One of the key things with doing any build is that you should learn something while doing it. For this build I needed a non-gaming machine that could handle tons of storage. It's being used for digital photography, so the keys are storage, dvd-writing, storage, card reading, storage, picture processing, and storage. And did I mention storage?

I wanted a case that could handle a lot of hard drives and that would allow me to place fans as needed to keep them cool. I selected Spire's SwordFin SP-9007B. It's got six 3.5" internal hard drive bays, plus two external, plus four 5.25" external bays. Six hard drives should be enough, eight should always be enough, but long term, knowing my inventory on hand, It very well come could have 16 drives in it. Which means I'll have to find a way to mount another 4 drives. But that's not for today.

Today we're only going for a single terabytes across 4 drives. Ideally this would be on a raid 5, but for now, it's a JBOD (just a bunch of drives). Down the road this will end up moving to something like four 400 gig drives, but for today I think we're okay.

Normally on a build, I'll assemble everything on the motherboard first, and test it all out before the mobo goes into the case. I did that here, and did so well before I had a camera and thought to take pictures. On this build the power supply and case arrived a week after everything else. So I borrowed a power supply from my Mythbox (watch for that rebuild to come soon) and hooked everything up. Of course, no power switch for the motherboard, but if you know what two pins short together to turn the machine on and off, a handy screw driver will work just as well. Note, you don't have to worry about 'bounce' on this as it's a mechanical switch, and 'bounce' is a part of it. 'Bounce' is when you make any electrical connection, it's not simply a switch from on to off, there is a brief moment where the connection is made and broken many times until it settles down. Because of this the power supply / motherboard are smart enough to not read the little millisecond contact times when the switch is coming together. Otherwise your machine would turn on and off a dozen times. What the system does instead is say, has this connection been stable for .x seconds? If so then turn on or off.

So, I wanted to learn something on the build, in this case, I'm going to for two main things, has MSI made it as a company, are they someone I want to use as a source for parts, and what is the new AMD Stable Business Platform really like?

Let's call it BP for short. The BP is AMD (and via chipset partner nVidia) answer to getting AMD onto the corporate desktop. You get 15 months of hardware stability. The drivers will be updated on regular periods and the hardware wont be abandoned for at least 15 months. This means you can build 10 one month, 10 next year and know that all 20 will be alike. You wont have to worry about this driver for this revision, and that driver for that one. Dell and others use this to sell into corporate cultures where total cost of ownership is more important than initial price. In this case TCO goes way up if you have to support dozens of different configurations.

In my case, I don't have to worry about it. It's one machine, but it's nice to get an idea of whats going on, on the business side of things. (In my real life, this combo might be rolled out onto 20 customer service machines, 10 shipping work stations, and 10 corporate office machines in my company. I also got it for about half the price of retail, which is the best reason of all to try it out!)

Let's answer the MSI question first. Are they ready for prime time? A picture can answer this for you. See this custom port cover plate? It's custom because you have to remove the metal covers for the parts you do or don't have with a pair of tin-snips. Even ECS, a budget brand doesn't do this. So, right off the bat, thats a massive strike against them.

Next up are the ram slots. You know the drill, you match colors. If you have two blue sockets and two black ones, you put both your sticks in either blue or both your sticks in black. When I did this with the MSI board it booted just fine, ran just fine, and was happilly running at DDR333 instead of DDR400 and totally wrong memory timings, no matter what I tried, thats what happened. Moving the the one stick from the second cyan slot into the first purple slot solved everything. The manual confirmed it as well. So much for going with convetions.

Another thing that bugged me, but really isn't an issue is the motherboard itself. Here you can see that they didn't 'tin' the mounting holes. I don't think this is really an issue, but it looks bad. Again, comparing MSI to ECS, I haven't seen ECS do this. If you look at the picture you can see that the copper is already starting to get discolored. I don't know if tarnish is an issue for the board or not, certainly if you were concerened about making a good grounding connection here there might be an issue over time. I'm actually more concerned that the red protective layer over the traces will start to cover off. Of course it doesn't have far to go, the dark area around the hole doesn't have any copper on it. It's only the light areas that actually have a gold or copper trace. On this mother board, it's copper.

And the last thing, you have to love the chipset heat-sink. The notch is there because it's partly under one of the expansion slots. So, you'll get less than ideal heat dissipation here. Worse, look at the CPU heat-sink next to it. The CPU's fan wont blow any air across this so it's a passive heat-sink with marginal airflow at best. So, although the board supports overclocking, the HT is going to be challenged right of the bat with this design choice. The only plus side here is that the fins are arranged for best air flow when the board is mounted vertically.

It's not all bad though, this board does one thing I truly love. There is ALMOST a standard for connection things like hard drive LED's, the internal speaker, and various switches. Most of them are two pins connections and if it doesn't work one way, you can usually swap it for the other way. (Hint, white or black are usually negative, the colored line is positive.) But what MSI does it provide TWO different ports for connecting some of the odd ones. Some cases use three pin connectors for some connections and other cases use two. This can be a big pain. If your case has a two pin connector, it goes on the primary block, if it has a three pin connector, it goes on the alt block. THAT little option alone nearly brings MSI back to the 'buy it again' level. If it wasn't for the port cover issue, they'd be at the buy-it-again level without question.

