I’m currently planning my next big computer build, that should happen at some point next year hopefully. One of the stumbling blocks though, is the choice of case. I’d very much like to keep my currently, much loved Silverstone FT02 because it’s built like a tank and has the all important 5.25" bays I want. The problem is though, every modern GPU I look at uses a heatsink with long, straight heatpipes which are known to be problematic when used in a case, such as my FT02, on account of it’s 90 degree rotated motherboard design. The cold side of the GPUs heatsink is lower down in a case like the FT02, and because the heatpipes are long and straight, the coolant can have trouble wicking it’s way back toward the hot end of the heatsink.
I’ve been looking for a new case but 5.25" drives are all but a thing of the past. At least multiple bays. So I’m faced with the prospect of hoping I can find an air cooled GPU that won’t have issues baring it’s holes / ports to the sky, finding a new case that fits my requirements (i.e. the 5.25" bays), or I can do something kind of janky and probably unnecessarily expensive… but also pretty cool.
The crazy idea I have rattling around in my head is buying a used optical media dubbing system. Which would basically be a super simple, shallow depth case, with room for a power supply, a whole bunch of 5.25" bays, a few fans, and nothing else. I could then buy a case for the main system based purely on performance and quality, without the need for 5.25" bays.I would then connect the ‘5.25" System’ to the main system via some sort of external cable / HBA.
When fully populated, my current 5.25" devices take 4x 3.5" HDDs, 7x 2.5" SSDs, and 1x good ol’ optical media drive. So my question is… is there some kind of storage adaptor or HBA, that can be installed in my main computer, and then connected (at full SATA SSD speeds) to the 5.25" only case?
Are you against the idea of using an external optical drive via a USB? If you already have an internal 5.25’ CD/DVD/BluRay drive you can also buy an optical drive enclosure.
Now with regards to speed or overall reliability, it isn’t really there because of the USB. I have not seen an optical drive enclosure connected via USB-C with better transfer speeds but I am sure they are out there.
I should have been more explicit in my original post when explaining that the goal is to still be able to use my various hotswap 3.5" and 2.5" drive cages.
I have looked into external enclosures intended for a single 5.25" optical drive, recently in fact, but the prices are stupidly high. Having said that, If I could find an enclosure for the right price, I’m not dead against using USB for optical media but for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t want to connect my various HDDs and SATA SSDs via USB.
Since you are buying a new gpu anyways would you be opposed to a water cooled one? Several manufacturers now have factory water cooled gpu that would avoid your heat pipe concerns.
There are 2 basic external drive interfaces.
USB
SAS
SAS is better, and more flexible, but more expensive initially, and it requires a free pcie slot.
if you wanted to use sata optical drives you would need to get a sas expander that could talk to sata devices (they exist), and often use a molex for power, and mount via the pcie slot in an enclosure. They don’t need a motherboard.
One place to look for hard drive enclosures is as ITX NAS boxes.
So far I’ve only found anecdotal evidence from users in various forum threads dedicated to cases that use a 90 degree rotated motherboard layout. Threads such as the Silverstone Owners Club thread over on overclock.net. But I do hope to get some proper data at some point, given that the RV02 (which is essentially the same as my FT02) is still one of the benchmark air-cooling cases on the GamersNexus charts. It’s a long shot but I’m trying my darnedest to get Steve and the gang to test a modern, large GPU in their RV02. Given the current trend of GPUs getting ever larger and heavier, to the point that some of them are cracking their own PCBs under their own weight due to sag, It would be really interesting to know whether such cards play nice in rotated motherboard cases, such as my FT02, where GPU sag is a non issue as it’s essentially hanging off the rear PCIe I/O slot at the top of the case.
When it comes time to build, I might buy the GPU first and see how it runs in my FT02 but it would be good to have a plan in place in the event that I run into issues. Ultimately though, I’m kind of trying to head any potential issues off at the pass.
I’m not totally opposed to water cooling but if I were to go the water cooling route, I’d probably be faced with the same issue of having to get a new case anyway. As, whilst the FT02 is a fantastic air cooling case, it’s not well suited to water cooling. I also prefer the low maintenance reliability of air cooling.
Would it require a free PCIe slot in the main ‘parent’ system, the external ‘child’ system, or both?
Would such an SAS expander have enough bandwidth to not cause any performance issues with any of my 7 SATA SSDs?
I have considered using a NAS oriented mITX case but there simply aren’t any out there (that I can find) with enough 5.25". At the very minimum, I’d need 3x 5.25" bays but the case would also have to have some hotswap bays for 3.5" disks… Which, I’m guessing if such a case exists, won’t be cheap. There also the issue of such cases having considerably larger footprint than an optical disc dubbing case.
If you’ll allow me to do a little online mansplaining, there’s heatpipes which are all over the place these days, and there’s thermosyphons which we don’t see as often in heatsinks. Heatpipes generally are not affected by gravity or orientation since they have a coating on the inside the pipe which promotes capillary action and helps the condensed vapor travel along the pipe. Thermosyphons don’t have that coating and rely on convection so they are affected by gravity.
As far as I know, one has not shown its self to be better than the other in heatsinks with all other things equal. The only thermosyphon I know of offhand used in a heatsink was the Ice Giant which I think generally performed well, but I don’t think heatpipe vs thermosyphon really played a role there.
It would require a free pcie slot on the host (usually x8 pcie3).
