TV Cabinet Rack 2017#
I replaced my super cool Dell rack recently with a more normal-looking setup in my living room. After countless weeks looking for the right TV cabinet I finally found one deep enough to house a couple of 2U rackmount cases and a rackmount switch. It turned out nicer than I had expected! Don’t ask me how much all this cost.
Pictures#
Cable management is next to godliness so I started with the fans. This is the pfSense side of the case. You may be wondering why I bought an expensive Xeon motherboard with dual 10 GbE NICs for what ends up being a router. I used to have Sonic gigabit internet and I kept reading that you needed a beefy CPU to route at gigabit speeds. Turns out it was overkill, way overkill. Oh well, future proofed for when I have 10 GbE internet in 20 years :)# |
I took a big risk here since I couldn’t easily find replacement Seasonic power supplies with the same ratings. All in the name of cable management! The pfSense side won’t have hard drives or anything besides the motherboard and I didn’t want any unused cables taking up space in the soon-to-be-cramped dual-ITX case.# |
I was terrified that my modded power supply would short out on the case so I took the precaution of heat shrinking the exposed leads.# |
Furthering my precaution I also zip tied the loose ends to hopefully prevent any possibility of the heat shrinking sliding off.# |
All done on the pfSense side. Luckily everything worked fine! This is a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F-O by the way, in a Travla T2241 case with dual 250 watt power supplies.# |
My TV cabinet has slots at the bottom of each shelf. Since everything’s gonna be sealed up I wanted to be sure there’d be enough airflow so I put rubber feet on the UPS and case to lift it up a little bit. This is an SMT1500RM2U and it barely fit in the cabinet.# |
This was the fun part. The Whisper EX Fan Kit sold by Standout Designs shipped with two crappy fans that didn’t kick on until the temperatures got to 80 deg F. It got way too hot in there with six hard drives spinning so I had no choice. I tried soldering two silent fans to USB but 5 volts was too low and they didn’t move much air. I’m soldering a generic 9 volt adapter to them here.# |
9 Volts did the trick. Turned out pretty good. Stripping those super thin fan wires was a huge pain though.# |
And that’s it! pfSense side is done, so is my Fedora 26 home NAS and general server. Six 10 TiB hard drives (staggered spinup) Btrfs RAID10 and 64 GiB of RAM. The 250 watt power supply is more than enough surprisingly, it maxed out at 137 watts during boot. The blue thing is my backup hard drive with a USB-SATA adapter with a write protect switch. Basically an ultra floppy disk.# |
I really can’t believe everything fit so perfectly in the TV cabinet. I’m so glad all of that planning over several months paid off lol. At the top is my 10 GbE XS716T VLAN switch. Can’t wait for that iMac Pro with 10 GbE to really take advantage of my custom NAS.# |
God I love cable management. That yellow cable and others on that side are temporary until I’m done re-wriring my desk. I’ll run the wires up through the grommet at the bottom-center of the cabinet. When the power goes out my UPS will shut off my TV/home theater first at a low percent, then my Mac and NAS will auto shutdown at a lower percent, leaving my pfSense, WiFi, and cabinet fans running until the UPS runs out of juice. Should be about 40 minutes before everything shuts off.# |
It all fits perfectly. Those 120mm case fans at 9 volts really do move a lot of air around. Usually my hard drives run at 107 deg F even during heavy load.# |
And that’s it. Turned out really well if I do say so myself! The TV is an old 55” UN55B7000WFUZA, the amp is an old TX-SR608, the TV stand is a VIVO STAND-TV08, and the TV cabinet is a Standout Designs Majestic EX 70-inch.# |
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