Long time did not hear from you. How's life? Came back to Malaysia?

Yup, lugged all my equipments back home in a 4cbm crate

Nice equipment u have

did you listen to the Weiss DAC as well?

Yes, LP will be another popular source to play music. You will find the analogue sound much more involving than the *digital* music. However, extreme care should be taken in handling the TT as one of my friend just broke the expensive stylus even slight mis-handling of the tonearm.

I can see you will be using Harbeth SHL5s and you will be in your audio nirvana soon. Please post some pic of them when all are properly set-up.

Enjoy.

hi. is that a server rack? how much did that cost?

i've always thought of using somthing like that to organise my HT system instead of buying those AV racking system from Middle Atlantic and AVRAK.

Bro, you are into LP already? Yes, it is quite a hassle for LP but when you are into it, you'll enjoy playing with it.

This :


Plus this


Perfect for classic and vocal

But those into heavy metal, rocks, R&B, etc, the CD, high rez music and SS amp is the route to go.

You would be surprised by how difficult it is to find a server rack over 37U in KL without knowing where to get them lol. All the stores in Jalan Pasar are selling 37U rack for over 1.6k and I was like...holy mother WTF....

I'd just recently acquired this rack and there are a few vendors (more like distributors) who carry full fledge rack equipments in Msia. I got my rack from Elegant Biz Sdn. Bhd. The racks are very very well priced and very high in quality.

Ryan Ting
Channel Manager
ELEGANT BIZ SDN BHD
C-3A-9, Jalan 2 /142A, Megan Phoenix,
56000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
T: +603 - 9101 2603 F: +603 - 9100 2100
H/P : 012-3290110
Email : ryan@elegantbiz.com/ryanting2000@yahoo.com/ryan@elegant.com.my

It would be nice if you mentioned Mr. Phang sent you but it's no necessary as I don't get any discount and neither would you by mentioning my name

I'll take some picture of my populated rack, it's almost done

Htkaki is spreading the posion

I am not in TT just yet. In fact, my friend advices me to go against this route. Beside the hassle in handling them, cost is another issue. A good decent sounding TT will costs around RM5k, the cartridge RM1.5k, phono stage another RM2k. All in will be close to RM10k not to mention the LP itself. In addition I am the lazy type, not willing to get up my chair everytime to skip track.

The 2 combos must have melt your heart & soul if properly set-up with your towering Triangle.


Enjoy.

RM10k for a TT setup is average tbh

Anyway, went out early in the morning to bring these home:

One is not enough, so I bought two. (one is for my cousin)

Spent the rest of the day to add on some parts to my rack and many more hours in cable management + building those interconnects:

Took with a pretty old PnS. Wife took my camera out....


Top to bottom:
1) Dlink 24 port gigabit switch
2) My custom 2U router/gateway/firewall/webserver
3) 2U APC UPS
4) Place to store recent BD, remote, and etc. Was thinking of getting a 4U drawer but for $300+....I'd pass
5) Silverstone LC20M HTPC full loaded (BD player, hotswap bay, card reader, intel pro nic, etc)
6) Denon 4311
7) Emotiva XPA5
8) My Norco 4020 unRaid server (diy), capable of housing 20 hot swap hdd and 2 more drives internally. Powered by Supermicro server board and raid cards. Afaik, none of the parts are available to purchase in Msia without paying a ton of premium anyway
*) Empty space in: 2U cantilever tray came defective, was going to toss my xbox there with lifesize kinect gaming..yummy. Additional space for CCTV, another console, 1 more gigabit switch in the future, and maybe another 2U UPS.


Top to bottom:
1) Acer h340 WHS - specifically used to download stuff, and to serve music. My squeeze server or whatever it is called is also in here.
2) Tplink 1043 wifi N router, used as an AP, root WDS (external antenna on top of the rack)
3) Linksys wrt54g - bought so many of them I now use them as dedicated 54G router, again this is used as an AP, root, WDS.

On the table is the RS15. A peerless universal mount is mounted onto it. Deciding on screen size, thinking of going 140" 16:9 which translates to 120+" 2.35:1

This post has been edited by AlamakLor: May 28 2011, 02:22 AM

Impressive Alamakor...
I cant help myself droolingggg

tell me more about that Norco 4020 unRaid server thing!

I have 11HDDs now and those 4-way probox's are not cutting it anymore...

Very impressive! I was thinking of using the small server rack like your case, but I later found out it is too many variable to manage noise, so I ended up with splitting my IT equipments and AV into two places. all my IT equipments are located at living room, then using CAT6 cable and switches to connect these two devices.

