Lack Rack

This is the first picture of my Rack Project. The idea to put the Lacks I bought from Ikea in this fashion comes from http://ryansullivan.info. So, kudos to to RS.

The idea itself to use Lack coffee tables from Ikea comes from an ex coworker of mine. Marco. Kudos to MS too! 

For now, there is just a 24 ports, 1U, Cat 6 Ethernet patch strip bought on Amazon for 29 euros. Build quality is on the el cheapo side of things, but it's cheap, so... :)

The coming weekend I hope to be able to move my gear in it. I bought a Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4088-S rack case for my server to go with the new rack. Build quality is robust but it's not very well refined. I'm coming from a Corsair Carbide 330R and the difference is palpable. Still, for the 76 euros I spent it's good enough and I need the extra space. I plan infact to add another 7 drives in the future. I mean, I'm going to add 3 drives to the 5 that are in the server right now, then, in the future, buy a backplane like this one and add another another 4 disks.

In order to do that I had to buy an HBA. My server's motherboard Asrock E3C226D2I has 6 SATA ports, and I obviously needed more than that. :)

It was a long process but in the end I found a BROADCOM SAS 9207-8I for a 109 euros new and I went for it.

There is more :), I'm using 4 disks in a Microserver Gen8 via iSCSI multipath right now and the E3C226D2I has only 2 Ethernet ports and 1 PCIe slot. I don't like the idea to go back to singlepath, so I think I'm going to do something a bit crazy and use a USB3-to-Ethernet network card. We'll see how it goes. LOL.

It's all for now. Bye bye then.