATA and 4 IDE). So RAID controllers are definitely needed.

I think he said that he was going to use a SCSI based controller, as SATA is SCSI compatible, he could then just chain them up. All he would need is the adapters I'm guessing.

Yeah pretty much.

Lets get some answers, shall we ? ^^

How to power it up:

Pretty much as you guys described, just y split up the molex for now, and ill have plenty of connections for everything... and the 16 amp rails can easily run whatever you throw at them... could have powered up all my disks with one PSU if i would have wanted =) ill have to get some custom wires going in there at some point, but the finances have kinda stopped before xmas :P



The disks and connection for now

The main rigs :

And no... i replaced the P5K premium with another P5Q premium, so the motherboards are the same now =)

That equals 20 s-ata on the mobo's alone
gonna run 2x 4 port pci s-ata controllers as well on disks that wont be used for anything but storage, since pci get bandwith problems really fast

The rest will be run on SAS controllers, still gathering up some cash to get some decent ones, so gonna run on 4x pci-x1 - 4 channel ones for now, thats a additional 24 disks there =) However, these will be replaced by some LSI 8 series ones as soon as i get some more cash to spend ^^ they have a 1500mhz cpu and 2gb onboard memory, that will help the main comp stress less =) and increase the raid performance ALOT


The mITX :

Well... it allready got 2 pata disks connected, and will be using 1 sata slot in dvd/rw , that pretty much fills it up with only 1 sata free, will see if ill put it to use at some point


Mini update :

got some decals cut on the label cutter today ^^.

Will get some pics tomorrow

I missed the motherboard upgrade lol. I couldn't help but do some research into your tech ;) lol.

Are you going to be using i7 processors/motherboards?

No he wont.

Personally I looked into upgrading and it would cost around $1,500AUD for a decent CPU and mobo, perhaps end of financial year (June/July) or end of 2009.

Who said decals cant look decent? ^^

More pics to come later today

Man that is sweet. Love that decal, goes perfectly with the orange and black.

One question though. When moving it it (if you ever do lol) wouldn't it be better to install some caster wheels to the base?

That decal looks awesome.