god I wish I could find this in a cheap ass chinese version. It’s exactly what I need but I don’t want to spend more on my case than I did on my cpus/mb lol.
Your case will outlast the cpu/mb/ram content of your server by several generations if you choose so. So, look at it as an investment, like a house.
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Believe me, I know. My server is in an in win I bought in 1997 lol. it’s just a pill I don’t wanna swallow.
FWIW… I love IStarUSA’s stuff. They make pretty good server chassis. Some of their stuff ain’t cheap, but like @Dutch_Master said, you could think of it as an investment.
And while Supermicro chassis are great and robust, the static pressure fan situation is usually not very house friendly.
Well its around half the price of Supermicro. And you will need HBA with 4 SFF ports and 4 cables, or expander.
And if you on such tight budget, then only way you buy something decent ,will be used.
Because that Intertech seems already as “cheap ass chineese” 
It may be good, because almost everything is chineese, but I wouldn’t count on anything cheaper. Trays usually elevate price, but even cheapest ones (usually horrible) are like $10 a piece.
rosewilll sells those hot swap bays separate right?
so get another model of the same chassis… and just get the compatible hot swap bays , right?
SATA is not a good idea with more than a few disks, I would say more than 10 miniSAS for sure.
My advice is: forget it. If something stops working you may spend days to troubleshoot this. Its fine for maybe one, two cages.
Also how this will be exactly cheaper? I cannot check RW, because they blocking Europe, but I saw them for like $60. So $480 for 8… Without the actual case.
Also here’s recent example of fubar with this. Bit diferent (miniSas backplane but with SATA reverse fanout), but point of failure pretty much the same.
You can’t get 8 of those in there. 3 max.
Also they work great. I have the case OP wants. And a separate hotswap bay in another machine. It’s been solid.
Right we were taking about Intertech, and I compared to its 24 drives.
And I thought about 2U, 3 disk cages, hence my 8x number. But still you wouldn’t fit this in standard 4U rack. It was already morning for me, so…
But 3 cages, yeah, that could work, still at least 12 points of failure for SATA alone, probably molex-sata power splitters on top of that…
And even then 3x60=$180 plus case price ($100? maybe). That almost $300 for 12 disk case?
And they out of stock everywhere. But Chieftec makes same thing same price. I even bought one for my server, but I plan only for 4-disk array, not 12-24.
Power splitters are not necessary for the rosewill bays. They use only 2 molex each.
Like I said originally though they are discontinued.
molex-molex splitter then, you need 6 for 3 cages. I guess depends what psu you have.
Yeah, sorry, missed that. But regardless Chieftec makes them too.
For what it’s worth, 120mm fans aren’t going to save you much on noise. The main issue with a hot-swap rack mount chassis is that there’s nowhere for air intake and exhaust except the front (filled with drive bays and typically a SAS backplane) and the rear (which doesn’t have a lot of space either due to I/O, PCI slots and power supplies). You need a fairly high amount of static pressure if your drive bays are full. Typically 38mm deep fans running at higher rpm than desirable in living space.
I have a Rosewill L4411 in my basement rack. I would not buy another one, and I definitely wouldn’t want it in living space. It’s not fully populated, and is running a low power board and CPU (Core i5-2405S), 10G Mellanox card. I’ve tried a few different 120mm fans, but in the end it’s either warm/hot or loud (choose one). The drive bays are crap compared to say Supermicro. The front door/filter setup is terrible. The handle brackets had to be modified to allow it to go into any of my racks. I long ago relegated this machine to just web server duties.
I would say that if you want 12 drive bays in living space… you don’t want a rackmount chassis. Get yourself a full tower that will accommodate your drives, many 120mm or 140mm fans, and maybe an AIO if it makes sense.
Any chance you have space somewhere to put a noisy machine? There are always many good options for 2U 12-bay ready-to-go servers on eBay for cheap (often under $400). I have three Supermicro servers in my basement (two 2U and one 1U), and they were cheap ($300 to $600). Came with CPUs (dual L5630, dual L5640, E3-1270 V2), one came with M1015 HBA, all came with RAM (48G for two of them, 32G for the 1u), all came with the hot swap cages (12 each in the 2U, 4 in the 1U) and some 2.5" cage adapters, the 2U ones came with SAS backplanes, two of them came with rails. I haven’t added much… Mellanox 10G PCI cards in all, an HBA for the second 2U, filtered front panels for the 2U ones, drives. Two of them have been running for 5 years, the other for 3.5 years. No problems at all. All are running FreeBSD and have ZFS pools.
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@nx2l Have you done this personally? I’ve looked at doing this but it looks like the fans on the case you posted are a bit different sized than 3-5.25" bays.
