SAS and SATA HBA options for NAS and Servers

As a follow-up to my previous post, Flashing IT Firmware to the LSI SAS9211-8i HBA, I have been looking at other options for HBAs. Sometimes it might be appropriate to have an HBA that supports both internal and external drives or you might need support for more than eight drives. These are some additoinal solutions that should be considered.

All of the controllers mentioned here have been selected based on the need for drives to be used in some sort of software RAID solution such as Linux with md RAID or FreeBSD with ZFS. While there are other more advanced controllers with advanced hardware RAID support, those features would go completely unused in the intended use. To that end, using the IT firmware is preferred and all of these controllers support IT firmware. As I covered in the previously mentioned post, the process of flashing to IT firmware is a little more complicated but is worth the trouble.

Unless otherwise noted, the controllers can support up to 256 devices if used with an SAS expander. This is a good option but increases costs and only really makes sense if you plan on having a very large number of drives in your system.

LSI SAS9211-8i

The original HBA I was writing about was the LSI SAS9211-8i which supports eight internal drives through the use of two SFF-8087 internal connectors. These require breakout cables to directly support Serial ATA drives. The 3ware Multi-lane Internal SFF-8087 to four SATA cable seems to be the best value for the breakout cable. In the case of the SAS9211-8i, you would need two of these cables. I have been extremely happy with this card in my storage server (write-up coming soon) and its performance has been exceptional. Note that this controller is a PCI Express 2.0 x8 card so make sure you have an appropriate PCI Express slot.

Qty	Component		Cost		Link
1	LSI Logic SAS9211-8i 6Gb/s SAS/SATA PCIe x8 Card		$234.99		Amazon
2	3ware Multi-lane Internal SFF-8087 to 4 SATA Cable		$16.88		Amazon
	Total		$268.75
	Controller cost per drive		$33.59

LSI SAS9211-4i

As I covered in another post, High-End Mini-ITX NAS Server with ECC, another choice would be the LSI SAS9211-4i which is identical to the SAS9211-8i except that it only has a single SFF-8087 port and therefore supports only four Serial ATA hard drives. The same 3ware cable is needed but only one this time. This controller is a PCI Express 2.0 x4 card which is more common on many motherboards.

Qty	Component		Cost		Link
1	LSI Logic SAS9211-4i 6Gb/s SAS/SATA PCIe x4 Card		$167.99		Amazon
1	3ware Multi-lane Internal SFF-8087 to 4 SATA Cable		$16.88		Amazon
	Total		$184.87
	Controller cost per drive		$46.22

LSI SAS9201-16i

In the case that four or eight drives is not enough, another option is the LSI SAS9201-16i which is a similar controller to the other two but supports sixteen drives via four SFF-8087 ports which require four of the 3ware cables. I am considering this controller for my storage server since I already have eight drives installed and am thinking about adding at least three more drives. Like the SAS9211-8i, this card also uses a PCI Express 2.0 x8 slot but can support up to 512 devices using an SAS expander.

Qty	Component		Cost		Link
1	LSI Logic SAS9201-16i 6Gb/s SAS/SATA PCIe x8 Card		$410.05		Amazon
4	3ware Multi-lane Internal SFF-8087 to 4 SATA Cable		$16.88		Amazon
	Total		$477.57
	Controller cost per drive		$29.85

LSI SAS9212-4i4e

Another interesting option pointed out by John in the comments on a previous post is the LSI SAS9212-4i4e controller. This is a more unusual controller since it features four internal Serial ATA ports (not an SFF-8087 port) and one external SFF-8088 port to connect to an external enclosure or SAS expander. It can support up to 256 devices with an SAS expander like the 4i and 8i models. It also features a PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface.

The LSI9212-4i4e is available for $251.99 from Amazon but, in this case, there is an even better bonus. There is an identical but IBM-branded version of this card also available and it is $198.27 from Amazon (thanks to John for pointing this one out too). Saving a little over $50 is definitely worth it since the card is identical in every way. This is not an unusual situation and happens frequently especially with IBM and Intel selling their own versions of LSI cards.

