The technology age is in full swing! Technologies that were once reserved for professionals can now be found in the home and even in the living room. The average technology consumer now has vast amounts of movies, digital pictures, music and other valuable data on a home network that would compete with the office of yesteryear. Many of these consumers have need for a server, but do not have money for an expensive professional-level server and opt to build one themselves.
I-Star’s D-Storm Signature Series rackmount server cases are designed for entry level server applications while maintainting expandability. The D- Series includes attractive locking aluminum doors and bezels, which provide a customized professional look to your servers. The expandability of these cases make them fit for just about any server application.
Who is I-Star?
Established in 1989, I-Star Computer Inc. has over fifteen years of experience in designing and manufacturing Industrial Switching Power Supply, Sheet Metal, and Rackmount Chassis. From the standard switching power supply to high-end redundant power supply, I-Star has grown to be one of major provider in IPC power supply industry. In recent years, we have also expanded our products to include DVR/IPC and Storage RAID industries. Our goal is always to provide our customer with the best products and superior customer services. In the beginning I-Star focused on providing our customers the combinations of cutting-edge technologies, high quality manufacturing, and excellent customer services. It has been a proving record that these priorities earned a strong partnership for I-Star in today’s competitive market.
I-Star builds its strength upon its experience, technology, and strong partnership. We have been working closely with major computer components manufactures and system integrators for years to ensure that our products have high compatibility and solid stability. We also adopt new industrial standards to improve our design. Our ability to design according to customer’s requirement also wins us a high reputation in the industry. Our experienced design and project engineers complete an OEM project within the deadline and meet the product requirements. We believe that being a leader of innovative technology means able to integrate it into our products which is the key to be successful for us as well as for our customers.
D-300 stats
- 4x 5.25” bays
- 2x 3.5” bays
- Fits ATX motherboards 12” x 9.6”
- Power ON/OFF switch, system reset, alarm reset buttons
- LEDs for power on/off, HDD, Fan & alarm
- Removable air filters
- Environment Monitoring system mini-board (optional, not supplied)
- 1x60mm ball-bearing fan
- 2x80mm ball-bearing fans (optional, not supplied)
- 1.2mm SECC Zinc-Coated Steel (made in Japan)
- Lockable Aluminum front doors
- 19” (W) x 20” (D) x 5.25” (H)
- Front USB 2.0 ports
- I-Star 3U 300W power supply
The aluminum bezel is very attractive and hosts two lockable doors. The center of the bezel houses most of the status information, as status LEDs are mounted behind a glossy black panel. A keyhole is also located here, which locks both front doors at the same time. When the keyhole is unlocked, the knob mechanism fluidly turns 90 degrees from horizontal (locked) to vertically (unlocked). The aluminum doors are hinged toward the edges of the case (the left door is hinged on the left, and the right door is hinged on the right), and swing open when pulled (you must grip the door underneath a lip opposite the hinge).
The power and reset buttons are located behind the right door. They are placed next to a 3.5” drive bay, making use of the extra space afforded there. The reset button is a bright red plastic push-button, while the power switch is a matte black rocker switch.
The alarm button is located on the center panel between both doors. The alarm functionality only works with the optional Monitoring board, which does not apply to us anyway. There are two fan monitoring lights which only work with the optional monitoring board.
The case is enclosed by a top panel which has ventilation holes stamped in the top. Vent holes placed on the top can naturally expel heat through convection, but are usually not seen on rackmount cases, as these holes are usually blocked when installed in a rack.
The top panel is secured by two black screws on the sides of the case and a thumbscrew in the back. Once these screws were liberated, the panel slides off easily. There was so much room inside the case that I thought I could hear an echo. There is an aluminum bar connecting the two sides of the case, which is where the optional 80mm case fans can be mounted for additional cooling. Unfortunately these fans must be installed to fan mounts which were not supplied, so we could not use any of the many 80mm case fans we have in our labs.
The back of the case has been stamped with holes for two 60mm exhaust fans, but only one is supplied and installed. An additional 60mm case fan can be purchased separately. The fan is a YS-tech fan, rated for 4200 rpm and 25CFM, which may be adequate but somehow the case feels incomplete without the additional fan.
Power supplies are usually not included with server cases, but this case comes with a 300 watt I-Star power supply. Much of the wattage needs of today’s power-hungry workstations comes from powerful graphics cards and overclocked systems. 300 watts should be enough to handle a decent server setup of 1 processor (or dual-core processor), 4 hard drives and an optical drive without strain. Keep in mind though, that power supplies generally run most efficiently when kept under 70% load, so should remain efficient with a maximum of 210 watts. We would recommend a beefier power supply for dual-processor servers.
