I know that a number of people on here have a background in computers, and may even be self-proclaimed computer geeks. I figured I would start up a thread to see what you all have running at home for computers. I will start


I just recently bought a house, so I have been setting up the new place for of my needs. I have been running Cable/Satellite and Cat6 cables to every room, and I completely reconfigured my home server setup. I have not finished this whole project, but it is well underway at this point.

This is the structured wiring drop for my living room. I have another setup exactly the same up in the "master bedroom" on the 2nd floor, except one more Cat6 left inside the wall for a future wireless access point. Three RG6 cables and three Cat6's here right underneath the Television:



The ethernet drops are terminated to a Cat6 Patch Panel in the basement.


The coax drops go to a video distribution board, also in the basement. On the left are the splitters and amplifiers for Cable TV, and on the right is the multiswitch for a future Satellite setup.



I do also have a short (24U) server rack that houses my networking gear. It includes a number of servers for video storage, content downloads, email backups, and other functions for the home. Two of the servers are starting to really run out of space, and instead of upgrading them, I decided to replace all of them with a new virtual server platform running VMWare vSphere Hypervisor 6. These are the parts that I picked up:

Supermicro SC846A-R900B
Supermicro X8DTE-F Motherboard
Supermicro SAS846EL1 24 bay SAS Backplane
2x Intel Xeon L5630 2.13GHz Quad Core CPUs
6x 2GB DDR3-1066 Registered ECC
Adaptec ASR-5805Z SAS Controller

For hard drives, I am re-using many of my WD Red drives for storage and downloading, but the VMs themselves are now running off of some HP 300GB 15K SAS drives that I had kicking around for a future need.

Total out of pocket cost for this setup is $320.54 after shipping. $258.65 for the Case, motherboard, SAS controller and backplane; $37.90 for the CPUs; and $23.99 for the memory.