Other Options

There are, of course, other options out there. I particularly like LSI controllers due to their optional IT firmware rather than being stuck with IR firmware. Generally speaking a NAS design is all contained in one computer which makes an internal controller preferable. There are other excellent LSI controllers that are designed to only use external enclosures using SFF-8088 ports. These include the LSI SAS9201-16e, a PCIe x8 card with four SFF-8088 ports for sixteen external drives without SAS expanders and 512 devices with SAS expanders. Another option is the LSI SAS9205-8e, a PCIe x8 card with two external SFF-8088 ports for eight external drives unless used with an SAS expander where it can support an amazing 1024 devices.

There are a few other controllers but these HBAs cover the best options for nearly all situations where hardware RAID is not a priority. Some of those mentioned also support RAID 0, 1, 1E, or 10 but with the IR firmware. If you are planning to use hardware RAID, it is probably better to look at other options that include on-card battery backup and additional cache memory.

Conclusion

Of the cards mentioned, the most intriguing to me is the IBM-branded version of the LSI SAS9212-4i4e. I am considering adding this card to my storage server since it would provide the additional four internal ports I need while also providing an external SFF-8088 port for an enclosure. I have not made a firm decision yet.

Since I already have the SAS9211-8i, I might either replace it with a SAS9201-16i, add an SAS9211-8i, or add the IBM-branded SAS9212-4i4e. The other temporary alternative is to use some of the five currently-unused Serial ATA 3Gb/s ports on the motherboard. These are slower (higher-end PCIe controllers seem to be faster than motherboard ports) but might do the job for now.

Flashing IT Firmware to the LSI SAS9211-8i HBA

In the process of upgrading my storage server, I wanted to upgrade the firmware on my recently acquired LSI SAS9211-8i SAS/SATA 6Gb/s PCI Express card to the latest IT version rather than the IR version it ships with. Apparently this process is a little bit easier on older 3Gb/s cards but not quite as simple on the 6Gb/s models. In addition, things get complicated with newer motherboards as well. Here are the steps to switch from IR to IT firmware.

For those of you that have not read up on the two firmware types, the IR Firmware is the Integrated RAID firmware. This is the typical hardware RAID firmware that the internal cards ship with. The IT firmware, on the other hand, is the Initiator Target firmware which is designed to allow an SAS HBA to connect to up to 256 devices uses SAS Expanders. The IT firmware is typically shipped on external cards. The IT firmware does not have any RAID capabilities and simply acts as an HBA. The reason I wanted the IT firmware was so that I would have no IR firmware to worry about since I was going to be using Linux md software RAID anyway.

Before you do anything else, I would recommend that you remove any other HBAs from the system, especially LSI HBAs. It is possible to specify which controller you want to flash but it is safer to just have a single controller in the system.

The first step in this process is to download the appropriate files from LSI Logic's web site. These are located in the support downloads section for the SAS9211-8i. It would be nice if the needed files were clearly explained but, sadly, that is not the case. Although Windows will never touch this system, you first need to download the Windows and MSDOS package because that is where the actual firmware files are available. I am downloading the latest Phase 12 firmware in order to have future support for larger than 2TB hard drives. LSI knowledge base article 16399 lists what versions are required for larger than 2TB support. The name of this package is:

9211_8i_Package_P12_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip

Now that we have the actual firmware, we need a way to install it. I initially downloaded the Installer P12 for Linux package. The included sas2flash utility was easily able to upgrade the firmware on the SAS9211-8i to the latest IR version but threw an error when I tried to flash with IT firmware.

Some searching ensued which led me to several LSI knowledge base articles. The first, number 16266, is entitled Flashing IT firmware over IR firmware (and vice versa) for SAS HBAs. In summary, the article suggests that I need to create a DOS bootable USB flash drive or similar, copy the appropriate firmware and sas2flsh DOS utility to the drive and update that way. The important information is the command sequence needed for a 6Gb/s HBA.

sas2flsh -o -e 6

This command puts the sas2flsh command into advanced mode (-o) and then erases the flash (-e 6) firmware and BIOS. Apparently rebooting at this point would cause the HBA to cease functioning as the article warns:

DO NOT REBOOT. If you do reboot, or if you attempt to flash the firmware and/or BIOS image and it does not flash correctly, you will have to RMA the controller.