Very interested with your Norco 4020 case, is it very quiet when turn on? I'm thinking it to get the hotway 4 bay hard disk enclosure (~RM320), with 2TB HDD, it can be 8TB.

I have pictures of the internal on my facebook. I will extract them out and explain the stuff required. Unfortunately I'm in the hurry to head out to check out some building materials. At the mean time for those who are interested, you can google:

lime-technology and start doing some reading. In a nutshell, the unRaid uses ONE parity drive to protect the whole array, almost like a raid 4/5.

This casing originally came with super high static pressure and cfm delta screamers that we once loved so much back in the old prescott days. I swapped everything out the AC TC3 fans and that killed 80% of the noise. You'd hardly hear the noise of the server once the room AC is on. Norco now sells replacement fan bracket that takes in 3 x 120mm fans, although the exhaust is still limited to two 80mm fans. Anyway talk later

kiding i have four of those probox 4-way things (non raid version) and they work well..

just be sure to get the usb3 version... the older usb2 version suffers from some power stability issues

Thx for the advice, but I will use the eSATA connection, need to spin down the hard disk if idle >30 mins. I'm not sure the spin down command can run over USB connection, so better use eSATA. electricity rate is going up soon, better save more power.

@ alamak - thanks for sharing all the above info. 42U racks are pretty common here in HK, that's why I asked.

I'm running 8 HDDs using 1 x QNAP TS-409 (4-bays) and recently added 1 x QNAP TS-412 (4-bays). Both running RAID5. Seems like a more expensive option compared to your Norco solution. Curious to hear more too, since u mentioned that u can have 1 HDD to RAID5 the entire array. I'm not IT literate, btw, so I hope u can keep the explanation as simple as possible.

Since it is stored all parity in one drive, so it is RAID 3/4, RAID 5 store parity info across all drives.

RAID 5 data writing to disk performance is better than RAID 3/4 in term of writing, but for video streaming, it is just reading performance, so no different if using RAID 4 compare to RAID 5. BTW, the min number of drive to build a RAID 3/4/5 is 3 drives.

- The unRaid system uses one parity drive to protect the whole array.
- The parity drive only need to be as big as the biggest data drive you have
- Unraid allows using of ANY hdd combination. Unlike any RAID setup, you can mix and match, and toss any old hdd into the array.
- One usb stick is needed to store the OS
- Free OS allows 2 data drive, 1 cache drive, and 1 parity drive. Paid license like the one I got support over 20 drives
- If the parity drive fails, all you need to do is replace the parity drive and rebuild parity
- If one data drive fails, the array will fail to run and it will indicate which drive failed in the management console. Replace the drive and the array will rebuild the data
- If 2 data drive fail, you lose both the data drive
- If one data drive fails and the parity drive fail as well, you lose the all data in the failed hdd.
- The OS allows user based sharing and uses SAMBA. I'd mine set to show certain folders: Movies, TV Series, and etc as read only. No username is needed to access these drives. You can specifically hide certain drives/folders. It's SAMBA so you can pretty much do anything if you have knowledge in Linux.
- Write speed is capped at 25MB/s due to the parity drive. With the parity drive disabled you can write at the hdd's max speed. Read speed is not affected by the parity drive.
- A cache disk can be used to aid transfer speed. You can toss the files you wanted to transfer into the cache disk. Unraid will then move the data in the cache disk at a predertemined schedule set by you. However, the cache disk is just a regular drive so if that drive fails before the data is copied over the the array you will lose the data.
- A high current single rail PSU is required if you plan to power a ton of hdd
- Hdds are spun down at a predetermined time to save power. Mine is set to 5mins
- You can put unraid to sleep and use magic packet to wake the system up if required
- Unraid doesn't need much resources or power unless you plan to run a ton of addons. A low power Celeron 420/430 is the best processor to use (used to use one but I replaced it with my old e8400)
- unRaid can utilize APC powerchute to shut down the Pc. My unraid is connected to my APC UPS which has a Network Management Card add on whereby I could have the UPS trigger all PCs connected to the network and the UPS to shut off at the same time.

My unRaid: (all pictures taken when I was still in Canada)








Everything bought from Newegg and NCIX. The server actualls has 16gb of rams lol. I decided to fully load up the whole thing so I know there is no room for me to upgrade in the future. It would be used as-is for many many years to come.

There are many different solutions but I decided to go with this route. There is a specific thread on AVSforum about unRaid. You can use any old pc to build the system. However, if you know where to get rack mount casing in msia, please inform me as I'm looking to get another 2U casing to build a CCTV server

This post has been edited by AlamakLor: May 28 2011, 05:57 PM

Nice setup you have there AlamakLor.

Will be nice to see it put together and finally you can achieve your HT bliss!