After two months or so of planning, I finally completed vanguard and retired cerebro. The one complaint I have about the Norco RPC-4020 chassis is that it seems a bit noisier than my previous CM Stacker case (which had the same amount of fans). The fans in the Norco case have a higher RPM, however drives in the Norco case seem to run at about 38c while the same drives in the Stacker ran at 25c.

I also had one drive die not long after I plugged it in, however the SMART error registered about 37 days ago. I will upload some pictures later on once my parity resync completes.

After a week or so of research, I decided to go with the Supermicro C2SEE motherboard for my new fileserver (vanguard). You can check out the specs of the board here. For a quick summary, the main features are:

• 6 x onboard SATA ports
• 4 x PCI slots
• 1 x PCIe 16x slot
• 1 x PCIe 16x (@ 4x) slot
• 1 x PCIe 1x slot
• DDR3 RAM
• Onboard 10/100/1000 NIC

The main reason for choosing this motherboard was that the company who sells unRAID (lime-technology use this same board in the pre-built servers they sell, and it’s lime-technology recommended. I figure if I use this board, I won’t have too many issues.

As part of upgrading the amount of hard drives in my current fileserver @ home I wanted to find a case which could handle more drives. I currently have a CM Stacker which handles 12 drives (utilising 4-in-3 cages) and I was finding it a bit of a hassle to constantly unplug/replug all of the drives to change one. While browsing the internet I came across the Norco RPC-4020, which is a 4RU case that handles 21 hard drives.

The issue with buying this case was that nobody in Australia stocks them. I ended up getting in contact with the people @ IPC Direct who said they could ship it to me.. for $196 USD! Recently I was on holiday in the US along the west coast and IPC Direct said they could ship the case to my hotel which nobody was able to do. On my flight I had the norco classed as a 2nd piece of luggage and it cost me $0 USD to bring back.

The next step in upgrading my fileserver will be to buy the new motherboard (Asus P5Q Deluxe) and CPU (intel something..) and start the transfer of the hard drives from the old server to the new. If you are looking for a new server case I HIGHLY recommend the Norco RPC-4020. The case comes with the 20 SATA hard drive trays and houses one drive internally and seems to be a fairly well made case. Coming in at $300USD, it’s worth every cent.