After erasing the flash, you need both the IT firmware and the BIOS file. These are both in the previously mentioned archive for Windows and MSDOS. The relevant files are 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom. The next command actually does the flashing.

sas2flsh -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom

After flashing is complete you can verify that version 12 firmware is loaded with the command:

sas2flsh -listall

This process seemed simple enough. I reasoned that perhaps the article uses a DOS bootable USB drive since that is the way most people will do the flashing but the Linux sas2flash program should work fine as well. This was not the case. Every time I attempted to erase the flash I would get back an error that the erase had failed.

Perhaps using DOS was important and so I proceeded with those instructions. I created the DOS bootable USB drive according to the recommendations in article 16266. Using bootflashdos as suggested apparently requires a 2GB or less USB drive probably due to FAT limitations. I simply used a 2GB SD card in a USB SD card reader. Once bootflashdos was done I copied sas2flsh, 2118it.bin, and mptsas2.rom to the SD card.

I booted from the SD card and attempted to run sas2flsh but was met with an error: "ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program." Fortunately, article 16266 mentions the error at the end and directs you to article 15807. The gist of article 15807 is that Intel 3000 or 5000-based boards have optionROM limitations which cause the above error. The easiest solution is to use a different system. Alternately, you can use the UEFI installer.

At this point, I have already tried using Linux sas2flash and DOS sas2flsh and and now I have to get another version for UEFI. I went back to the LSI site and downloaded the Installer P12 for UEFI archive. This provided the sas2flash.efi program. I copied this program to the same DOS bootable USB drive and proceeded to reboot my system.

For some reason on my board, the SuperMicro X9SCL+-F, the video output seems to come on a little late in the boot process so I can never seem to see the key commands for getting into the BIOS or bringing up the Boot Menu. This is worse when an HBA is installed that also has its own BIOS messages. Through a little bit of trial and error I figured out that F11 brings up the Boot Menu. I selected the option for UEFI Shell and was dropped into an unfamiliar command line interface.

Through more trial and error and prodigious use of the help command, I figured out that the map command lists the device tree. The names are a little complex but it looked to me like the device aliased to fs1: was the USB flash drive. I guessed correctly. In order to access fs1:, I first had to mount it.

mount fs1:

...seemed to do the trick. I then used the command...

fs1:

...rather than the more logical use of the cd fs1: command which, of course, failed. Using the _ls_ command gave me a listing of the files in the directory of the USB drive. The command I needed was sas2flash.efi. Running through the same series of commands from above...

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6
sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom

...resulted in a successful flash of the HBA. Finally this process was complete. I rebooted the system and accessed the BIOS interface with Ctrl-C. This confirmed that the IT firmware was loaded.

This process was much more complex than I had anticipated. Although I recognize that every scenario cannot be documented clearly and in order, it would have been nice if the LSI site had made this process a little simpler. In particular, it was very irritating that the downloads page does not list files by date under their respective sections. It would seem logical to have all the latest versions of the installer at the top of the list and then older versions in order going down. Instead the files are arranged haphazardly in no particular order but loosely grouped by intended system.

The documentation provided with the various installer files was fairly complete but should have had better examples of a simple flash operation. There are a myriad of flags to the various versions of the flashing program but only a few are needed in normal operation. I had to resort to searching the knowledge base to get a clear idea of what flags were needed.

Once it was clear what flags and that the UEFI version of the installer was needed, it was a painless process. Getting to that point was a much longer process that it should have been.

Update: I have also written another post detailing other similar controllers that are also capable of being used with IT firmware.

Supermicro Xeon E3 Server Build

In recent years I have gone through a number of different platforms to run the products I use and deliver for my clients. I have used Mac mini clusters, Amazon EC2, my own custom server farms, and a combination of the above. I am once again looking for a new platform.

This brings me to one simple fact. In my work, I prefer to have the maximum amount of control over the operating system as well as the hardware. I have found that over time I am better able to manage stability and functionality when I have been able to choose what components are part of the system in every way.

To that end, my preferred operating system is OpenBSD. There is no other operating system on the market that offers such fantastic security, excellent documentation, and minimal-but-practical approach to the base system.

