The Tank

After resolving the Not Putting a Heatsink on the CPU crisis, I thought you might like to see the collection of antiques I'm bringing together.

Firstly the case, the reason this build is called The Tank. It's an Antec 1080AMG full tower made of 1mm steel. It weighs a fricking ton! Really, it should have wheels. It's been sitting unloved up in my loft for too long now so it's time to put it to a good use.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...674/KJAvOi.jpg

The Tank opened up. Despite the size, it doesn't take that many drives. Two drives can be installed in each of the detachable disk racks you can see in the middle. There's space for a further four 5.25" devices which I'll likely use for hard drive caddies. The PSU is a 600W OCZ job I bought a few years ago.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...910/BxMevp.jpg

The insides. Here you can see the Supermicro X8ST3-F server motherboard in place. It's a socket 1366 ATX board with a built Matrox G200 graphics card (wool!), six SATA ports, 8 SAS ports, two Gigabyte network ports, remote management stuff and probably a couple of other things I haven't discovered yet. It didn't come with a manual... The CPU is a Xeon e5620, a four core CPU with hyper threading - an i7 for servers really.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...743/6lIkqA.jpg

How it looks with the heatsink on. It's an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro job. It was cheap(isn) and does the job nicely.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...537/RBxg2b.jpg

I've now installed a four port NIC on one of the PCIe slots. I didn't take a pic of this but you're not missing much!

I'll be using The Tank as an ESXi server. I already had ESXi installed on a USB thumb drive which I used on my Microserver. I plugged the thumb drive into one of the internal USB slots and was a bit surprised to find it booted up no problem at all, correctly identifying all the NIC ports and starting up as per normal. I had my VMs on a drive which I pulled from the Microserver and had also installed. There they were, all ready to use... The big test (which I haven't done yet) is moving over a further four hard drives which I used for an Xpenology storage array. This may be more of a challenge as I had to do some fancy tricks to allow the drives to be used directly by the Xpenology VM. I'll find out soon enough how it goes :)

interesting looks like the Antec 1080AMG was just a chieftec dragon with an antec badge on it

I think you may well be right Pob. It was a long time ago that I bought this case so I can't remember my reasoning for the purchase - probably the reviews were good!

Small update - the drive cages hold three drives each, not two so there's space for ten drives in the case if need be. I've also transferred across four drives from my Microserver which I used as my Xpenology storage array. I can't remember the specifics especially as I don't use ESXi everyday but I had to manually arrange for the drives to bypass EXSi and talk straight to the Xpenology VM (I think) so I was a bit dubious about whether the disk transfer would go smoothly. It did. I plugged in the drives, started up ESXi then the Xpenology VM and voila. It's a testament to how robust ESXi is that I can swap to a whole new machine on an entirely different architecture and have zero problems.

Here's a picky of the final setup bar the addition of a fan or two. It's definitely an old skool case - no place to tidy the cables!
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...538/ekrTk9.jpg

Great Job Bluecube :)