The destination has 2 options depending on the drives. SAS allows cable lengths of up to 10 meters. If the drives are all SAS, you can just use a passive plate on the box, like:
If some of the drives are sata, you will need a SAS expander that can accept sata drives with their 1 meter max cable lengths. SAS expanders can also be up to 3 levels deep between the controller and the drive. There are 3 generations of SAS, that you will find hardware for. For most cases use 12gbps stuff, it became affordable around 2017 so there is a lot available new and used. 24gbps hardware is also available but it is still expensive, and the people who have upgraded have made the 12gbps hardware cheap.
A feature is on 12gbps (and maybe 6gbps, but I can’t remember, but due to the price difference just get 12gbps) that allows several slower streams to be sent over one SAS channel. For your sata SSD drives, 2 of them will fill one channel, or 5 7200RPM drives, a single channel will probably support many more optical drives. The standard controller to device cables are 4 channels. It is common for an expander to have an 8 channel uplink to the controller, though there are reasons to have more channels. Often if you need to have more channels, just add an additional expander too. SAS expanders cost around $100 ±$40.
On the destination the sas expander has the pcie form factor, and can be screwed into a drive with a pcie slo, you could do some diy solution, but this looks much more finished. Out on the destination enclosure the card does not need a motherboard, but may need a PCIE slot with power, which are available with a sas power connector, other cards just get power via a molex connector. ie:
The above card has will connect to 24 drives, and to an upstream host with 8 channels. It will connect to both SAS and SATA drives.
I am just curious WHY you want to use optical drives. You can get 4T drives for $4.50 a Terabyte, one 4TB drive is about more compact than a stack of 100 50G blue ray. Why would you choose to make optical disks.
my pricing information comes from:
If you did the above things with the cheapest 4TB drives on amazon…
$268 16 external SAS channels
2 at $70 each
48 at $18 each, initially $429 each, 48 for $968
Storage review did a review of one of the 10TB drives in this line.
ie 8ms, 450MB/sec
4 external cables at $20 each
12 at $20 each SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 Cable
make a pair of raidz3 arrays, 2 hot spares per chassis, add both to a pool, so 19 drives of effective speed.
219TB = 152TB in the pool at 17GB/sec read, as slow as 4.25GB/sec write with large files since writes have to go to at least 4 drives,
268+968+140+80+240 = $1696 for 152TB
plus a box and power supply and fan, and somewhere to put it out of earshot. Hard drives consume about 7W while they are on so these hard drives will use 336 watts plus the controller cards.
I have an FE3080 which keeps normal temperatures in my FT02 case. 180mm fans are the AP183. This leaves 310mm for a graphics card. I have also removed the superfluous PCI slot cover strut to give the card maximum airflow as this model’s design is to exhaust air through the rear of the card.
Thank you for the fantastically informative posts. I’ll re-read them a few times when I’m not so busy but at the moment, it’s at the end of a long day, and I’ve still got to finish cooking the dinner. I will just pick up on a few points though.
I already have a decent Bluray drive. So I don’t want to spend any more money on an external one, or on one of the stupidly expensive external enclosures. As for why I’ve got an old fashioned coaster maker to begin with… simple. I’ve got an ever growing media collection. For philosophical reasons, I’m against streaming services and non-physical media purchases. There’s just far to many examples of either a given title / TV show being removed (meaning that people who “bought” it can no longer access it), or the many more examples when the quality is lower on streaming, or the version available on streaming has been cut. Even modern shows have episodes that aren’t available on streaming service due to them containing content that (probably quite rightly) is no longer seen as acceptable.
As for setting up a ZFS based NAS using a bunch of HGST disks… I wish I could!
I actually already have a NAS, which I will be upgrading soon funnily enough, but I’ve found that the cheaper, server oriented disks are always far too loud for my environment. A few months back, I actually had to return some WD Golds because just one WD Gold 18TB was louder than the 6x 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pros the Golds were meant to replace! So when I’ve saved up enough to upgrade my current zpool, I’ll be sticking to Ironwolf Pros.
With that said, I did just want to go back to the subject of using Bluray disks as a backup medium… It’s something that mostly doesn’t make sense to me but I have been toying with the idea of getting a handful of M Discs, and backing up just the most precious family pictures and videos. The bit I really struggle with when it comes to the 3-2-1 backup rule is the 2 bit (two different media).
Hi fellow FT02 owner!
That’s really good to know, thank you. Just to confirm though… have you actually checked under load?
Also, your FT02 looks to be in really good nick. I’ll have to post some pictures of mine at some point.
I would really miss the 5.25" bays. I use the top two with icy Dock storage modules for bits and pieces, then a Pioneer Blu-ray/DVD player for CD music playback, a USB module with fast charger (my remote doorbell is plugged into it lol) and an SSD/hard drive back up facility. I bought the case new around 7 years ago and it has been well used but looked after so no scratches. I took out the QR bay fasteners and use screws for a better grip. I added some more soundproofing to the case panel at the side of the drives.
Kidding aside they mostly are, but that thing above is the “anidees AI Raider XL”, a current case from an unknown manufacturer that’ll set you back about $300. Based on a couple of random youtube videos, the quality is kind of what you’d expect from an effectively brandless product for that money: it’s not garbage, but also won’t blow you away.
I ordered one a little while back just to have it for when i might need it (i know…) but it’s still making its way here so no first-hand experience.
Fractal’s current Define XL comes with 2 optional 5.25" bays at the top. Just saying in case 2 bays is enough and you’re looking for something pricy.
The Silverstone RM600 and Alto D2 that were shown at Computex last year, but aren’t shipping yet, are huge honking cases with lots of storage options. Given how they’re against current trends they might not ever sell them for real, who knows.