Although I frequently use Linux distributions for specific tasks that require it, I always come back to OpenBSD on as many servers as possible. Although, as a rule, OpenBSD does not cater to virtualization, vmt(8) and vmwh being the exceptions, I have found excellent stability in virtualizing OpenBSD using multiple different virtualization software packages.

These have included VMware, both ESX and Fusion, as well as VirtualBox, and Xen using HVM. Each environment has its advantages and disadvantages but all have been very stable and worked quite well for me.

To that end, I am in the process of building out a new, next-generation virtualization platform that provides benefits in energy consumption, computing power, efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Although I have nothing against AMD, I tend to use Intel processors for all of my mainstream servers. Some of my prior and still active platforms run on ARM, PowerPC, and SPARC64 architectures.

Xeon E3 Processors

Based on the currently available technology and performance levels, I have selected Intel's Xeon E3 processors as the best option for my new platform. As we have seen from many major press announcements of late, the industry is moving away from concentrating a large amount of processing power in individual systems and into a lower performance per system but more systems (or processors) in the cluster. For purposes of redundancy, cost, and energy efficiency, it makes more sense to build more Xeon E3 systems rather than fewer Xeon E7 systems.

Looking at the E3 lineup, processors fall into several categories with some exceptions. The unusual processors are the E3 1220L and 1260L which are both low power models. The 1220L is only a dual-core chip with hyper-threading which looks on paper much like a very low power Core i3 processor. It features a measly 20 watt max TDP, a clock speed of 2.2 GHz, 3 MB of cache, but also features a max turbo frequency of 3.4 GHz. It features all of Intel's processors technologies except for integrated graphics. The other low power model, the 1260L, features a 45 watt max TDP, a 2.4 GHz clock speed, 8 MB of cache, and a max turbo frequency of 3.3 GHz. The advantage of the 1260L is that it is a quad-core chip with hyperthreading and also has 8 MB of cache. Unlike the 1220L, the 1260L features integrated graphics.

The rest of the processors in the E3 lineup are very similar with slight increases in performance with each model. The E3 1220 is the other oddball in that it is a quad-core chip but lacks hyperthreading. The 1230 and up are all quad-core but also have hyperthreading. The 12x5 chips all have integrated graphics while the 12x0 chips do not.

Because the motherboards I am looking at all feature onboard graphics, integrated graphics are of no use to me. This immediately narrows the field to only E3 12x0 chips. That brings down the choices to the E3 1230, 1240, 1270, 1280, and 1290 models.

Looking at these five models, each one increases the chip's clock speed by 100 MHz. The 1230 is a 3.2 GHz chip with a max turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz. The max turbo frequency also tracks the processor speed at 400 MHz faster. Based on the sequence the 1240, 1270, 1280, and 1290 move to 3.3 GHz, 3.4 GHz, 3.5 GHz, and 3.6 GHz with the max turbo frequency topping out at 4 GHz on the 1290.

Looking at all of these options, it only makes sense to me to either go with the E3 1260L or 1230 based on whether energy consumption is a major consideration. Both processors offer excellent features and clock speeds. Both processors are quad-core, feature hyper-threading, and have 8MB of cache. The difference comes down to clock speed where the 1260L is 2.4 GHz with a 3.3 GHz max turbo frequency and the 1230 is 3.2 GHz with a 3.6 GHz max turbo frequency.

The final factor is availability. Because it is a newer chip, the E3 1260L is much more difficult to obtain. All of the normal channels I purchase parts through do not have it and I had to contact a company that specializes in building servers and works closely with SuperMicro in order to get a quote. Even then, the E3 1260L would have to be special-ordered and would take an addition 5-7 days to arrive.

Rackmount Server

There is one other factor that I have not mentioned. That factor is what your intended system supports. One of the cluster systems I will be deploying only supports a processor with a max TDP of 45 watts or less. That very quickly limits that system to the E3 1220L (20W), E3 1260L (45W), Core i3 2100T (35W), or Core i3 2120T (35W). This system that I am planning to use in some applications is the SuperMicro SYS-5017C-LF and it is a superb, compact, energy efficient system that makes a great cluster node. Given my evaluation of processor options, the E3 1260L would be my preferred choice although for the extremely budget strapped project, the Core i3 2100T will certainly be the most cost effective choice.

