I recently decided it was time to start building DAS Two as I've been collecting parts over the last few months on the cheap from eBay. At this time I don't have any new disks to add to the array however I split the current 16 disks between the two DAS units. Why am I doing this? Well the aft stack in DAS One runs about 5C hotter than the front stack of drives, I still haven't got round making fan towers for the after stack, and given it's the summer, I can easily fix that issue.

Back in May I came across another Corsair Obsidian 750d case on eBay for £30, it was mostly complete but had a 5.25 plate missing and also missing dust filters. Given these case's are getting old I wanted to snap up another one to match DAS One. Once delivered it also turned out the the forward plastic face plate was broken, easily fixed with some Gorilla Glue! For the build would need another PSU, Corsair LED fans to match DAS One plus a Molex fan splitter. I also picked up another LSI 16e card for £50 although it won't needed at this time. No additional SAS-SATA cables were required as I just took two for the aft stack out of DAS One.

PSU in the form of an RM850 was sourced off eBay for just £47 and also a 750d Airlifter kit for £25, everything else came from Amazon. Assembly was exactly the same as DAS One.

1. 1 x Corsair RM850 850 Watt 80 PLUS Gold  £47
2. 1 x Corsair 750d Airfliter Kit £25
3. 1 x Corsair Obsidian 750d case £30
4. 1 x 24 Pin PSU tester £5
5. 2 x SATA to 4 SATA Splitter power cable £10 (not used atm)
6. 1 x Molex to 5 x 3 Pin connector for fans £10
7. 2 x 140mm Corsair Red LED fans £32
8. 2 x 140mm Corsair Blue LED fans £22

Okay so I now have 8 disks per DAS, over the coming year I'll slowly start to replace the 6TB Reds in DAS One with 18Tb drives, the old drives will then be moved in DAS Two acting as back up drives for all data either in the same array or in a backup cache pool...maybe even a second array as apparently that may be on the horizon in the future! This will mean I'll need to install the other LSI 16e card in Ultron and source to more SAS-SATA cables. When it comes to that time I plan on installing SAS PCI SFF-8087 to SFF 8088 connector boards in the each of the DAS units because as it stands the units can be unplugged but will have long non-removable cables stick out the rear. The connector boards will allow removable SAS cables between the units and Ultron as internally the drives will be connected to the PCI boards. Not strictly a necessity but nice if I need to shift things about.

I've been unable to find replacement 5.25 faceplates, as you can see from the above picture one needs a serious clean, so I was wondering what could be done? Installing fan controllers was one option but wouldn't really add that much to the build. I then had the idea of installing some Optical drives for a disk ripping ARM VM! Essentially it will be the same setup as my ARM Machine but virtualized, as when ARM is out on loan I'm back to manual disk rips. I'll need more SAS-SATA cables for this so I'll probably wait until do the PCI SAS connector mod.