The original Udat case was built seven years ago. It served me well for about two years until I got pretty much fed up with the performance of the EPIA board. So now it's time to revisit this little case and do several things right.


Issues with the original:

Slow network performance - The 10/100MBit integrated NIC was the only option and as such really limiting.
Bad airflow - Even though the PSU had a 80mm fan it had hardly any air vents facing the case so not sure what air it actually was supposed to extract. Two 40mm fans were added to improve the flow but that takes us to the next issue.
Noise - 40mm fans are anything but silent.
Storage space - 1TB was plenty in 2004 but now you can have that in a laptop.
Power efficency - It was good but not optimal.
The storage array was also used for the system partition which caused a bit of grief when Windows decided to implode.
Lack of optical drive.


Parts that will be carried over from Udat to Udat2010:

The bare chassis without PSU and fans.
The RAIDCore BC4852 RAID controller.
The 5-in-3 hotswap bay.


New parts that will be added:

Intel D510MO Fanless Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX Board.
5 x 2TB Samsung HD203WI Spinpoint F3EG harddrives.
160 GB Samsung HM160HI SpinPoint M5 2.5" harddrive.
StarTech 2.5" SATA removable harddrive rack for PC expansion slot.
Samsung SN-T083C/BEBE slot loaded optical drive.