SGI O2 NAS Build Log

[bicostp]

The other day at work I found a few SGI O2 workstations in the trash and grabbed the one that looked the best. (The O2 was a low-end workstation produced by Silicon Graphics, the company responsible for many graphics systems throughout the 90s, including one of The Weather Channel's 'Local on the 8s' systems and the N64's GPU.) Unfortunately I could not get any of the ones I tried to boot properly, so I just grabbed the nicest looking one and figured out what to do with it. I have an AMD Geode based Mini-ITX motherboard sitting around in a skeleton of a chassis, so I figured the SGI would look better than that, and another project was born.

Parts:
SGI O2 workstation chassis and shell
AMD Geode NX DB1500 motherboard with 512 MB DDR RAM and a 1.0 ghz AMD Athlon
Sony DVD-ROM
Two 400 gig IDE Hitachi Deathstar hard drives
Front panel wiring harness from an old modded Dell case I plan on getting rid of anyway
OS: FreeNAS Server 2003 (because of RDP and TeamViewer VPN, mostly.)

Total investment: $0

I want to preserve the outward appearance of the original computer as possible, without going through a bunch of pain in the butt 'stealth' stuff like making adapters to connect the motherboard's ports to ports removed from the O2 motherboard. It's going to be set up so any Mini-ITX motherboard and 3.5" hard drives will just bolt in, so eventually when I have the time and money it can be upgraded with a newer motherboard and some better hard drives, making a multi-terabyte NAS with gigabit LAN and eSATA.

The O2's chassis was designed to hold several removable modules, which connected to a common backplane at the front of the case. Thankfully the outer shell is solid plastic and covers the chassis like a helmet, so this part should be fairly easy. The trickier part will be closing the back up, because that's where most of the butchering will happen. Haven't decided if I'm going to try saving any of the module attachment parts, or just glue them together in approximately the right places building off the motherboard tray.

Here's how the motherboard lines up with the SGI motherboard tray:


Just to make things easier, I'm going to cut down the aluminum remains of a case the board is in now into a motherboard tray that can just attach to the SGI tray with JB Weld. That way there's no question that the screw holes will line up. Unfortunately the motherboard only has 10/100 Ethernet, so

The first snag I hit was the power supply. The original PSU was long and square, while the PC PSU is short and wide. (The SGI power supply cover actually lines up with both, oddly enough.) I tried arranging the PC supply different ways, but there was just no way to line it up so it didn't interfere with the motherboard. The solution? Gut the PC power supply and put its internals into the SGI PSU frame. It needs some rewiring, as the PC power supply has some extra parts on the AC plug, but this should work out better than


The PC supply is smaller, so it will fit.

When it's put back together, it should look something like this (but with the cables coming out the back or other side):

The back of the computer is to the right.

The chassis itself will need some work. There's a plate on the front which has to go for cable accessibility, and the dividers near the bottom may have to go to make room for hard drives. (I'm going to try reusing the original sleds, but more than likely the drives will need a custom bracket.)

More to come later.

[dragonhead]

dude if you go back and grab the other one ill pay you for shipping. those look sick! and i just built a NAS box using FreeNAS. Its currently residing in a suitcase though.

[Triton]

ditto, i'd like one too if possible Why dont I ever find stuff this cool in the trash?

[dragonhead]

ditto, i'd like one too if possible Why dont I ever find stuff this cool in the trash?

you live in iowa.

[Triton]

ditto, i'd like one too if possible Why dont I ever find stuff this cool in the trash?

you live in iowa.

touche'

[bicostp]

Okay new hard drive strategy.

Earlier model O2s had two hard drive bays and space for the A/V module (there are pictures here), but because this one is an R10000, it only has room for one hard drive. R5000s had a second drive bay, so if they're still there tomorrow I'll pull out the parts necessary to retrofit this chassis. (Aside from an extra bit of metal clipped in, they're identical.) The new hard drives will sit in the original SGI drive sleds, and the connectors will be accessible through the slots in the front chassis panel where the frontplane's SCSI connectors poked through. Unfortunately the slots aren't big enough for the Molex connectors and IDE cables on the hard drives I already have to fit, so they'll have to be widened. (I need to make a bigger hole for motherboard cables anyway.) This is probably easier than trying to build something from scratch (or retrofit old Dell brackets)


Here's what a 3.5" IDE drive in the unmodified sled and chassis looks like.

