In early September, I began planning and building my first home lab system. Â My system is largely based on the specs of the Baby Dragon from Phil Jaenke (@RootWyrm)Â and taking advice from Chris Wahl’s (@ChrisWahl)Â builds. Â I decided to add my own twist to the project by modding a PowerMac G4 case to accommodate the SuperMicro motherboard. Â For the project, I purchased:
- SuperMicro MBD-X9SCM-F Server Motherboard – $157.99Â (Amazon)
- Intel Xeon Quad-Core E3-1220V2 3.1 GHz Processor – $206.99Â (Amazon)
- 16GB 2X8GB RAM – DDR3 ECC UDIMM 240pin PC3-12800 1600MHz –Â $214.96Â (Amazon)
- Corsair CX Series 500Power Supply – $65.99Â (Amazon)
- Western Digital RED 1TB hard drive – $79.99 (NewEgg)
- 90GB OCZ 2.5″ SATA II SSD drive (recertified) – $59.99 (NewEgg)
Modifying the case proved to be really fun and easy. Â I had not attempted anything like this, but it was a good opportunity to break out the dremel and enjoy a cool afternoon on my back porch working on the case. Â All of the case mods were done within just a few hours. Â I ended up having to run and pickup new stand-offs from Radio Shack, but otherwise, I had everything I needed at home.
One of the nice surprises I found was being able to reuse the power assembly from the PowerMac G4 to power the new motherboard. Â A post from tonymacx86 forums gave me great tips on how to solder the necessary pins so that the power button would work without the programmable chipset on the board. Â And its been a long time since I’ve soldered anything – but it proved very easy to do.
So, after its all said and done, the things that bug me about this build are:
- The extra power cords that attach on the far side of the motherboard – makes it difficult to keep them clear when shutting the case.
- Power supply is too far from motherboard connections to route cables appropriately – will need to look at extending the cables to the motherboard
- Power button hack works great, but power light isn’t illuminated – probably an easy fix
- I’m unhappy with my fan situation – so I will be looking to add some additional cooling to the case
The actual motherboard and server all came together very nicely. Â Overall, I ran into relatively few problems – however RAM proved to be my biggest issue and delayed actually using the system by a couple weeks. Â I initially ordered incompatible RAM from Amazon and had to go through the process or returning and ordering the correct DIMMs – but once that was done, it was smooth sailing.
So my MacMod Home Server project is still a hobby at this point. So, maybe there’ll be a followup in the coming months as I have time to tinker around the holidays. Â I hope to have this in production and usable soon.
