I’ve been toying with the idea of going the rackmount route with my home servers for a while now but two things have always stopped me, noise and cooling.
The issue with rackmount storage servers in a home setting is that in order to keep the disks at least in the mid 40c’s, you either need fans that sound like jet engines, or somewhere you need to run the HDDs hotter than is gernally considered to by ideal. There’s also the low frequency noise that, in my use case at least, drives me crazy if I don’t take extensive steps to mitigate it to bareable levels.
So I’ve been kicking around the idea of what a cool and quiet, 3.5" disk storage based server case might look like. I’ve come up with a basic concept that I think makes sense but I did also start wondering just how niche my use case / requirements are.
So I’d like to canvas opinion on whether a case that took a full ATX motherboard (+ 1 or 2 expansions slots to account for a large GPU in the mobo’s lowest PCIe slot), had room for between 27 and 36 HDDs that would be slot loading / toolless, and that was similar in size but not in terms of layout to the Lian Li PC-600 would be popular?
It might actuall be poosible to rack mount the case but the air flow is not front to rear. So it’d only really work for the home user it’s intended for. It’d also work out to just 9 to 12 HDDs per 3(ish)u.
I’ve worked out a basic 3D model of the layout but I still want to polish it a bit before I post it… or perhaps more to the point, I want to know whether there’s any point in me spending more time on my flight of fancy?
I might even be able to provide helpful feedback because I went down the road of design and producing a 32-bay pedestal case with as small a form factor as possible.
I stole the hdd retention mechanism from the Lian Li PC-Q26 for my design.
Thanks for the response and reminding me that that case existed. It’s HDD mounting solution has given me an idea for something better than I already had in my head.
27 to 36 disks is a big ask when it comes to minimising noise/heat for any case really.
The way I get around this is to buy a case with double the drive bays and only populate ½ of them.
I snaffled up a TGC-dh-4036-12gb-02-chassis-4u-36bays-hotswap-backplane-12gbps-dh-4036-12gb-02 case this month for ~$400AUD delivered. It’s about to be superseded which is why it’s a ⅓ of its original price.
If the fans are still too loud, you could look at replacing the fans with
Noctua alternatives which I’ve also done a couple of times in the past.
Added bonus of over subscribing bays is that you can migrate to SSD over time…
It depends, since I mostly need 2.5" space; or 5.25" space that can be converted to anything I want. But there are adapters for 2.5"->3.5", even 2x 2.5" to 3.5", so… again, it depends.
Also, motherboard would have to go up to EEB. (I think you might find more interest here with that form factor, and it’s not that much bigger than ATX.)
One of the issues I have with server cases is that the air intakes are so restrictive. Which isn’t an issue in a server room, where you can just use faster, noiser fans but in a home environment, it is… for me at least. I’ve thought about running a rackmount case, with some of the disk bays not populated but that opens up issues with dust and it still doesn’t address the issue of the rest of the case internals, potentially being restrictive to airflow. I would love to try and see whether I could make a case like the one you have, as quiet as I would want it to be but the risk of it not meeting my requirements stops me from risking my money.
Having said that though, and as this case I’m designing is ultimately a flight of fancy, perhaps I should look into using a partially populated rack mount case.
I’ll have to give some more thought to the disk area, which is already semi modular but perhaps could be designed in such a way that it can be adapted to different form factors of storage.
I’m the same with 5.25" bays. One of the big reasons I’m just not interested in 99.9% of new PC cases, is because so few of them have more than a couple of 5.25" bays… if they even have 5.25" bays!
I’m gonna hang onto my Silverstone FT02’s and Fractal Desgin XL R2’s until they either fall apart, or form factor changes make them unusable.
I’ll have to just double check the clearances but it’s certainly possible for the case to support EEB. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
