Messages

The Hitachi 0F12450 hard drives I have a server class drives. I have three HP Z400 PC's one with six drives in it and the others with four drives each and they work just fine. One PC is running Linux RAID. Two are Plex servers and are running FreeNAS in a fault tolerant ZFS2 RAID configuration. The one with six drives shows up with 16.4 TB of storage (currently 9.4 TB used). That being said, if I remember right the RAID screens on boot shows the 3 TB drives but the BIOS only showed 728 gig in SATA mode. I am pretty sure they will work as long as the RAID controller can see them as 3TB.

I used a sawzall to remove the middle plate on the front CD/DVD drive bays to allow the iStarUSA drive cage to fit. Nice thing with the dell case...it has four CD/DVD drive slots. The iStarUSA drive cage allows five SATA or SAS 3.5 hard drives and only takes up three of the CD/DVD slots and the remaining fourth still allows the Blu-ray burner I plan to use.


I removed the motherboard tray to cut out all the Dell mount points and any other protruding metal that would interfere with the Z800 motherboard. I also cut some tabs at the bottom of the case that might have interfered as well.



More parts came in like the hard drive cage, the video card and the two port SATA III PCIe card for the boot drive so the SSD will boot at the 6.0gb speed. Dual booting Mint 17.3 for day to day operations and Windows 7 for gaming and Adobe CS6 video encoding. The five drives will be motherboard RAID 5 so both OS's can read/share the data plus reads and write will be faster than stock drives since it is RAID 5 as well as some data protection.

Long night, now working on thinking about how to mount z800 MB on the tray and keep it lined up with the PCIe connectors to match the back panel alignment slots.


Pictures for todays work on my site:
Case teardown: http://mbppg.com/media/PC%20Builds/Dell%20690/dell%20690%20teardown/
For case mods: http://mbppg.com/media/PC%20Builds/Dell%20690/690%20case%20mods/

Thanks Andy, parts have started to arrive. The motherboard had a few slightly bent pins on the first CPU socket. Pretty sure I have them bent back correctly but I do not have CPU's yet to test with, they should arrive tomorrow.

I worked on the case this weekend and took it all down to do measurements for the motherboard. Looks like I have just enough room (14.25 x 13 inches) without having to cut anything out. I will have to remove the stock Dell I/O back panel by drilling out the rivets as the Dell I/O ports do not match up with the HP motherboard. The Dell motherboard tray is removable which will be nice to work with outside of the case to retro fit the new motherboard including proper motherboard mounting holes and possibly cutting out part of the tray to make room CPU fan mount plates on the bottom of the HP motherboard.

Parts going into the system include five Hitachi 3.0TB hard drives in RAID 5, PNY 240 GB SSD boot drive, (dual boot windows 8.1 and Mint 17.3),  LG Blu-ray rewriter, MSI GTX 970 gaming video card, two Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU coolers and an iStar tray-less hot swap hard drive cage.
http://www.amazon.com/iStarUSA-BPN-DE350SS-SILVER-Silver-Trayless-Hot-Swap/dp/B00CW31H5A

Plan is gaming/video encoding rig. I like old school PC's kinda like old muscle cars heavy iron and lots of power. Nice thing is the Dell has big fans that move a lot of air without being loud. I know this may seem a bit obnoxious but hey why not.

Project Pictures link:
http://mbppg.com/media/PC%20Builds/Dell%20690/

New to the forum and thanks to Andy and others for great info on the Z800. I have a couple Z400 work stations from work and currently using them as NAS/Server for storage and a Plex Media Server. I was given an opportunity to pick up a non working Dell Precision 690 and starting looking into building a dual processor PC.



Looking into the 690 boards and lack of processors they could handle, I started to think about the HP Z800 motherboard and ran across Andy's article. This got me thinking....having a Dell 690 case with an HP Z800 motherboard inside.  Not sure it will fit but I am pretty sure I can make it work. If not I have a Antec Lanboy Air I know I can make work. Anyway I thought it would be cool to see if I can make it work. Plus I plan to put stickers next to the Dell logo on the sides..."Dell, powered by HP" or like the older Intel inside logo "HP Z800 Inside!"

So I bought a rev 3 Z800 motherboard, two X5680 CPU's, and 48 gig of HP ram off ebay yesterday and a few other parts from Amazon and I will get started on the project soon.
I am not new to modding and I hope to have fun with this project as I love to build things. One of my project from several years ago: http://mbppg.com/media/photoalbums/fly_n_high_pc_mod/index.html
Another more recent project called Black-n-White http://mbppg.com/media/PC%20Builds/Black_n_White%20PC%20build/

Looking forward to this build and working with guys on the group.