I test fit the motherboard as well. There's about a millimeter between the top of the heat sink and the side of the power supply frame. It's definitely a tight fit, but there's plenty of air circulation in that spot and the Geode NX 1500's TDP is only 9 watts so heat shouldn't be a big issue. (With that heatsink and some airflow it never felt like it got above ambient temps anyway.) It means gluing the aluminum tray to this one is out, but thankfully it's solid under all the ITX screw locations so I'll just screw and JB Weld some standoffs in.



Also made one of the first irreversible mods this afternoon: the unnecessary parts (90%) of the frontplane have been eliminated. It just screws right back where it originally was, so it lines up with the plastics perfectly. Unfortunately it blocks the hard drive slot a bit, so maybe that hard drive frame will need to be modified so the drive sits further toward the back of the case.



The A/V module has been gutted, and it ill be repopulated with functional, proper-looking audio ports and someday a 2.5" SSD which will serve as the boot drive. (Far off into the future, when the motherboard and drive upgrades happen.)

e: Glued the little retaining clip back onto the power supply cover, am currently trying to fit an optical drive with the stock faceplate.

e2: Edited so it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. Still pretty about how nice these manual mode photos are coming out on my 8 year old Powershot A80.

[bicostp]

Went in today not feeling too great but there was stuff I had to do that they didn't tell me about until last Friday evening that needed to be done ASAP so in between replacing computers and spreading pestilence I grabbed the second hard drive bracket holder thing off an R5000. Turns out it was just held in with two screws that were accessible from the bottom of the case without even having to take the bottom plastic cover off. Slipped right into the R10k frame I've been using, so now it has two proper drive bays.

I have to give SGI credit, these things are pretty intuitive. Too bad the plastics shatter if you look at them wrong.

Probably going to go with Windows 2000 Server or Server 2003 instead of FreeNAs, partly because our TV only understands shared Windows Media libraries not SMB shares, and partly because of RDP.

[Triton]

i still want one of the shells (or any other SGI machines they might have ) and like dragonhead said i'll gladly pay shipping and such

[bicostp]

Did some fit testing with the R5000 motherboard tray today. It took some cutting to get everything lined up properly, but this will work. It would just need to have standoffs added and held in place with JB Weld, because there isn't enough room to retrofit the aluminum ITX tray. (The heat sink will hit the power supply frame.)



I had to make a notch in the circled area to clear the audio jacks, but everything else made it under that part.



Still needs some cutting. This is about as low as the board can get; I cut a couple plastic spacers out of the way so now everything is flush with the latch mechanism. I think the PCI riser might even line up where it belongs! Really wish I had the shield plate to go with this motherboard.



There's about 1/8" of room between the heat sink and power supply with the R5000 tray. (The R10k tray in the OP doesn't fit with the second hard drive bay installed.)

The power supply is next. The AC connector in the regular case has some extra parts soldered to it, which will be transferred to the connector on the original SGI PSU case. (They're both the kind that push into a rectangular hole and click into place, so swapping them would mean desoldering everything anyway.)

Unfortunately I don't have a disc drive that works with the black SGI filler bezel, but the green main cover you see when it's closed is actually the part that attaches to the tray. (See this picture.) It has the eject button built in, but it was designed to push on the black bezel, so I'll just super glue a couple bits of plastic to that so it reaches the DVD drive's eject button. Not exactly 100% stealth, but when it's closed (which it will be the vast majority of the time) you won't notice. Another hard drive could easily fit in the optical drive's space using a 3.5"-5.25" bracket, but airflow is very limited in that space.

As for future expansion, this motherboard looks perfect. So perfect I was considering buying it right away, but that's probably the Sudafed talking. About $150 will get the board, RAM, a 32 gig boot SSD, and some right-angle SATA power adapters and data cables. (The PSU has a 20 pin ATX connector and the 4 pin P4 power connector, but only 4-pin Molex power.) After that it's just a matter of getting more hard drives! We'll see how the ol' tax returns look... The main reason for replacing the board is because the onboard LAN only supports 10/100 Ethernet, while the rest of our network is gigabit. Yes a PCI gig card would solve that problem, but then it's still limited to two SATA 1.5 ports. Hmm... That sounds like the cheapassed way to do it, so that's probably what I'll do. (That is, assuming the motherboard survives this ordeal. Hell it's been through worse. ) I think there's an extra gigabit card around here somewhere...

