AMD Phenom 9850 2.5GHz Quad-Core GIGABYTE GA-MA790FX-DS5 motherboard AMD 790FX north bridge AMD SB600 south bridge 4GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) OCZ Reaper HPC SDRAM Radeon HD 3870 video card Thermaltake Armor Series VA8003SWA Full Tower Case HighPoint 2320 8-channel PCI-e x4 RAID controller 600 watt Thermaltake Purepower power supply 6x500 GB Western Digital Caviar SATA 3.0 Gb/s (1-6/7 RAID-5) 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA 1.5 Gb/s (7/7 in RAID-5) 750 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 3.0 Gb/s Rosewill RCX-Z3 CPU cooler Samsung 20X DVD-R DVD burner 1x 250mm cooling fan 2x 120mm cooling fans 2x 90mm cooling fans 2x 4" Blue Cold Cathode lights

The Blue Dragon (Click for larger image)

Upgrade History

The Blue Dragon was commissioned in June of 2008 as a replacement concole for the aging Red Dragon. Since the Red Dragon stood as a signiture computer in the Dragon Array, the Blue Dragon had no small task to fill. Despite being Red Dragon being four and a half years old, the system could still hold it's own. Unforchently, mounting problems and aging hardware meant the system wouldn't be able to be the primary concole forever.

The design of the Blue Dragon addressed several of the Red Dragon's short commings. First and foremost, the problem of heat. When the Red Dragon was designed, there were around 10 case fans. Many had failed over the long years of use and cooling had become quite an issue. For the Blue Dragon, the design had a reduced fan count. To lower noise, larger fans were prefered.

An other issue with the Red Dragon was the drive bay count. The system housed 8 3.5" hard drives and two 5.25"--and that was all the case was designed to hold. Since the solution to storage here has been simply to add more drives, the case for the Blue Dragon had to accomidate this.

The core of the machine needed to be something that would keep processing power at or above the curve for quite a while. The Red Dragon was a dual processor system at a time when nothing but servers were running this configuration. It was before multicore CPUs were around and held it's own as they entered the market.

As a long-time fan of AMD processors, I knew I was going to chose some flavor of of their processors. I settled on the Phenom 9850--a quad-core clocked at 2.5 GHz. Initially I wasn't sure if I was going with that or the 2.3 GHz version, but there really wasn't any reason to settle for less. This CPU also consumed 125 watts and was still in my budget.

The motherboard I had a good deal of debate over, but decided on the Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 after reading several reviews. The Linux guys all said good things about it and the chipset was good. It gave me 6 internal SATA drives and two PCI-E x16 slots along with apearing to be well designed to disapate heat.

RAM was a bit important and I wanted something designed to get rid of heat. I was impressed with Pluvius's OCZ Reaper RAM and went with that myself. I loaded the system for 4 GB--4x what the Red-Dragon currently has.

To house this system, I wanted a case that could move a lot of air and had room for the RAID array that will likely exist in it one day. I picked a silver Thermaltake Armor Series full tower case which employed a 250mm side fan, 2x120mm intake/exaust fans and two more 90mm fans. It can also house 8x 3.5" drives and 10x 5.25" drives. When I do design the RAID array, I have the option of picking up some hot-swap 5.25" bays to hose it.

For the power supply, I stuck was a recomendation by Pluvius for a 600 watt Thermaltake Purepower. It had all the connectors I wanted, able to be plugged in by groups and a 120mm cooling fan on the bottom. While I could have gone larger, I don't think I needed to. I'm not overclocking or running multiple video cards. The Red-Dragon runs off a 300 watt supply and probably draws more wattage then the Blue-Dragon (not sure because of the video card).

On July 28th, 500 GB drive prices bottomed out at $58/drive. This meant I could build a 3,000 GB RAID-5 array with the remaining budget I had allotted for the Blue Dragon.

I had one 500 GB drive from the Red Dragon and decided to order 6 more 500 GB drives for the array. This would give the Blue Dragon 3.0 TB of RAID-5 storage. I selected a HighPoint 2320 controller as I've been happy with the two other HighPoint controllers I've had in the past--including the PCI-X controller that has run the Red Dragon's 6x250 GB RAId-5 array from four years.

The Blue Dragon's case has 11x 5.25" drive bays in front. One is taken for the power switch and one at the very bottom has a pull out drawer. There is an adapter that converts three of the bays to 3.5" and it includes a 120mm blue LED cooling fan. I saw that Thermaltake sells these bays and ordered two more. I pulled out the drawer and an 5.25" to 3.5" adapter and am now have 9x 3.5" fan cooled bays. This still leaves room for the CD/DVD-RW drive and 3 additional 3.5" bays at the back of the case.

I installed all the drives in the converted 5.25" bays at the front of the case. They are all cooled by 120mm fans. The 7x 500 RAID drives go to the HighPoint controller and the two remaining drives (a 500 GB program drive and a 750 GB overflow) run from the motherboard.

For the moving process, I picked up my 1 TB external hard drive from the safe deposit box. This would provide intermediate storage for the transition. The 500 GB overflow drive from the Red Dragon was nearly full, so it's data was held by the backup drive while the RAID array was being set up. The Red Dragon held everything else, since it still contained the original 1 TB RAID-5 array. The external drive has both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports. The Blue Dragon has 2 eSATA ports, which made things easy and much faster. USB 2.0 has 480 mbit/s transfer speeds and eSATA 2,400 mbit/sec--5x as fast.