While the SYS-5017C-LF fits one major role in my new choice of systems, there is still the need for an additional mini tower form factor or more expandable rackmount system. Once again, I am sticking with the SuperMicro SYS-5017C series due to its amazing power and flexibility in a rackmount system.

Mini Tower Server and Motherboard Choice

For a mini tower form factor system, the SuperMicro SYS-5037C series offers two different models that are very similar to the SYS-5017C series systems. I already had a previous SuperMicro Core 2 Duo E4700-based barebones system which used the excellent SuperMicro CSE-731i-300B mini tower case with 300 watt power supply. This is the same exact case used with the SYS-5037C-I barebones system.

I sold the E4700 CPU with the matching SuperMicro motherboard and memory on eBay and looked at the available motherboard options. The one that jumped out at me was the SuperMicro X9SCL+-F motherboard which fits the SuperMicro case's Micro ATX form factor. There are several other flavors of X9SCL motherboards but the X9SCL+-F was the one I wanted for a special reason.

Intel's Sandy Bridge Cougar Point chipset server platforms includes the new Intel 82579LM gigabit ethernet controller. Since this controller is very new, the majority of open source operating systems have only just added the required driver modifications which may not be in the current release. The other X9SCL variants all have one 82579LM controller and one Intel 82574L gigabit ethernet controller. I did not want to worry about this potential issue so I opted for the X9SCL+-F which has two Intel 82574L controllers.

I have been using this system since late summer and have been very pleased with its performance and design. Although I planned to go with the E3 1230 for this system, a particularly good deal on the E3 1220 came up and so I snapped up that processor. At the current prices, I think the E3 1240 is probably the best value before the very large price jumps to the E3 1270, 1280, and 1290 processors.

I am actually in the process of moving the system to a whole new virtualization system right now and will have updates on that process soon. Stay tuned.

Two Goals for 2012 and Paperless All The Way

This is the time of year for New Year's resolutions. Most people make some and most people break those resolutions within a few weeks. Some say that you should not tell anyone your New Year's resolutions because when you break them you will not be embarrassed. Well, I suppose it depends what your New Year's resolutions are. I have two major resolutions for the year 2012.<! data-preserve-html-node="true"--more-->

1. Simplify

This one seemingly simple goal encompasses quite a few different aspects. For one, I need to go through every single box in the garage. I refuse to have any box that I have not specifically packed up with only what I want to keep. This means no "junk" boxes. As most any technology professional does, I have lots of miscellaneous parts and cables. I will be getting rid of whatever is not really useful to me. No old computer parts that I might use some time down the road unless I have a specific and sensible plan for them.

Another part of the simplification process is going completely paperless. I have already started this process for 2011 and will be continuing it for 2012. Although some good dedicated software is available, I have so far been using my own organization system that I am still refining but with the Fujitsu ScanSnap software. The scanner I use is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M.

The S1500M is very flexible and allows you to scan a variety of paper sizes and a decent stack of papers into one PDF file. In fact, I like the S1500M so much, I am planning to purchase a smaller, portable ScanSnap. If you want to go paperless, I would strongly recommend you first purchase a larger, higher capacity scanner such as the S1500M. A smaller, more compact unit is harder to use and will likely make your paperless quest less likely to be completed.

The portable scanner I am planning to purchase is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100. It is part of a two part portable system I am setting up with both the S1100 and a portable printer. More on that soon.

2. Get Out of Debt

I am one of the fortunate Americans to not have very much debt. It consists of a car loan and a few thousand dollars of miscellaneous other bills. While the exact dollar value of the debt is not all that substantial, I am firmly committed to having no debt. That means zero.

I am not opposed to having one or two credit cards for emergencies and travel. There are certain things, such as car rental, that are much more difficult and expensive with only a debit card. However, credit cards are not for discretionary spending. The bottom line is, if you do not have the money, do not buy it.

Unfortunately, this is one of those goals that most likely will not be fully completed in 2012. The car loan still has several more years and was a very expensive car, a Dodge Sprinter van, and so will take a little longer to pay off. Although, if at all possible, I will be paying all if not most of it off this year.

