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Case for a home storage computer?

L

lamb110

Gawd
Joined
Jul 6, 2006
Messages
602
i have 7 hardrives (1960gbs) and i am running out of room. Its also generating a TON of heat, so i was thinking of buying some budget parts and building a storage only computer. Whats the best case for this purpose? It really just needs to have a ton of room, and weight isnt an issue either.
 
Masstige... All the room of the stacker 1/2 of the price ;). Get some of those 3 in 2 HDD bays, and you've literally got at LEAST room for 10HDs. Throw an ECS board with a soldered on AMD Duron (~1ghz duron + mobos can be had for literally 30$).
 
Personally i found that i never had enough space for HDs, so i went all out and made a 5u fileserver with a custom modded HD rack in the front (hds mount vertically in the 5u) so i can fit about 20 drives in one case. (Nevermind that my raid controller can only take 16, its chainable, i can drop another one in if needbe)

Rackmounts are good for dropping in a corner, or under some furniture even if you dont have a rack, i have mine in a closet under the stairs next to the AC unit. Headless, only power and dual gigabit linked into it, works great.
 
Depends on how desperate you are. A store here in the zoo has an old file server case that is VERY moddable and is used for $40. It's HUGE and takes an ATX board. So look around and see what you can find if you have time.

Also, the Norco rack mount cases are relatively cheap for good expansion room. They have a SATA drive enclosure that links via firewire (I believe) so you can put multiple enclosures on the same chain. :eek:
 
i'm really not that good with computers, i can definatley tear down any home desktop or build a computer, but when it comes to rack mount type computers that are a network storage computer i'm lost. Do i just throw in a reagular ATX board/processor, a SATA controller and call it a day? How do you get your network to reconize it? the only way i know of doing it is to set it up like any other computer and share the drives.
I'd love to have an option like a rackmount system so i can just keep adding drives and cases to it, then just be able to acess them thru my gaming computer that i use all the time.
 
Its just a normal computer really, takes standard atx/Eatx boards, layouts a bit different, but its simple enough. I run windows 2k3 (only because i have more than 3tb) on mine but xp would work fine. You just make the drives network shares, and map them on your other pcs, then they act like theyre local drives. If you want fancy load balancing with dual gigabit, that takes a bit more work, but single gigabit is probably fine for your needs
 
$39.... SCHWINGGGGGG!!!!!! :p

http://www.xoxide.com/chenming901.html

xoxide_1905_117172534
 
$39 thats freakin tempting there, plus i'm sure i sould screw in some hardrive moutings in the bottom of that thing, thanks :)

but also that shuttle looks pretty cool, where can i get one? i went to the site on that pic but i didnt see anything, but then again i didnt look around that hard either, i'm pretty lazy
 
The shuttle looks custom made, which it probably is because thats a case modding site. Nonetheless, its pretty sweet, but would take quite a bit of work to mount all that stuff in there. You'd have to go with an external DVD-RW or something.
 
yea - the shuttle was kindofa smartass remark...

can't go wrong with a < $50 case with all that room that was mentioned earlier...
 
Hey, if you want some hellacious room, check out this case.

ELEVEN 5.25" bays (add some drive rail converters to mount 3.5" in 5.25" space), plus 3x 3.5" internal and 1x 3.5" external bays!!! Geez, this thing could concievably carry 15 :eek: hard drives, without running out of room!!!

On a side note, this is sorta like the case I used for my file server. Mine was an old scsi cd drive tower, which I modded to hold a micro-atx mobo, and will hold 8 hard drives with no problem. Best part was, it was free for me!! :D
 
i was thinking of investing in a quality case.... Lian Li PC-V2000Aplus II
good choise? how is the cable managment in one of these?
 
Thats a great case, but for a fileserver i still recommend a rackmount :). The inverted board layout in the 2000 is going to put your sata and IDE ports at the very top of the case and the drives will be at the very bottom, this will require quite long cables and a bit of work to make it look nice / get good airflow
 
jbrukardt said:
Thats a great case, but for a fileserver i still recommend a rackmount :). The inverted board layout in the 2000 is going to put your sata and IDE ports at the very top of the case and the drives will be at the very bottom, this will require quite long cables and a bit of work to make it look nice / get good airflow
Click to expand...
thats kinda weird lol, why would the do something like that?

Where can i get a rackmout case? any links?
 
Sure, check out newegg, ill show you one i recommend to people.

http://reviews.cnet.com/SkyHawk_Bla...is_Model_IPC5101_BK/4505-3030_7-30980782.html

its outta stock at hte moment, but you can probably find it elsewhere, 10 5 1/4 bays which you can either just use straight 5 1/4 > 3 1/2 mounting rails with for 10 drives, or put 5:3 enclosure bays in em. (5 3.5 drives per every 3 5.25 slots).

Its a solid case, and outta the box can hande 10 drives
 
http://www.tritechcoa.com/product/620843.html
I have seen cheaper versions of these, but I cant find them now, but you could put 3 of these in a 11 Bay Stacker and have room for a Optical Drive and a Floppy, thats 15 Hard Drives. I have also seen versions where you could put 3 hard Drives into 2, 5 1/4" Drive bays, In the same 11 bay Stacker you could again fit 15 Hard drives with room for a single optical drive. I wish I could find them, I think it was newegg where I seen them before, but there not there now that I can find.
 
Yep, those are the things i was talking about, theyre great, but i wish there was a cheaper version, theyre real simple, cant be that expensive to make :(
 
jbrukardt said:
Yep, those are the things i was talking about, theyre great, but i wish there was a cheaper version, theyre real simple, cant be that expensive to make :(
Click to expand...

Have you ever thought of making your own case? You would be surprised how easy it is to get a metal or plastic case the exact size as a project for very little or nothing, and a length of plumbers strapping from Home Depot will hold as many HDs as you can throw at it. Although it probably won't be as elegant, you could use a home-built case for a while until you get some money backed up to buy the exact case that you want. I'm actually doing this with a media PC... I picked up a very old home theater amp from goodwill the other day for $7. It is the PERFECT size and with a few days work it will look sleek in it's old-school glory... with a few weeks work (hopefully), rival that of my new equipment.

Just a thought... :D
 
I dont know if you know anything about Linux/BSD operating systems, but you could look at FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) to run the software side of things on your server. It has a footprint of 17mb and runs all sorts of servers for you. It can run SAMBA (aka CIFS) (the windows file sharing protocol), FTP, NFS, SSH (you can use winSCP to do encrypted file transfers over the intarweb). Its really easy to set up. You dont really need any Linux knowledge to run it because everything is controlled by a webgui front end after the initial set up (which is also really easy.)

I bet it would be worth a look at, especially because its free and small. :D
I think the biggest problem with it at the moment is that software RAID5 is buggy :rolleyes: , but thats being worked on. I personally am using it to run my NAS (very small atm) and it runs great

And with the hardware side of things, you ever think of building your own rack for future expansion? :cool:
rack-small.jpg
 
Thats the inspiration for my rack, I just went with MDF so it would be more sturdy, and I could have a strip on the back to mount rails on the front and back. works really well :D
 
i've decided to just get the UFO-U2, not cause it can hold a ton of drives, but cause its bad-ass. Then use this current tower to hold my drives, it still has room for 4 more (11 total)
 
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