Crime Against Nature, or, how I learned to (nearly) complete "Damaged"

[destrudo]

Let me add a little background,
For all my years I've had trouble tackling storage space properly. Many issues handling the dev VM's that I have running (they were always slow as hell.) Plagued with handling the displays and general IO that I really /SERIOUSLY/ needed. Well, about a year ago I began the project to build a workstation to end all workstations (Which is why you will see some /somewhat/ low-end hardware in here.)

I needed displays, and I didn't wanna spend much, so I got evga 8800GT superclocks.
I needed those ****ed cards to quiet down, so I mounted HR-03's on them.
I needed those ****ed HR-03's to not take up my slots.

(Yes I know that's a 3870, I had the HR-03's on them originally, and don't comment about the crappiness of the pics, I know, I don't care.)

After the ability to handle my displays, well, I needed a motherboard to take it.
That motherboard needed SAS, at least four pci-e x8+'s
That motherboard was the Tyan S2915-E.
At first, I spent a measly 300 on a pair of 2214's, but in time, it changed, as I did, and became a pair of 2376's
So I thought to myself, "Well now I need memory" (Who really cares about the brand, it's 8gb 800mhz ddr2 ecc reg.)

It was at that point that the loch-ness monster came up to me, and asked:

"Can you get a Lian Li A77?"

"Sure!" I replied to the monster.

Now I needed my storage, I needed a whole LOT of storage. It needed to be fast too.
So I settled on some fujitsu sas drives to be raid 1'd (Although I am now seriously considering raid0) 36gb, nice, easy.... And 16 Seagate ES2 500GB hard disks ala...

The last two on the bottom right hand side (black and purple) are two of 8 1tb hard disks for backups.

But for some reason I wasn't satisfied, I needed magic, I needed lights, I needed amusement... so I went a little insane, and turned a webserver/fileserver/workstation (It really does everything for me) Into... this.

The system has 2 PSU's, one PCPC 860 (Modded with 120mm fan) for handling all the cards, procs, fans... everything except the drives. As well as a 500watt PCPC silencer to handle the drives alone.


I was trying to stick to more of an optical illusion to hide the unused cables, and I think it worked quite well.

It does look rather strange, but an adaptec 31605 with the breakout cables is a hard beast to dabble in... When it's under only UV, looks a lot nicer.

speaking of which....



I need to add another UV light on the lower area of the case, but I'm trying to avoid direct light when looking inside the case, so making a pretty looking thing to cover (But reflect) the light will probably come later.

This does not conclude anything.... this is just the beginning...

[Jahova]

Nice cable management.