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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