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#1
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
Greetings,
I am in the planning stages of creating 5TB of NAS for my home network. I will be creating a RAID5 solution and, for price-per-GB-reasons, have settled upon 500GB drives. As a result, this is looking like an eleven- or twelve-drive solution. I will be using SATA drives. I have researched external multiple-SATA-drive enclosures and found them to be more pricey than I am willing to pay. With the 1-meter (~39in) cable length allowed under the SATA spec, I am wondering why I wouldn't just buy two cheap (~$30) computer cases, mod the cases to allow installation of extra cooling fans and SATA cables, use the included power supplies to power the drives and fans and mount four to six drives in the empty cases (no MOBO or anything else) and run the SATA cables back to the RAID controller in the case of the main computer? Sure, cases take up more space than enclosures- but the extra space should provide for better cooling ability of the drives. The cheapest 12-drive enclosures I have been able to find run in the hundreds (to thousands) of dollars and this sounds like a $100 solution. So if I don't care about the extra space, are there any fatal flaws in this evil plan that I'm not seeing? Thanks. |
#3
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
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#4
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
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#5
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
Thanks, everyone, for your replies.
I am sensitive to the cooling issues and, while I don't have the link handy, when researching the underpinnings of this solution I came across someone who found a very cost-effective case where the drive rack ran from the top of the case to the bottom. Gleaming aluminum. This would allow for safe mounting of about four drives with adequate space for airflow, addressing the cooling issues. While I had just about written off the enclosure idea, Steve's suggestion below has me rethinking my approach. $240 for two five-drive enclosures _was_ a bit more than I had wanted to spend, but gaining the ease of hot-swapping the drives (supported by the RAID controller I'm targeting) and going with a solution _designed_ to hold five drives vs. the jury-rigging I was originally considering seems like the more sound idea considering the investment I will be making in the hard drives in the first place. I'll have to search for cases again. Much appreciated, -Chuck Steve Cousins wrote: wrote: Greetings, I am in the planning stages of creating 5TB of NAS for my home network. I will be creating a RAID5 solution and, for price-per-GB-reasons, have settled upon 500GB drives. As a result, this is looking like an eleven- or twelve-drive solution. I will be using SATA drives. I have researched external multiple-SATA-drive enclosures and found them to be more pricey than I am willing to pay. I use the Supermicro CSE-M35T1 (and CSE-M35T1B for black) hot-swap cages that hold 5 drives in the space of 3 5.25 inch bays. Put two of these together and you get 10 drive cages. They come with fans built in and I've had good luck with them. Sure they are a bit more expensive than using another case but it is not that bad all in all. $120 each and you only need two of them. The other one or two drives you can put internally. I do this with an 11 drive system. So if I don't care about the extra space, are there any fatal flaws in this evil plan that I'm not seeing? Nothing fatal but you need to make sure you power up the second case appropriately (before or during bootup) of course. Sounds silly but it could come back to bite you some late night. Plus you will need to jumper the second cases motherboard power connector in order to turn on the power supply (I'm assuming ATX). Good luck. Steve |
#6
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
Rod Speed wrote:
wrote I am in the planning stages of creating 5TB of NAS for my home network. I will be creating a RAID5 solution and, for price-per-GB-reasons, have settled upon 500GB drives. As a result, this is looking like an eleven- or twelve-drive solution. I will be using SATA drives. I have researched external multiple-SATA-drive enclosures and found them to be more pricey than I am willing to pay. With the 1-meter (~39in) cable length allowed under the SATA spec, I am wondering why I wouldn't just buy two cheap (~$30) computer cases, mod the cases to allow installation of extra cooling fans and SATA cables, use the included power supplies to power the drives and fans and mount four to six drives in the empty cases (no MOBO or anything else) and run the SATA cables back to the RAID controller in the case of the main computer? Yes you can, but the cheapest cases dont have that many drive bays and it isnt that great mounting drives in every bay, you dont get enough airflow over the drives to cool them adequately unless you add a fan and that only works very well with the 3.5" drive bay stack. Sure, cases take up more space than enclosures- but the extra space should provide for better cooling ability of the drives. In practice it doesnt, because you have the drives all stacked