turn supermicro 24 bay into separate pc and shelf?

while looking into redundant power supply i found it to be VERY pricey! ! !

SO an idea of building a desktop computer in a supermicro 24 bay chassis, but connecting the front 24 bays to an external power supply and the Data lines to my nas, so they will be 2 separate things.

my MAIN issue is if i need to “do repair, work on the hardware” to the desktop part i’ll have 24 spinning disks i could damage unless i shut down the nas as well.

Thoughts?

It’s an interesting idea, however, I wouldn’t recommend it.
The only real benefit to this is if you are super space constrained and this is your only option. Otherwise, the list of cons in trying to set this up would greatly outweigh the advantages. For instance, a Supermicro 24 bay chassis is going to be loud. There are ways to quiet it down but they are pretty extreme measures and the end result is costly. You’ll want to keep a chassis like that far away from you computer setup like in a basement or garage. Additionallly, you lose the ammenities of having an actual desktop chassis like front panel connectors. In this case (see what I did there) you’d also need to have 2 separate power buttons and it also sounds like you would need to have some sort of externally mounted power supply which is not ideal at all. My question to you would be what do you currently have in the way of a NAS and computer? And what was the ulitmate goal of trying to combine them 2 into one box?

it will be under a bed with sound baffling, fans and filter system, with the foot of the bed being a “wall” 1/2 inch plyboard and the other side the desk, monitors, mise, keyboards . . . . . so space is a bit of an issue, and yes there’ll little sound bleeding. with the systems under the bed i’ll have to run hubs for each pc anyways. “2 separate power buttons” no, the 24 bays will be controlled by the main NAS, so when the main nas turns on it will also turn on the 2nd PSU. right now i just have 1 24 bay as my nas. the plan is to turn that into a high I/O seed box, add a 72 bay nas with 3 of these split rigs, 1 main “game” pc, 1 secondary “game” rig, and a custom built home automation pc. and not important to this conversation but a 2u supermicro fan twin as vm and surveillance server.

The large chassis are loud because of industrial fans for good airflow over drives.
If one replaces fans with quieter ones, I would say to take care that you still get enough air flow?
Iirc, SATA drives don’t get quite as hot as SAS drives, so would be okay, but if running hot, won’t they burn the drives out?

Or do you reckon I’m over thinking it?

Hmmm, are you sure you will have enough airflow to keep the systems healthy?
There are for sure passive and low temp computers, but they have less moving parts.
Just concerned that you might end up with a few more dead drives than normal running a heavy machine like that in confined quarters, but YOLO, you are welcome to give regular updates of how very wrong I am! :slight_smile:

You’re absolutely right, The high pressure static fans are mostly the culprit for the noise in these machines. And unless you get the “quiet” versions of the power supplys, those tiny power supply fans will also be quite whiny.

You could check out this guys videos for some awesome tips on how to quiet these suckers down quite a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCag6XqE4hiLi9wa3YYL4_0Q/videos

But, if you’re not going to go down that path, I still maintain that these things will be loud.

there will be a 6 inch 460 CFM fan blowing over them, so YES more then enough airflow.
shucked wd easystore 8tb = $119 to 160.

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Those are exactly what I use. You probably already know this, but those are a tight fit in the Supermicro SC846 chassis whereas those backplanes and bays were designed for HDDs from many years ago which were not quite as pyshically large as their contemporary counterparts.

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I don’t want to discourage you if you have your heart set on doing this type of setup. So, might I suggest looking into this part from Supermicro that may help you setup your shelf portion of the rig. This board is essentially what you would use to turn a full storage server into just a JBOD chassis.


yea i know i’ll need a board like this. going to 3 different backplanes i’ll have to really research it to get the right one. probably have to talk to SM themselves.

were there any other cons you could think of?

I’m still a little unsure of how you are going to power the disk shelf or the seperate computer motherboard. Are you just going to strap a power supply on top of the case or do you intend on running leads from another power supply in a different chassis to get to the back-plane somehow or the motherboard?

the idea is finding a 1u server with 4 1200W PSU, and these backplanes take 4 molex, so make some custom molex connector with higher gauge wires, so i won’t burn down my house. at most 6Us of distance.

Are there 1u servers with 4 independant psus? I couldn’t imagine a use case for that.

i haven’t found one, so i doubt it, but i really haven’t looked all that hard.

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