A lot of what makes up a professional server are the electronics inside it, like a professional RAID card and redundant power supply. A do-it-yourself server is 90% of the components selected. The chassis features are what will make installation and maintenance easy or more difficult.
Most of the time a server is never touched after installation. The quality of a server case reveals itself when you have a problem, like when replacing a failed drive. Normally in a RAID 1 setup, just pop out the bad drive, install a new drive and rebuild the array. The server remains up and usable the entire time. With this server if a drive fails I will need to pull out a screwdriver, shut down the server, take the top, remove the drives and install a new drive manually. Hot-swap bays can be added as an expansion, but at a minimum this case should at least have included slide-out clip rails. Out-of-the-box installation requires that all drives are screwed down, which requires a server shutdown should a drive replacement be necessary.
Many server cases have fans that direct airflow from the front of the case, over the system component and out the back. Side and top ventilation are not serious considerations, as these will be blocked when installed in a rack. The smaller the form factor the more important this airflow. Professional servers will have lots of fans, and usually physically separate the motherboard from the drives. Professional servers also will provide some sort of monitoring panel for system temperatures and fans. The I-Star D-300 does not include the fans necessary for front-to-back airflow, and does not include the monitoring module for the front panel, both of which are included in the D-300-L.
The case is rather easy to get into. The top of the case is secured with two black screws on the left and right sides, and one thumbscrew in the back. We removed the side screws so that we can easily get into the case with the one large back thumbscrew. After the screws are removed, the top slides off easily.
The D-300 has lots of room for installation. We were pleased to see this case has a removable motherboard tray, which we unscrewed for mounting. After the appropriate stand-off screw mounts were installed we realized that the motherboard tray must be attached to the case via screws, which would be under the installed motherboard. This renders the “removable motherboard tray” feature useless, as the tray must be screwed to the case before mounting said motherboard. Installation of the motherboard still wasn’t that bad, as there is plenty of room in this case.
The drives were installed next. There are two identical drive cages, each with 2x 5.25” bays on the top and 1x 3.5” bay on the bottom. A bit of black foam is glued underneath the 3.5” bay to support and cushion the drive cage. Each drive cage is attached from the top using four thumbscrews, which are easily removed. For our server layout, we decided the drives should be installed in the left cage, and our DVD and floppy drive should be installed in the right cage.
The drive cages offer no hot-swap capability and no drive clip-rails were included. Each drive must be installed in the traditional manner, with screws. We decided to take advantage of the extra room afforded by this case and install our hard drives in the 5.25” bays. This requires an extra mounting adapter kit, but the extra airflow around the drive makes the extra effort pay off.
The right drive cage holds our optical and floppy drives, which require that the bay covers for these drives be removed. The steel drive bay covers are painted black, and are installed with screws. It was a pain to remove the covers, but there was no way they were going to be damaged, chipped, or otherwise come to the same fate as cheap plastic bay covers. Our DVD drive was installed in the top-most drive bay, and floppy in the lower-most 3.5” drive bay, using standard case screws.
After all drives were mounted in the drive cages, we placed them back into the server, aligned the cage holes with the chassis’ mounting pegs and screwed the cages back into position.
The power supply’s cables were long enough to reach all the components easily, and have enough slack to route and tuck them out of the way properly. There is also a little room between the power supply and the case to tuck away unused power connectors.
A Radio Shack voltmeter was used to test the power supply rails during server idle and load. Load was tested using PCMark 05, which maxed the CPU at 100% during some tests. Load was also tested by copying files from the DVD drive to RAID 1 array, but readings were the same as idle.
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The power levels listed remained consistently rock-solid, not fluctuating one bit. When the CPU reached 100%, the 12v line immediately dropped to 11.97 volts and remained there until the CPU load dropped. The test results show that this power supply is within 2% tolerance on the 5v line and less than 1% tolerance on the 12v and 3.3v lines, even under load. A power supply with 1% tolerance is an excellent find and usually costs as much as this entire case!
Conclusion
You can save some money by building your own server, and the I-Star D Series is great for the do-it-yourselfer. 3U cases are appealing because you can build a server using standard desktop parts without adapters, which makes for an easy server project. The I-Star D-300 is a good base server for a decent price, but must be upgraded to truly offer server-quality features. On one hand it has superb construction and lockable aluminum doors, a decent power supply and lots of room to work. On the flip side the case lacks standard server features like hot-swap drive bays, enhanced cooling, front-panel monitoring and drive rails. The I-Star D-Storm Signature Series is designed for entry-level server applications, and is a good start for an expandable server.
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