adjacent with no real airflow over them. The rest of the space is irrelevant really. The cheapest 12-drive enclosures I have been able to find run in the hundreds (to thousands) of dollars Yeah, they're not a mass market commodity item. and this sounds like a $100 solution. So if I don't care about the extra space, are there any fatal flaws in this evil plan that I'm not seeing? Yes, adequate drive bay cooling. I'd personally see if I could find a PC case that has a decent 3.5" drive bay cage, one that you could combine two cases by pinching the cage out of one to put in the one you want to use. There is often enough space below the cage to mount another and you can usually mount a fan so it blows over those, two fans. Main problem is that the fans arent quiet and I prefer quiet systems. You'd likely still need a total of 2 cases, with 2 more canabalised, since there arent that many cases that have a cage that takes 6 3.5" drives. I dont think using the 5.25" drive bay stack with bay kits works very well, you dont get much cooling of the drives by conduction to the drive bay stack metal that way and it isnt that easy to cool with fans either. Thermaltake makes a nifty three 5 1/4" bay cage with a 120mm fan in front of it I'd keep looking at dedicated hotswap backplane cases, though. If you're serious enough to need RAID5, you should do it with the right equipment. If you're just experimenting, that's a different matter...but building your own cases/cooling system, and buying quality power supplies could reach the price of a dedicated case pretty quickly. Dave |
#7
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
David Flory wrote:
Rod Speed wrote: wrote I am in the planning stages of creating 5TB of NAS for my home network. I will be creating a RAID5 solution and, for price-per-GB-reasons, have settled upon 500GB drives. As a result, this is looking like an eleven- or twelve-drive solution. I will be using SATA drives. I have researched external multiple-SATA-drive enclosures and found them to be more pricey than I am willing to pay. With the 1-meter (~39in) cable length allowed under the SATA spec, I am wondering why I wouldn't just buy two cheap (~$30) computer cases, mod the cases to allow installation of extra cooling fans and SATA cables, use the included power supplies to power the drives and fans and mount four to six drives in the empty cases (no MOBO or anything else) and run the SATA cables back to the RAID controller in the case of the main computer? Yes you can, but the cheapest cases dont have that many drive bays and it isnt that great mounting drives in every bay, you dont get enough airflow over the drives to cool them adequately unless you add a fan and that only works very well with the 3.5" drive bay stack. Sure, cases take up more space than enclosures- but the extra space should provide for better cooling ability of the drives. In practice it doesnt, because you have the drives all stacked adjacent with no real airflow over them. The rest of the space is irrelevant really. The cheapest 12-drive enclosures I have been able to find run in the hundreds (to thousands) of dollars Yeah, they're not a mass market commodity item. and this sounds like a $100 solution. So if I don't care about the extra space, are there any fatal flaws in this evil plan that I'm not seeing? Yes, adequate drive bay cooling. I'd personally see if I could find a PC case that has a decent 3.5" drive bay cage, one that you could combine two cases by pinching the cage out of one to put in the one you want to use. There is often enough space below the cage to mount another and you can usually mount a fan so it blows over those, two fans. Main problem is that the fans arent quiet and I prefer quiet systems. You'd likely still need a total of 2 cases, with 2 more canabalised, since there arent that many cases that have a cage that takes 6 3.5" drives. I dont think using the 5.25" drive bay stack with bay kits works very well, you dont get much cooling of the drives by conduction to the drive bay stack metal that way and it isnt that easy to cool with fans either. Thermaltake makes a nifty three 5 1/4" bay cage with a 120mm fan in front of it Yeah, http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...cage/a2309.asp There arent going to be that many cases that will take 4 of those tho. I'd keep looking at dedicated hotswap backplane cases, though. Yeah, me too. If you're serious enough to need RAID5, you should do it with the right equipment. Dunno, you can make a case that he doesnt really need hot swap and that cold swap would be fine and worth the massive saving on price. If you're just experimenting, that's a different matter...but building your own cases/cooling system, and buying quality power supplies could reach the price of a dedicated case pretty quickly. If you could actually find a full tower case that can take 4 of those iCages, and two power supplys, the price may not be quite that bad. The iCages are reasonably priced. |
#8
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
Thermaltake makes a nifty three 5 1/4" bay cage with a 120mm fan in front of it
