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Great Norco 4020 build thread

I saw this when looking for pictures of it. Mine came in and it's awesome. The fan's are really loud. I may turn the wall of fans around and unscrew and change the direction of them. The amount of space you have between the back panel and the wall of fans is small.
 
SuperChicken said:
I saw this when looking for pictures of it. Mine came in and it's awesome. The fan's are really loud. I may turn the wall of fans around and unscrew and change the direction of them. The amount of space you have between the back panel and the wall of fans is small.
Click to expand...

It is, I moved my bar back a bit and was able to keep it clamped. I also picked up some sycthe (spelling?) 80mm fans which really took the noise level down.
 
SuperChicken said:
I saw this when looking for pictures of it. Mine came in and it's awesome. The fan's are really loud. I may turn the wall of fans around and unscrew and change the direction of them. The amount of space you have between the back panel and the wall of fans is small.
Click to expand...

I did this as well. I also replaced the stock fans with Panaflo's. Flipping the fan divider did help with cable management on the 20 individual SATA cables. I do wish they had multilane connectors on the backplane. It would have been so much cleaner. But I guess most people aren't concerned about asthetics inside a server case.
 
Hey epimetheus: Which Panaflos did you swap in and how is the heat?
 
croakz said:
Hey epimetheus: Which Panaflos did you swap in and how is the heat?
Click to expand...

80L1A's. Not sure what the full part number is. I'll look when I get home tonight. They remove any heat just fine. I'm running 7 1TB drives right now and the airflow out of my PSU is warmer than anything else. The airflow out of the case fans is not more than about 5 degrees above ambient.
 
Saw that thread as well, excellent info. I decided to go with the 3x120mm fan approach, however. I'm thinking instead of hacking up the perfectly good metal fan plate, I will do what was suggested and use a wooden template, and mount to that :)
 
hate to revive an old thread but im building a similar box but the images dont work

how come each drive backplane has two sata ports?
 
gigatexal said:
hate to revive an old thread but im building a similar box but the images dont work

how come each drive backplane has two sata ports?
Click to expand...

In the very first revisions of the Norco 4020, they were dedicated ports for the use of a SATA drive or a SAS drive.
 
each port looks like a sata port that I'm familiar with. So I should just go HBA -> sas cable with sata fanouts -> single sata port on the backplane?
 
There are 4, some revisions have 2 SATA in the middle and 2 on the right side. Other revisions have all 4 ports clustered together on the right side.

Either way, SAS cable to 4x SATA fan-out (Forward breakout) cable is what you need.
 
gigatexal said:
each port looks like a sata port that I'm familiar with. So I should just go HBA -> sas cable with sata fanouts -> single sata port on the backplane?
Click to expand...

Thats what I have in my 4020, but it is a gigantic pain in the ass to diagnose drive or caddy problems because you have to disconnect a ton of wires. (For example, connect all 20 SATA cables, power up the system, discover that the drive in the bottom caddy is not being detected and re-inserting the caddy doesn't help.

GUESS WHO IS SPENDING THE TIME AND EFFORT TO DISCONNECT ALL THOSE WIRES TO GET TO THE BOTTOM? Not to mention that you barely have enough space to even fit your hand to push in those SATA connectors if you dont remove the fan plate, as removing the fan plate has screws on the side and on the bottom. :mad:

I would prefer the SAS-to-SAS (or SFF-8087 to SFF-8087) cable route in future builds unless you get a killer deal on a chassis that had SATA-port only backplanes.
 
Isn't that what the 4220 is for? same case, but uses sff-8087 ports, I have two of those I use.
 
hmm should have done better research and gone with the 4220 but i think i will be ok with the 4020, i haven't had a drive failure ever so we'll see

i'm thinking of making a map of which bay has which drive in it by serial id or some other unique id
 
I have a txt file that lists all the drives and what bay they are in, just incase I need to. helps a lot.
My other case, doesn't cover up the front of the disks, so I can manually read the serial stick on them easily.
 
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