@dwm I have space in a root cellar that I could use but it gets very humid in there. Honestly, its just a 5’ crawlspace under my house that has power and lights. But, that’s about all I have where it would be out of earshot. I have a small house.
I think I will keep looking at ebay for some discounts but otherwise I will look for a tower and forget hotswap.
Assuming you can even find the bays rosewill discontinued, the fans are on the back of them.
Humidity generally isn’t a huge issue (some moisture tends to be better than none due to ESD), as long as the temperature is steady (no condensation cycles). Unless we’re talking about literally wet surfaces. If it’s a dirt floor, that might be an issue. But I suspect it’s just not a space you’d be comfortable using for a computer. I get it.
If you have tools, skills and time… nothing is impossible; theoretically you could build your own case from scratch! Or an enclosure (say wood) around the noisy box that dampens the noise without killing the air flow. I was just cautioning against an off-the-shelf rack mount chassis in living space (and my lack of satisfaction with the Rosewill I bought years ago). They’re just not designed with noise levels as a priority. Ones with real oomph inside are very loud because they have to be to push the air that’s required to keep thermals in check, through limited access to fresh air and exhaust. Keep in mind there isn’t room for a tall tower cooler. In 2U and 1U form… there isn’t room for an active cooler at all, all of the air comes from chassis fans.
Of course you can go very low power and bring the noise down. You didn’t say what else this box needs to do. If it’s just storage, no GPU, no 10GbaseT… yes, you can probably get it to a level that’s reasonable, which would be similar in oomph to a purpose-built desktop NAS (Synology or similar).
I don’t consider hot-swap a true necessity at home. It’s convenient for sure, but not a true necessity for me. It’s not like I’m adding/removing/swapping drives on a regular basis. And when I do, I don’t need to do it on a live machine (powered and in the OS). I need to know which drive is which when one or more fails. A Sharpie (or a diagram on paper) solves that problem. I have hot-swap bays, I just don’t really need them.
What do you need this box to do? What’s driving the need for 100TB of on-line disk?
@dwm Yeah, the root cellar isn’t really an option. Thanks for sharing your experience with COTS cases, that’s the kind of thing I was hoping to hear about.
I don’t need the 100TB right now. I’m planning to work within the new TrueNAS core and figure out the best configuration for me but I will have to do a couple things.
First I want to mirror 2 drives to house family photos and movies that are literally irreplaceable. The other 8 I was thinking of doing a raid Z-3 for redundancy and speed for file hosting. I wanted to see if I could use this box as a render server while I’m learning Davinci Resolve.
If I don’t continue with that I’m planning to continue to learning network admin and try to do some other IT, online courses. I think my job will be automated or off-shored in the future so I’m trying to think of careers that will be quasi future proof. I think that network admin will continue to be a local job, not something that can always be done remotely. But tis not my field I was thinking of posting a new thread to get a general feel of what the community thinks of the future.
Most network admin is remote in my experience. Even in the old days (I worked for an ISP for quite a while, then continued in the industry for longer). Don’t let that discourage you. It also means you can do the job from anywhere with Internet access. If it interests you, go for it.
But since you mentioned it… and you don’t appear to be desperate for 100TB in one place right now… split the drives up between two or three smaller machines? That’ll give you an opportunity to play with networking between them, providing host redundancy with VMs or containers, ZFS snapshots and send/receive, pf or similar for access controls, etc. Just a thought.
For what it’s worth, at home I build my pools from mirrored vdevs. This article still applies today:
Hey, have you actually listed all you want from the case?
like this:
Most desired:
- Rack Mount
- ATX mobo
- ATX PSU
- 10 * 3.5" HDD (internal/external)
- 2* 2.5" SSD/HDD (Internal or hot swap)
Would like, not essential:
- Full sized GPU (or low profile
- AIC CLC or Air cooler
- Any other PCI Cards
- Any redundant power supply
So if it doesnt need a GPU, then that allows for a shorter height?
That’s if you haven;t already found what you want on newegg / ebay / mouser
If you want to run a full-fat GPU, then like you mention, 4U is what you’re kinda looking at, but perhaps a “tower” server might be avaialgle, with the right dimensions, and some of them have “Ears” or brackets you can buy to tuen them into rack mount cases?
Also, if you want rack mount, are you bothered about ready-rails (which slide out) or just static rails (that stay in the rack, like a chest of drawers’ suports) or even just bolted into a rack?
I went for a 4u chassis, to allow for an unmodded GPU, with an ATX board and AIO, and hot swap drive cages, but not everyonw has the same criteria?
I found this at a hefty discount on cyber Monday. I haven’t seen anything close to the price and free shipping, a serious consideration on ebay.
I’m planning to get started on a build and then add in some 5 in 3-5.25" bay from Icy Dock. Not cheap but space efficient.
https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=242
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