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May 20, 2008
Chenbro ES34069-Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis as new unRAID server
Chenbro ES34069
The Chenbro ES34069 is a cool lil mini ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis that I've been using for a while to house one of my unRAID servers from Lime Technology.
What can I say, I outgrew my kuro boxes and needed a new method of storing data, music, video, backups in a reliable manner. I choose to go the tiny route to save some space and power using ITX and a mobile processor.
Lo and Behold my new data warehouse is born. Unraid ITX (pics enclosed)
There are many cool features about this mini ITX case I like, and a few I have issues with.
On the Positive side.
Small, but not too small to work with
Accepts 4 SATA Drives + 1 2.5" Laptop drive + 1 SLIM optical Media Drive + built in Card reader
Two 70MM fans on back which are pretty quiet and cool the drives and cpu well.
Accepts a special PCI riser card so you can use a small PCI raid card.
The case is very well ventilated. and if need be, you can put in a 60MM fan on the front.
4 removable hotswap SATA trays
On the negative side.
I disike the external bricks, but sometimes it's the price you pay for small size.
The card reader and PCI card are very hard to come by. I had to order them separately frmo the UK (that was expensive).
I would have really liked to have had an externally accessible PCI edge so I could use an eSATA connector, but no pci edge is accesible externally.. therefore I had to do some modding of my own.
The PCI riser does come with a special bracket to lock it in, but it did not fit well with the promise TX4. If you are not careful it can rise out of the motherboard.
Parts List
Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis From Logic Supply
At First I went with the Jetway J7F2WE1 From Newegg
It was cheap had the CPU and I had the spare 1GB ram module.
Later on I switched to a higher end MSI board that could support more ram.
MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mobile Mini-ITX Mainboard From Logic Supply
OCZ Gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory From Newegg
Internal Card reader & PCI Riser Card www.mini-itx.com
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II 4-Port Adapter NewEgg.Com
Kingston 2GB Secure Digital (SD) Flash Card w/MobileLite Reader Model FCR-ML+SD/2GB From Newegg
and a bunch of 500GB SATA II drives laying around.
Slim Optical Slot load Panasonic Optical drive from eBay.
Duo Core 2.33 GHZ CPU from eBay
In general, I really like the chassis, motherboard, machine OS and form factor. I've already touted unRAID as a home server NAS environment. This chassis is a perfect fit for it.
One might have chosen to forgo the internal card reader, however unraid loads it;'s OS from a USB flash and there is a license tied to the flash GUID. This was a necessary evil, so I went for the embedded card reader.
Why did you buy a 2GB card and card reader you ask? This card reader, in particular, accepts all three SD media SD/MiniSD/MicroSD. It;s just a handy device to have around. I really needed the 2GB card and I did Not want this big bulky card reader hanging off the chassis. So it's more for a cleaner look. Besides the price was right!
Overall the build was pretty easy, Screws come off the back the motherboard tray pulls out.
One thing is that you have to build these boxes in order. So I had to install things in steps.
First the 2.5" laptop drive,
Then the card reader.
Then the motherboard, ram, route cables, PCI card to riser, Slide riser down, re-route cables so it did not push the riser card out.
Last but not least the slim optical media. This is where things became a problem.
If your board and memory are too high or close to the optical media, you will be unable to install it.
When I started out, I had the Jetway board with the AMD Geode. I got this from newegg at a very cost effective price of $129 with a $20 rebate. Not too shabby as it came with the CPU and I had a spare gig ram chip laying around. This setup performed very well. The only downside was the board's Ethernet is not natively supported by unraid. This caused me to get a 3 port 1GB Ethernet daughter board. (ugh). Once installed that worked like a charm. I knew one day I was going to rebuild gatekeeper as a mini itx machine so I knew this board would be put to use elsewhere.
I had the need for more ram because unRAID's root filesystem is in ram. this is good and bad. Good because you can spin down all the disks and the system still functions and bad because you need a decent amount of ram if you want to load other packages.
unRAID is based on Slackware 12, so installing packages is really easy.
It seems as you find more uses for an almost idle machine, you find yourself adding packages.
Very soon I had a caching nameserver, time server, dhcp server. etc, etc.. Then I decided I wanted to move my bittorrent to this device and I saw the need for more ram. Perl/php/Apache/mysql and sure enough.. now you need the ram for root.
The MSI mainboard was quite sufficient. it accepted the 4GB of ram yielding 3.2GB to the OS after loading. This is due to the bios/pci reserve area and the nature of the chipset. Still, it's enough!
With a cheap 2.33Ghz Dual core mobile processor the machine became a quite able workhorse.
I'm hoping to one day get vmware server running on it and possible rip dvd's and compress them directly on the NAS box.
As I mentioned on the downside, I could not lock/screw down the Promise TX4 PCI card and riser. Perhaps a different card would work better, but this bracket just did not fit well with the promise.
I had to have 4 SATA ports so I had to go with what was available.
I took 1 of the internal SATA motherboard ports and attached it to the 2.5: laptop drive.
as I mentioned, once I get vmware server running on it, I plan to run a ripping xp environment and a slackware development environment right on the box.
Also unraid makes use of a feature called a cache drive whereby all writes happen to a temporary work drive.
Later on in the eve, the files are moved from the cache drive to the raid array, thereby providing very fast writes because you do not do the parity calculation until files are moved to the protected JBOD array.
Ithink the main reason for this was to handle HD video streaming without having RAID parity calculation causing delays. Don't get me wrong the system is fast enough, but the ram cache fills up fast and the nature of parity calculation may cause pauses.
After all sata connections were made, I realized I had one more unused motherboard connector and I thought... Gee.. allI need is an eSATA adpater and I can attach a 5th drive...
A quick look at the case shows a vent at the back. A few nibbles here and there and I was able to unscrew the eSATA from the PCI bracket and attach it to the back of the case. I'm not using it right now, but should the need com e where I have to expand or backup data, I want to do it at top speed!
So although simpler then my ReadyNAS interface, and not as mature as openfiler, unRAID is going to be a serious contender due to the way it uses disks.
As I outgrow and retire my Kurobox-HG's I think how far we've come and how much I enjoy building these lil machines.
Stay tuned as I still have a few more project builds as I plan to dabble with clustering, iSCSI and new backup technology.
Links of Interest
http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=100
http://x-case.co.uk/p/404991/chenbro-es34069-mini-itx-home-servernas-chassis---just-arrived.html
http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2008/03/27/the-chenbro-es34069-case-review-part-1/
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=42¤cy=0
What to watch out for:
You will see a number of different pricing structures on the net. One must ask.. how can one company have this product $40 cheaper? Read the fine print. Some of them do not have a power supply, or possibly the heat sink or other cables.
I bought mine from Logic supply and it came with everything needed.
Ram Height and Placement if you plan to use slim optical media. You may have to get a motherboard with ram placement further back or go with low profile ram.
With the MSI and OCZ ram I just barely made it!
Posted by Me on May 20, 2008 12:00 AM