Once the car loan and the other debts are payed off, my wife and I will be completely debt free. Once we reach that point, we will never again go into debt. Once expenses from debt are eliminated, your expenses drop and it is easier to pay your expenses with a smaller income. The side benefit is less stress which also often means greater productivity. It would be very nice to work without thinking about paying any bills other than my immediate monthly expenses.

3. Other Goals

I have other goals, as most of you do, but the rest of my goals are not public. As I complete the other goals, I may write about them. Time will tell.

Xserve G5 and WD2003FYYS 2TB Drives

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working with a school on getting a 2GHz Xserve G5 up and running to replace a PowerMac G5 operating as a server. The Xserve had no memory so we acquired 4GB of memory. In early 2011, I had upgraded the PowerMac G5 to dual Western Digital WD2003FYYS 2TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration.<! data-preserve-html-node="true"--more-->

All of this had been working perfectly but then the Xserve G5 was donated to the school and it was time to move the drives. After the memory arrived I installed it and attempted to just move the drives over. I had also initially setup the RAID 1 using SoftRAID (an excellent product by the way).

When I attempted to boot the Xserve with the 2TB drives, it just refused to boot and flashed the infamous folder error meaning it cannot find a boot drive. Although unlikely, I thought perhaps SoftRAID was preventing the drives from booting in the Xserve G5 and so I used SoftRAID to convert the on-disk format to Apple RAID.

I was also unable to boot from the Mac OS X 10.5 boot DVD. After some additional research, it occurred to me that the Xserve only had a CD drive and not a DVD drive. With that discovery, I decided to create a bootable FireWire drive with Mac OS X 10.5.8 as a means of booting the system.

Using the FireWire drive worked perfectly and allowed me to boot the system and get a better idea of what could be keeping the 2TB drives from being recognized. Oddly, one of the 2TB drives would finally mount in the Xserve after a considerable delay but the second drive would only mount after a long wait and only once in every ten reboots or so. If the second drive ever mounted, its paritions would never be properly recognized as part of a RAID set.

I started digging for more information about what could be causing this very strange behavior. Contrary to what some other users experienced, the drive trays did not show an orange light but instead showed a normal green light but only one drive would show any activity as indicated by the blue light.

After some searching and a great deal of trial and error, I came across a post on the Apple discussion forums detailing how another user had the very same WD2003FYYS drives and was able to get them to work perfectly by putting a jumper on pins 5 and 6 which causes the drive to only operate at 1.5Gb/s instead of the typical SATA II speed of 3.0Gb/s.

Once I set these jumpers, the drives came right up. Both RAID sets showed as degraded even though each RAID set had two partitions as expected. Disk Utility showed no further information so I moved to the Terminal. I ran:

diskutil listRAID

The output showed me that each RAID set had three partitions and one was marked as missing. I used the following command to remove the extra parition:

diskutil removeFromRAID (replace with missing partition's UUID) disk3

Obviously "replace with partition's UUID" refers to the UUID of the extra partition. The RAID set itself will also have a disk reference such as disk3, disk4, etc. In this case, both disk3 and disk4 are RAID sets made up of two partitions, one from each 2TB drive. This allows a separate boot RAID set and data RAID set.

Once I had removed the extra partitions from each set, the RAID sets immediately changed to online from the previous degraded state. This whole process was more complex than I expected but finally works as expected.

If you are facing a similar upgrade, I have read in a variety of posts that Seagate drives seem to work without issues while Western Digital drives tend to require the 1.5Gb/s jumper workaround. Hopefully I will not run into this exact problem again, but if I do, it should be an easy fix.

Choosing a Mini-ITX Case

The Mini-ITX form factor has been with us since 2001 and is a very interesting form factor if you are planning to build your own HTPC or have any need for a compact computers. Systems such as Apple's Mac mini are close relatives of this form factor. Although I would seriously recommend looking into a Mac mini if you need a real HTPC, building your own compact system is a great project.