One other interesting thing about the MSI board is if you look at where the CPU connects. It's a little hard to see, but if you look, you can see that the board is laid out for an AM2 socket. They've reserved space for the four screw CPU socket, right down to marking where the holes will be. I suspect you'll see this board in an AM2 configuration very soon.

On to the case! It's plastic, I knew this going in, but the hinge on the case is pretty iffy. It's actually a double hinge. The nice thing is you can fold the door fully out of the way. The down side is I don't know how long the front door on the case will stay with the case. The side panels and locks are a big pain in the rear. I actually had to take one side panel off to get the lock to unlock on the main side panel. Normally I say, don't use the keys on a computer lock ever, and this reinforces that believe. Don't use the keys on this case ever!

This is a big case, lots of room in it. Some of it is a little wasted like all the space above the power supply, but that just means there is room for modding and other such. As an example, all that 'wasted' space above the power supply is just perfect for renting out to a newly married couple who need a cheap place to live. However as power supplies get bigger, that extra space may very well be needed, and thanks to the large power supply mounting plate, you should be able to customize that to work with the new 1000watt and redundant power supplies coming on the market. There is actually enough space above the power supply here to fit a cd-rom drive. So if you need more room for hard drives, this would work. You could use this for a water cooling solution but something about putting any liquid over a power supply seems like a bad idea.

It's a nice case and Spire will likely become a popular second tier designer. The case itself was under $60. It's got good mounting for fans, the grills on the case are noisy, but those will get cut off anyway. It's all about sound, right? The back fan's mounting box will let you mount the fan on the outside of the case as easily as on the inside, so that grill really will get cut away. All the connectors are labeled and the lack of documentation really doesn't hurt if you've done this before, if you haven't.... you can likely still figure it out if you were able to get through elementary school in less than 8 years.

Even the the accessory bag is nice, re-sealable. They plan for you to keep it. You'll have to too, because those custom drive rails are the only way to mount a hard drive. Speaking of mounting drives, the 5.25" slots allow you to mount a drive without having to screw it down, although you can if you use a washer. The trick here is not over-tighten the screws, if you leave it a little loose they slide right in. As for the accessory bag, well... you do have a ton of room above that power supply.

Mounting the fans was interesting, initially I mounted the back 120mm can backwards. I didn't catch it until everything was booted and I was running temp tests on the hard drives. It turns out that may be a better solution. The system has a lot of venting on it, and mounting the fan wrong caused extra air to blow across the hard drives and even more air to blow out through the power supply fan. I'm not sure, but I may reinstall the fan this way. It should push more air away from the CPU as well. If thats the case, it may work better to reverse the front hard drive 120mm fan as well. This will need a little follow up testing.

So we have the fans in, the power supply is mounted, note that this power supply sits right on the rails, if you have an add sized power supply, you may have to do a little playing with that mounting plate to get it in right, but the design is flexible, so you shouldn't have much of an issue. In truth, resting on the rails made the PS very easy to install.

Now that the drives are in, it's no longer a pretty wiring job, but thats okay, I still have one more drive to mount in but I can't do that for a week, so there's no point in locking everything down yet. Note that you've got a ton of room here. You can use plain SATA cables, you don't need the 90' angle type. There is lots of room here. My only real complaint is that the hard drive are a little close together, the fan helps but it only really gets the middle drives, the top and bottom most drives don't really get as much airflow as they should. That backwards mounted fan in the back however seemed to have covered that issue. So that may end up being a longer term solutions. Also, there are some 130mm and 140mm fans that will fit in the same mounting as a 120mm fan. If the width isn't too bad, that could be a solution as well. However, there is enough room on the other side of the hard drives that fans could mounted there if it was needed. This really is a big case.

Just look at the space around the motherboard, granted, it's not a full ATX sized board, but you can see, there's just a LOT of room in this thing. You can see why I'm not worried about finding ways to mount other hard drives down the road!

Okay, everything is mounted and it's time to power on, note there is a connector near the front fan with a warning label to make sure it's connected properly before powering on for the first time. I've connected everything correctly, so lets turn it on.

Nothing.

I've got flashing lights on the network port, so I seem to have power, maybe that ultra critical connector in front? No, everything right, time to start removing power connectors, still dead. Hmmmm... lets look at the power supply box and see if I missed something, oh there it is! UPS seems to have used this box for nice game of soccer. A quick power supply swap confirms it, the PS is dead, likely a fuse for the 12v line. Dang.

NewEgg calls UPS and a new power supply / soccer ball is on the way, I'll just have to use my cheapo for now. The cheapo is okay, but seems to run a little hot on this motherboard, nothing is out of spec, but some of them are at the high side. I'll have to swap power supplies when the new one comes in on Monday, maybe I can get that other hard drive at the same time and be done with it.

So what about the ultra critical power connection on the front. It seems there is a special button on the front of the case, and when you press this button, a red light comes on, when you press the button again, it goes out. That's it. Really, that is all it does. Dang.

PS. What do you do with your left over parts? Put them to good use!