[bicostp]

I was thinking of just ordering a couple of these 2 TB Hitachi 5K3000s and using the existing motherboard for now. They're 6Gb/s SATA, so they're definitely ready down the road when a new motherboard goes in. (I'm more interested in bulk storage than extremely fast storage, and the gigabit network is going to bottleneck traffic even on SATA I drives.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145475" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

$69.99 each after promo codes and rebate.

Yes/no/maybe? (The alternative is two PATA 400 gig Hitachi Deathstars.)

[jdmlight]

I was thinking of just ordering a couple of these 2 TB Hitachi 5K3000s and using the existing motherboard for now. They're 6Gb/s SATA, so they're definitely ready down the road when a new motherboard goes in. (I'm more interested in bulk storage than extremely fast storage, and the gigabit network is going to bottleneck traffic even on SATA I drives.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145475" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

$69.99 each after promo codes and rebate.

Yes/no/maybe? (The alternative is two PATA 400 gig Hitachi Deathstars.)

That's a good price, and Hitachi hard drives are fine. They're not as quiet as say a WD Green drive, but they're not exactly loud either. I have three Hitachis and they haven't given me issues so far.

[bicostp]

New parts! Somebody was throwing out a generic tower PC so I absconded with the front panel wiring harness and three fans. (The fans just needed some oil.)

I've also started messing with Windows Home Server in a VM, and it's definitely the OS of choice now. It's basically My First Server 2003 with the domain controller functionality lopped off, but the networking and backup integration are really nice. Aside from throwing up a big "no you don't belong here the big scary console tools will kill your data and slaughter your family!" warning when you log in, it will run anything Server 2003 will run. I've got it set up with FileZilla and TeamViewer at the moment, soon it will FTP things to the Quadra.

Out of the box, our Sony TV didn't like pulling media off of it because it's not compliant with the HDLNA streaming content protection authentication dalmatian plantation protocol. The solution is to disable WHS's built-in media server, install Windows Media Player 11 (instructions here, just extract the installers and run them in XP compatibility mode), add the Music and Videos shares to WMP's library, then share the library with other network devices. Works perfectly!

Probably not going to use the motherboard I have after all. The CPU is only a P3 900 equivalent, it only has two SATA 1.5 ports, and it only supports 10/100 Ethernet. The CPU and NIC are the biggest issues

The plan for this weekend is to put the power supply into its new shell and order some parts.

Shopping list:
GIGABYTE GA-D525TUD motherboard w/ Atom D525. Yes there are cheaper Atom based motherboards, but this one has four SATA 3.0 ports and an IDE bus for the ODD or a third hard drive. Most only have two SATA ports and no IDE, and once you throw in a PCI card to add those features it's the same price. It's also designed to their 'Ultra Durable 3' standard, so it has solid state caps.
Kingston 2gb DDR3 Holy hell RAM is cheap these days.
Hitachi 5K3000 2 TB Same drive as before. Might just get one to start with, hard drives just keep getting cheaper.

[bicostp]

Double post weekend update!

Ordered a couple of those Hitachi 2 TB drives on Monday, they got here on Wednesday. I lucked out; they play nice with the 2005 motherboard!

Got the front panel connectors wired up, so far so good there.

Windows Home Server is running off a 250 gig 7200 RPM Hitachi IDE drive, which will serve as the boot volume. (That way it's easy to just pull the data drives in case the OS goes kaput or something.) Next on the software list will be Media Player 11 (for sharing media better than the built-in WHS media server), TeamViewer (for the VPN), and FileZilla (for sharing with the Quadra and SE).

A spare gigabit Ethernet card solves the slow built-in NIC problem, but creates a new one: the PCI slot on the O2 is parallel to the motherboard, so I'll have to see if the SGI riser works in a PC properly with an old P3 motherboard and SoundBlaster or something.

Now that I know everything still works, the next bit will be the power supply.

[dragonhead]

i still hate your guts for not picking up that other sgi case

[Triton]

i still hate your guts for not picking up that other sgi case

me too!