I tried looking at that case but since my board is SSI MEB 13 x 16 it’s making so difficult to find a nice case for it. I hate to go rackmount for home use. Any help is appreciated…

Danny

for the time being I have been using the Buffalo DriveStation USB 2.0 1TB external. Its cheap and much faster than the current WD solutions. Its unfortunate, but for the time being its actually cheaper re-purpose an old desktop machine, install a 1GB Ethernet adapter, a 1TB SATA2 HDD and stick it on your network as a file server. If your old desktop has built in RAID, put 2 or more hard drives and create a mirror or better. If your old machine doesn’t have hardware RAID, install server 2003 or Windows 7, and use Dynamic Disks to create a software RAID, its slower, but your 1GB Ethernet would be capping your SATA 2 HDD speed anyways.

You’ve asked the exact question that my part 4 article discusses — the case.

For my build I used the Antec 650 Titan, but it wasn’t my first choice. I’ll explain in more detail when I write my full blog entry, but the short reason is that it was the only server case that let the power supply connectors reach the motherboard.

Congrats on your build! I’m actually right in the middle of mine, I went with the ASUS KFN5-Q/SAS board since the S4980 is EOL. As for the CPU’s I got qty 4 8354 2.2 GHz cpu’s. My only snag is finding the ideal case for this board and setup. What do you recommend? I was thinking of the ABS 695 or Khaos Case, but I’m still doing some research. HELP!

Thanks,
Danny

For reference, I buy from a guy who gets them by the pallet load from leasing companies and he refurbs them. The last 490 I bought through him was $550 Cdn for a machine with 2 dual core Xeons (2.2 I think), 2GB of RAM, and 320 MB SATA(not the original). No video card. The lease was 2 years, so there still is some warranty left, and its transferable.

The two people I’ve bought for are both very happy. One is a hard core gamer and he did have an issue with the PSU – he put in a video card with 2 GPUs and the PSU didn’t have enough video card connectors. With some work he managed to source a cable that worked for him. The other is a moderate gamer, and he had one issue where he unplugged a USB memory stick, and got a blue screen. He called dell, transferred the ownership and had recovery disks sent overnight.

So all in all pretty satisfied, but I am getting itching to get a 490 as my 470 felt slow after testing the 490. I am a moderate gamer.

James

I made a quick edit to get the image included