I have been thinking about building a compact system for a little while now. One of the requirements of this project was to use a Gigabyte motherboard that was easy compatible with a particular operating system. The two possible boards were the GA-H67N-USB3 or the GA-H61N-USB3. Although the H67N board was my first choice, it appears to be either discontinued or experiencing supply chain issues. That really leaves the GA-H61N-USB3 as the only compatible Mini-ITX motherboard that is readily available. I ordered the H61N board and it arrived right after Christmas.

The next step in building a Mini-ITX system is selecting the case. There are quite a variety of Mini-ITX cases on the market now. Some are extremely compact while others are slightly more spacious. I looked at two moderately cases because I wanted to make sure that I could fit a 3.5-inch hard drive in the case. While it is possible to get several different 1TB 2.5-inch drives, there is a definite performance penalty for those drives since they are the slower 5400 RPM 2.5-inch variety. Faster 7200 RPM 2.5-inch drives top out at 750GB for now.

The H61N motherboard is a little less expandable that its sibling, the H67N. It only has two 3Gb/s SATA II ports on the motherboard for internal drives and one 3Gb/s eSATA port for an external drive. If you intend to use a DVD drive that leaves only a single hard drive in the case. Otherwise, you could have two hard drives. I will most likely only have a single hard drive in this case. I may add a DVD drive at some point but I am undecided for now.

Cooler Master Elite 100

In looking at the available cases on the market, two were initially of interest to me. The first was the Cooler Master Elite 100. I ordered it from Amazon.com and it arrived in mid December.

While I like the way the case looks in the photos, the fact that it can mount on a monitor using the VESA mount, and can house one 3.5-inch and two 2.5-inch drives, I was disappointed with how difficult it was to open the case and install the needed components. The case also did not have the quality feeling I was hoping for. Because of these issues, I quickly realized that I was never going to be happy with the case and I decided to send it back.

In the case's favor is its additional compatibility with Micro ATX motherboards but the motherboard I had on hand would have been an extremely tight fit and using a Micro ATX board also removed the ability to install a 3.5-inch hard drive in the case. The case does include a 150 watt power supply which Cooler Master states allows you to use a maximum of a 65 watt TDP processor. I think my intended use might be a pushing the power supply farther than it should be pushed.

Apex MI-008

My next choice for a Mini-ITX case was the Apex MI-008 which includes a 250 watt power supply. The Apex case is a little more spacious and more cube-like than the Elite 100. I ordered this case after my disappointment with the Cooler Master Elite 100. It arrived right after Christmas.

Much to my surprise, once again, I was disappointed with the case. Since my experience with the Elite 100, I had decided that I might keep an NVIDIA GeForce GT210 graphics card in the case in order to provide improved graphics performance over the Intel HD 3000 Graphics built into either the Intel Core i3 2105 or Core i5 2405S processor I was planning to use.

The Apex case, although providing space for one PCI Express card, did not have enough space for the width of the GeForce GT210 card. I was also disappointed at how the 3.5-inch hard drive basically pushed up against the CPU cooler and the overall construction was missing the quality I was hoping for.

Silverstone SG05BB-450

After two disappointing cases, I have decided to look at another case that might be a better fit and have much better construction. This time, I am choosing a case from Silverstone, a well known manufacturer of HTPC and other higher end case designs.

There are two primary purposes for this system. The first is to be a media center storage system for our iTunes content. The second purpose is for our son to play a few games such as Minecraft on the system. The case I am going to order this week is the Silverstone SG05BB-450 which includes an SFX format 450 watt power supply.

This case is expressly designed to house a graphics card as well as one 3.5-inch drive, one 2.5-inch drive, and a slim optical drive. Although more expensive than the other two cases I initially purchased, the Silverstone SG05BB-450 looks like a much better system all around.

If I were looking for an even higher-end case, I would also look at the Silverstone SG07B with its 600 watt power supply. This would work great with a higher-end Radeon 6870 card. I may very well build a system with the Silverstone SG07B but first, I need to find a Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB motherboard.

This whole process of selecting a Mini-ITX case has reminded me once again that in most things, you really do get what you pay for. An inexpensive case is made with cheap components and is missing the attention to detail and quality that a higher-end case provides. Later this week I will also be building a Micro ATX system with another Silverstone case that should be delivered mid-week. I will have a post detailing that process soon.