Discussion Forums > Technology
Case with 9+ hard drives & OpenSolaris/ZFS advice
Pentium100:
--- Quote from: rostheferret on October 13, 2010, 07:06:56 PM ---Surely a rack mount server case would work better here? He doesn't need a full case with all the expansion slots and the like, Full Towers are designed more with gaming in mind...
This I spotted with a minutes googling. With that 4-in-3 it'll fit 12 HDDs.
--- End quote ---
You found the case of my main PC :) Yea, it would fit 12 drives, I think, but 2 of them would be vertical. I think I read somewhere that vertical drives do not last as long as horizontal ones. And those drives would not have a fan in front of them.
rostheferret:
--- Quote from: Pentium100 on October 13, 2010, 10:58:03 PM ---
--- Quote from: rostheferret on October 13, 2010, 07:06:56 PM ---Surely a rack mount server case would work better here? He doesn't need a full case with all the expansion slots and the like, Full Towers are designed more with gaming in mind...
This I spotted with a minutes googling. With that 4-in-3 it'll fit 12 HDDs.
--- End quote ---
You found the case of my main PC :) Yea, it would fit 12 drives, I think, but 2 of them would be vertical. I think I read somewhere that vertical drives do not last as long as horizontal ones. And those drives would not have a fan in front of them.
--- End quote ---
Possibly, due to the manner the disc spins (it would introduce uneven gravitational forces between the two ends of the disc) but tbh, I wouldn't expect it to make a significant difference. I wouldn't expect heat to be a major issue either - my old PC didn't have more than a couple of fans and it was fine - but if it is, it's not hard to tape a fan somewhere :P
bork:
Disk orientation - had several systems with over 200 disks each, all standing on their ends (Auspex). Most common large disk array chassis hold the disk drives on their edge.
Just make sure that you have proper power and cooling.
per:
ZFS is definately worth it.
The checksums, and total ease of administration is unbeatable if you want a sub $100k solution.
Anyway, personally I have one of these:
http://www.mullet.se/product.html?product_id=332663
It's a supermicro chassi and motherboard, and should be available elsewhere too.
That´s around $2300 (ouch, the dollar is low, it used to be $1600 when I bought it, and the price in SEK is more or less the same. :-)) for the complete system, everything except drives included, making the drives the by far most expensive part.
Perhaps not the cheapest solution, but not all that much more expensive than low-end systems, and having 16 hot-swap slots with status-lights is really convenient if you ever have to exchange a drive.
geoffreak:
I think the case I've decided on is this one. I still have no idea what controller card(s) I should get though. I need something that is cheap, supports Ubuntu/OpenSolaris, and allows the OS to recognize each of the drives (JBOD without concatenation). The difficult part will be to not limit bandwidth too much and find a motherboard that has the necessary expansion card ports.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version