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Barebone server: what else do I need to complete it?
superboyac:
After a quick review of all the enclosures I could find, unless I fabricate my own, the Lian Li is the best one. Why? It's the most spacious of them all for 20 drives. The other ones resort to 5.25 drive bays that cram 3-5 drives together really closely, which I'm guessing is bad for heat. I feel I'll be able to get more effective air flow with the Lian Li. Plus it has a lot of spaces for big fans.
I also liked Caselabs, but their innards would cramp the drives together more. The enthusiasts seem to like it better, though. But most of them were doing a couple of hard drives and big water cooling systems, which is different than mine.
I also checked out separate towers for the motherboard and hard drives, but there are none that can go more than 10 drives (without resorting to the drive bays cramming). So i think I'm stuck with the Lian Li pc-d8000.
40hz:
A couple of things to keep in mind:
1) while your amount of harddrives are going to require *some* cooling, even if you end up with very silent cooling the vibration from the harddrives are going to make a fair amount of noise. You'll want the case to be massive, not the flimsy few-millimetres-thick that even high-quality cases usually are made of.
2) even if you put in power supplies that are ridiculously over-specced (which you shouldn't), be sure to set the harddrives to "staggered spinupw" (or Powered-Up-In-Standby) individually before you attempt turning on the system that's been finally assembled with 20 disks.
-f0dder (October 03, 2012, 04:11 PM)
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Are you saying the Lian Li case is not thick enough? What are my alternatives?
-superboyac (October 03, 2012, 04:33 PM)
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Many high end cases are fabricated out of aluminum. So they're not as sturdy as a comparable steel case. But unless you're moving them around a lot, or you're in the habit of sitting on them, it's seldom a problem. At least from my experience. I've never seen many problems with them except when somebody (not me) got too heavy handed during a build and damaged one.
The Antec Sonata line is a steel case designed to minimize noise while still providing adequate cooling. But that would severely limit the number of drive spaces available since it's a PC rather than a server case. You could use it for the server and put the drives in a separate cabinet. But that wouldn't solve the problem of fan and drive noise for the array...
I don't know of anything that supports a large number of drives that is going to be very quiet.
About the only way I know to keep noise down and minimize power requirements with large numbers of drives is to go with 2.5" (laptop style) drives. Which isn't what you'd likely want to do at this point.
superboyac:
^^That sounds like a reasonable assessment to me. I've now searched for several hours for cases, I haven't seen anything better than Lian Li, so I think I have to go with that. It shouldn't be nearly as loud as those racks. From what I've seen online with the 140/120 fans (although I didn't see any with more than 10 drives) it should be fairly quiet with the bedroom door closed.
Now I have to piece the other parts together. I'm still thinking a windows server OS, and running virtual machines on it for different things: freenas, owncloud.
I also plan on the three things below for drive pooling:
SnapRAID - Filesystem agnostic parity based data redundancy, (Linux/Windows).
Elucidate - A GUI for SnapRAID (Windows).
Liquesce - Drive pooling for Windows
So I'm getting close...one problem right now is nobody in the US seems to be selling the Lian Li pc-d8000.
f0dder:
Are you saying the Lian Li case is not thick enough? What are my alternatives?-superboyac (October 03, 2012, 04:33 PM)
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Haven't seen one of them IRL, so I don't know - but most cases, even high-end ones, I've seen have been "somewhat too thin" aluminium, like 40hz says. The Corsair Obsidian 550D I got for my new server is pretty decent, but still - I would rather have it be made of steel than alu, and a few mm thicker. Dunno what that would have done to it's cost, though, and I would've been wrecked from carrying it home from the store :)
And, again: you can probably get the cooling system quiet enough, but vibration, man... vibration.
40hz:
but vibration, man... vibration.
-f0dder (October 03, 2012, 05:46 PM)
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Definitely. Review what the people that did the Backblaze storage server did about vibration (nylon standoffs, foam anchor across the tops of the drives, rubber band 'sleeves') since that seemed to work the trick for them. Adapt as needed. Old trick: passing the anchoring screws through grommets or soft hi-temp washers between the drives and the tray they're mounted to cuts down on vibes as well. Dampens noise too. (Obviously won't work with some tool-less and rail mounting systems.)
Note: In a room with the door shut should be quiet enough as long as it's not a rack case.
You can also always turn it off at night or when company is over if it does get annoying. 8)
right now is nobody in the US seems to be selling the Lian Li pc-d8000.
-superboyac (October 03, 2012, 05:12 PM)
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That can be a problem with Lian Li. Some of their most interesting products never seem to be available from US sources. Guess US distributors prefer to stick with the best sellers. :(
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