Second piece of kit....The PC Case

And so the purchases start to roll in, tonight I've ordered a new case and I've gone with the Corsair Obsidian 750D Airflow.

I plan to swap out the vanilla fans at the front for RGB ones and the cooling solution is likely to be a waterblock to rad with RGB too... ditto RGB on the memory.. so a little bling.

But, tonight the case, it's the all black version... it is "Obsidian" after all, with a window on the right side, so I will be able to see it all to my right as I sit at my desk.

I'm planning to make the current machine my main office server/file server, but that'll be when I move onto an all Linux base.  Yes, I'm going to retired Window as my main boot environment and go with Ubuntu.  And I'll run VGA passthrough on KVM to a Windows machine if I need to play games or run VS.

Everything else will go onto my file server, and in that direction, I've also ordered two more 4TB Drives.  I'm only getting WD Blue, I've had great personal success with WD Blues, only having one failure in about 15 years (mucho lower than Samsung, Sandisk, Hitachi and Toshiba).  And then I got excellent customer support.

So, 8TB more storage... I've also gone with a 500GB SSD, again a WD Blue.  Because I have a 500G NVME M.2 SSD I can pull out of my current machine for the main boot.

I'm sticking with my EVGA 1080 GTX SC graphics card, and I'll put the older 770GTX SC into the file server - or maybe something less power hungry.

Either way, at the moment the new machine will go into this new case and the old machine will remain in the now very aged but trusty Coolmaster Cosmos 1000, except I will eventually recase even that in a matching Obsidian, maybe one without the airflow front and I'll keep the Cosmos as a spare (you never know).

But, all this is on order... The only part to yet arrive is the power supply.

I've had some Molex to SATA death cables arrive too, but they're for a server project which I've been trying to film for you guys for a few days.

This isn't to be confused with my current under desk server, which you can see me working on the case here:

I've also started to record snippets of my review of the 6 core 12 thread laptop I've been using for the last 6 months, so I hope to start editing that together.

I will also, hopefully, this weekend be able to start showing you why there has been a large chunk of time missed in my posts... What have I been busy doing?... 

WD Disk DOE & Dust....

I recently ordered a new WD Blue disk, it duly arrived and had the strangest problem I've seen in many a long year, no matter what I did the disk showed as 64MB total and it lost all data upon power cycling.

I puzzled over this briefly, until I pulled the disk back out the caddy and saw it had exactly 64MB of cache, yes, no platter space was being shown, just the cache showing up as disk space.  I have never ever seen this before, cache has always been a transparent intermediary for me in production and so to suddenly have the cache being the only exposed space was odd.

However, dead on arrival hard disk, a quick RMA and a new one winged its way into my hands, they actually gave me a slight upgrade as I got a WD Black by return of post.

Tonight I planned an hour to fit the new disk and add it to my workstation.... This machine has no cable management, and its a nightmare to add drives, there are six built in 3.5" bays but they have a set latch and screw mechanism, which forces you to fit the drives to that the power connectors are actually straining the distant power plugs. (I do plan to buy a pair of SATA power extenders on pay day).

What struck me as a massive problem however, is the amount of dust inside there.  Clearly, since fitting the 1080 GTX I've had something change or fail or open as there are copious amounts of dust in there.

Now my work area is not optimum for a workstation, I have a full tower case, so it has to go under the desk and the floor is carpeted.  Now this had been mitigated by the Coolmaster Cosmos 1000 case having lifting rails, taking the whole thing 1.25" off of the floor level, and two ground level filters, as well as a rear and front filter set.

But clearly things have not gone well, as just dust dust dust.

My original plan for the start of the year was to re-case the server, then re-case this PC as a server as well, retire one of the aging DELL 2950's for this machine itself, and put myself a new workstation together for my 40th.

Trouble is?... I'm skint, like proper skint, so I can't afford the workstation I was planning on...

And now I need to sort out this machine... I smell another re-casing task a head... Hmm, which case?  I'm thinking about the Corsair Obsidian range... Anyone have any other suggestions for a full height tower?... 1 x 5.25" at least 6 x 3.5" internal mount points and at least 2 x 2.5" mount points internally.  Front Panel USB would be a boon.

Dust seems to be my enemy.