Yeah, http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...cage/a2309.asp That's a nifty device. I'm sure this is by design (to aid in cooling), but it's only a 1:1 mapping of 5.25" bays to 3.5" bays. Finding a tower case to fit four of them might be impossible as I haven't seen any tower cases that offer 12 bays. At the very best it limits my case options severely. Those iCages are cost effective, though - I found them as cheap as $16.81 apiece at ACSOutlet.com (http://www.acsoutlet.com/A2309-Standard.aspx) - shipping yet to be determined. Buying four would cut a good amount off buying the two SuperMicro cages I was considering, but the SuperMicro cages allow me five drives in the space of three bays plus hot-swappability. Tough choice, but I think the fact that I can only fit three of those iCages in the tower cases I've been considering might end up being the deciding factor. There arent going to be that many cases that will take 4 of those tho. I'd keep looking at dedicated hotswap backplane cases, though. Yeah, me too. All the dedicated hotswap backplane cases I've been able to find have been rackmount. I don't have a rack (this is a home project) nor am I currently considering a rack. I have had difficulty finding some pedistal-tower-form-factor cases with dedicated hot-swap backplanes. If you could point me in the right direction to where I should look I'd appreciate it. If you're serious enough to need RAID5, you should do it with the right equipment. Dunno, you can make a case that he doesnt really need hot swap and that cold swap would be fine and worth the massive saving on price. If you're just experimenting, that's a different matter...but building your own cases/cooling system, and buying quality power supplies could reach the price of a dedicated case pretty quickly. If you could actually find a full tower case that can take 4 of those iCages, and two power supplys, the price may not be quite that bad. The iCages are reasonably priced. Right now my case looks like the following: Sheet metal, plastic, fans: $145 Cooler Master CM Stacker tower case Power Supply: $150 Corsair CMPSU-620HX 620 watts Drive Enclosures: $245 for (2) SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B hot-swap drive enclosures Yeah, maybe I can find a cheaper case than $540 that will give me all that. Maybe I can jury-rig a rackmount in the space where I am planning on keeping this equipment. Or maybe I can just build a new computer rack. This is why this is called the _planning_ stage Thanks for your continued help. I'm going to continue researching. |
#9
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
wrote in message ups.com
Thermaltake makes a nifty three 5 1/4" bay cage with a 120mm fan in front of it Yeah, http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...cage/a2309.asp That's a nifty device. I'm sure this is by design (to aid in cooling), but it's only a 1:1 mapping of 5.25" bays to 3.5" bays. Finding a tower case to fit four of them might be impossible as I haven't seen any tower cases that offer 12 bays. At the very best it limits my case options severely. Those iCages are cost effective, though - I found them as cheap as $16.81 apiece at ACSOutlet.com (http://www.acsoutlet.com/A2309-Standard.aspx) - shipping yet to be determined. Buying four would cut a good amount off buying the two SuperMicro cages I was considering, but the SuperMicro cages allow me five drives in the space of three bays plus hot-swappability. Tough choice, but I think the fact that I can only fit three of those iCages in the tower cases I've been considering might end up being the deciding factor. Then also consider this one: http://www.cooldrives.com/sainhosaraca.html [snip] |
#10
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Multiple SATA drive enclosure - can I do this?
Folkert Rienstra wrote:
wrote in message ups.com Thermaltake makes a nifty three 5 1/4" bay cage with a 120mm fan in front of it Yeah, http://www.thermaltake.com/product/C...cage/a2309.asp That's a nifty device. I'm sure this is by design (to aid in cooling), but it's only a 1:1 mapping of 5.25" bays to 3.5" bays. Finding a tower case to fit four of them might be impossible as I haven't seen any tower cases that offer 12 bays. At the very best it limits my case options severely. Those iCages are cost effective, though - I found them as cheap as $16.81 apiece at ACSOutlet.com (http://www.acsoutlet.com/A2309-Standard.aspx) - shipping yet to be determined. Buying four would cut a good amount off buying the two SuperMicro cages I was considering, but the SuperMicro cages allow me five drives in the space of three bays plus hot-swappability. Tough choice, but I think the fact that I can only fit three of those iCages in the tower cases I've been considering might end up being the deciding factor. Then also consider this one: http://www.cooldrives.com/sainhosaraca.html [snip] ^^^Good idea. I remember looking at those myself. I'm a bit concerned that they only have one fan and no temperature warning system. One advantage of the low density iCages is that if the fan fails (and good 120mm fans usually don't), your drives will probably be okay until you notice the problem. Even if a high density rack has a warning system, you need have some sort of plan for a cooling failure (auto-shutdown, etc.) or your drives will cook. BR Dave |
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