First post, by drpogi
I asked for help on vogons during the course of this build, and thought I'd write up a post about my journey. The theme here is (1) rebuild an old box I had/used and (2) use as many Intel parts as possible (I'm a former employee).
Back in March/April I decided I want to rebuild a system I had put together in 2000-2005: dual slot 2 Xeon 450mhz 2mb, 512mb ram, 4x Seagate 10k RPM drives, in an Antec (Chieftec?) beige server tower. Quickly I learned how rare the C440GX+ motherboard is now, and kicked myself hard for letting it go for nothing ~15 years go. I decided to build an L440GX setup, and maybe someday a C440GX+ would come along and I'd try to snag it. So here we go:
It came with 512mb RAM across 3 sticks, and a pair of 600mhz Katmai's. Cool, I always had an affinity for Katmai, that was the first PC I bought and built (I built earlier 486 class boxes from parts heading to the dumpster). Turns out the Antec case is now also very hard to find, so I opted for a modern glass Antec C8 case. The glass is nice, I enjoy sitting and looking at the components. Here's the system with my first set of hard drives, 4x200gb Intel S3700 SSDs. They're not period-correct, but they're Intel parts and were dirt cheap.
I picked up an Adaptec 2410SA RAID controller (I never had hardware RAID before, but always wanted it), which in keeping with the Intel theme has an Intel 80302 processor on it (i960 RISC architecture!). Unfortunately the Intel SSDs were too new, they were not detected by the RAID controller.
I had to swap it out with a 3ware 9500s, which worked great with the Intel SSDs, but does not have an Intel processor on it. Here's the system with the SSDs mounted for nice viewing:
download/file.php?mode=view&id=224317
The nice thing about this case is that I keep finding unintended ways to mount things like hard drives in it so that they're visible and look good.
Next I picked up an Intel SRCU32 RAID controller (with Intel 80303 processor) and a pair of 147gb Seagate Cheetahs. I was missing the authenticity and sound of spinning disks.
Now I've got so many hard drives (6) in this system, I don't know what to do with them all. So I built another system, and bought 4 more! That's a dual socket Ivy Bridge Xeon, which will make an appearance later.
Hit the attach limit, next post..
