Just last night I put together my server out of parts I had lying around my office. Having almost next to no experience putting a server together but plenty with regular computers, I intrepidly started my endeavor on putting my own server together. The case I used was an actual authentic server unit that was stripped of everything but its monster power supply unit, its floppy drive and the original IDE cables. Now I have a case (an actual server case) to house the hardware I had yet to place in it.

First I tested two different motherboards that both had Socket T462 for the AMD Sempron processor that I was going to add. One of the MB didn’t respond after I set it up and plugged the power switch,various LEDs, etc. to it. I assumed the MB was no good and tried the other one. The second one I tried was new and more advanced. The faulty MB used had two DIMM SDRAM slots. The second MB had three DDR RAM slots. So with that said, I installed the second MB with 768 MB of DDR RAM, two 5.1 surround sound cards, one USB 2.0 unit, and an extra Ethernet card(and of course the processor.) I’ll get into more specs later. Now on to the hard drives.

I started off with two 80GB HDs to see how things would work. I hooked them up to the MB and gave it a shot. Things ran good for the first minute until one of the HDs sparked and caught fire. I immediately cut the power and then the flames doused. I decided to give it a few minutes for the drive to cool down and then take it out. I replaced it with a 40GB drive. Ah…the smell of electric circuits frying. How was that for excitement?

The CD/DVD drives had no problems. There are two CD drives and one DVD drive, but only two of them are hooked up to the MB. All of them are powered by the way. My server is well on its way. The only problems I have now are:

1. I have no graphics card (it’s an AGP slot by the way),
2. I need large capacity HDDs and
3. Due to the type of MB I have,I was unable to plug in all the LEDs and switches.So If there is an error I will not be able to tell by the front LED panel.

Enough of that.

Here are the specs so far:

• AMD Sempron processor (speed unknown)
• x1 512 and x1 256 MB of RAM (768MB Total)
• x2 5.1 Surround Sound Cards
• x1 USB 2.0 card (2 ports)
• x1 Backup Ethernet card
• x2 HDDs (x1 40GB and x1 80=120GB total)
• x2 CD drives
• x1 DVD drives I will be sure to update the specs when I get my graphics card and am able to see what this puppy can do.

UPDATE ( 4/10/12) – The server previously discussed has been disassembled and no longer exists. I have a new media server that is in use. The housing is an old IBM ThinkCentre case. The guts are

• a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor
• 512MB of RAM
• x7 hard drives (6 in use) : x2 80GB, x1 2TB, x1 230GB, x1 500GB, x1 60GB, x1 120GB
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate