The Box - Bulding my first custom home server

Once upon a time, I wanted to have a home server, however the list of the requirements I put up made this idea quiet challenging. I wanted to have:

the server should support virtual machines
the server should support minimum 10 disks
the server should have low noise profile
the server should look OK to keep it in the living room

I was checking the computer cases available on the market, however those were

either ugly looking
smaller ones were not supporting the amount the disks I need
bigger ones were too huge and noise for the living room

OK, so if there's no case matching up my needs, than nothing else remains just to make one.

OK, but how it should look like?

a table
a simple seat
a pouffe

A pouffe like case would fit the purpose. The size is about right and it is an expected furniture in the living room.

So where we should start. Let's gather the hardware... I decided to buy a used brand machine, because of the quality of the hardware, this was cheaper then buying a whole set. So I bought HP workstation which has a Xeon CPU and nice amount of RAM.

So, the hardware is done, but a few small piece is missing e.g. disk racks, leg for the furniture and some supports to for keeping the sides together.

I was thinking about how to gather these items... Should I buy? Should I make from wood, from metal? Nah, I decided to design and 3D print these.

Thingiverse link of the 3D print designs:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3979224

Disk rack with disks...

What's next? The material of the case. Well, the best I found which is easy to work with and strong enough is MDF wood.

How about the design?! Well, I was watching a couple of videos about what's the key of having a low noise machine case. What are the key factors of an almost noiseless computer case?

use huge CPU cooler
use huge fans, which move slow
use the chimney effect

What's the chimney effect, simple, hot air goes up. This means to extract the most hot air, we need to have big fan on the bottom of the case and a big hole on the top of the case. However this also means that the original setup of the regular computer case is simply will not be efficient enough. To lay down the mainboard will not let the hot air out quickly enough. So the solution is a new setup, let's setup the mainboard vertically, so the CPU cooler can be perpendicular to the airflow, help the hot air extraction without any extra effort.

And this is how it looks...