I gave up on the HPE Microserver in the previous video on this subject and decided to go with a custom build. That went.. well.

It’s an iStarUSA D-300 case, ASRock Rack motherboard, Xeon Silver 4509Y, 64GB RAM and a Samsung 990 Pro NVMe. And, of course the Dell/IBM LTO-8 tape drive. Finding the right power supplies and fans was a bit of an issue due to my poor planning.

The PSU originally was a Thermaltake Toughpower PF3 1050W, but that full-size ATX form factor didn’t 100% fit so I ended up using a Corsair SF1000 SFX-sized PSU which was technically too small but whatever.

The fans were almost completely replaced between the beginning and end. I went with Noctuas for quietness and reliability, but the small ones in the back of the case didn’t move enough air. (As found out in the “smoke test” — not what you think). Swapped those out.

Of the two CPU coolers I tried, one suffered from extremely bad vibration at medium and high RPMs. The other also vibrated excessively (but less so).

Could I have made this a little easier on myself? Sure. But this was also my first ever custom rackmount build. And though I’ve probably built scores of computers over the last 30+ years, they were all desktops, and lately I’ve been buying so much used enterprise hardware that I lost the knack. Hence the super-long video.

BTW: Absolutely NOTHING in this video is sponsored, endorsed, nor otherwise shilled. I paid for everything out of my own pocket, bought it for my own reasons, and have no relationship whatsoever with any of the companies I’m about to mention below. There are no affiliate links or anything similar. You do you as far as these products go.

I converted an older HP DL380 Gen8 (aka a StoreOnce 2900) from using a hard RAID controller to an HBA for software RAID. The conversion is simple, but the video is long af because I spend a lot of time discussing the “why” more than the “how”.

In this excerpt from the below video, I talk about the total cost of ownership of RAID arrays.

This describes why I created the RAID HDD TCO Calculator which helps you figure out the total cost of ownership of a RAID array, inclusive of stuff like electrical and cooling costs.