Peri's P180

My friend Pericles wanted to change his Thermaltake Shark case to something quieter. The Shark was very noisy, even after my earlier attempts to quiet it down. Quiet fans and covering of the side grill proved to be insufficient. And he has 5 HDDs with 1,5TB of storage! He also needed some headroom for another 1-2 hard disks.

I think that the Antec P180 has the best balance between quietness and storage available today, that's why I got it for my server needs. So I ordered one from Pixmania in France. It arrived in 2 days, but Labour Day delayed delivery for another 2.

Installing 5 disks meant that one had to be on the upper chamber, and a PCI SATA controller was needed.
Out goes the WiFi card, the Gigabyte board only has 2 PCI ports and the other is the satellite TV tuner.

Hiding cables.
















Lower chamber with 4 hard disks. The original 35mm Tricool was thrown away, and I used a 25mm from the upper chamber.


The back.















Inside.













It turned out surprisingly quiet, just the muffled hhhhhh from all the hard disks working together. It will be positioned under his desk, with some carpeting to absorb more noise, in a semi quiet room, so it'll be OK. The rear and lower chamber Antec fans are heavily undervolted and inaudible from 50cm away, but the Zalman HS fan will soon need replacing, it chirps slightly even at 5V. The Chieftec PSU fan is a bit noisy, and will be needing some "modding" soon. :)

Specs:
Case: Antec P180
CPU: Intel P4 640
M/B: Gigabyte GA-81915P-D Duo Pro
RAM: 2x512Mb Kingston
GPU: nVidia 6200
HDD: 2xWD3200JD, WD250JD, Seagate7200.7 200GB, Seagate7200.9 400GB
DVD-R: Pioneer 110D
DVD-ROM: Teac 516
PSU: Chieftec CFT500W