Too many harddrives... wip

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bexamous

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 12, 2005
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Needed more space for harddrives. All my options seemed pretty expensive for barely more space. Right now I've got 16 drives. To get 20 drives would cost a few hundered.. not worth it.

I might just have to swap to larger size drives... which would cost money as well, but imo better spent than expensive new case.


... ANYWAYS, in an effort to save even MORE money I'm trying to build something that will let me add more drives but not cost me anything.

So I went and got some random, damaged, case at work. Drilled out all the internals to make space for harddrives. My plan, right now, is to have two stacks/towers of drives holding 10-11 harddrives each, up to 22 total.

Because of spacing it will be too difficult to use screws to hold in the drives so I"m thinking of using 'stretchrite round elastic cord' to suspend all the drives. This will be cheap (20 yards cost me $3.50), easy to do (just like lacing up shoes), easy to install drives (just slide them in between strands), and cut down on vibration.

Here is current progress that I did mostly today:
casetv4.jpg


The drives will be held up by those bronze colored shelving things. Tomorrow I'll work on how to effectivly mount the entire structure to the chassis and how to keep them spaced out correctly with the weight of the drives and force of the rubberbands.

If I was just to use the premade screwholes in those shelving rails and was to screw drives to them, I coudl fit 11 drives with 1/2" between each drive. I'm not sure how efficient my rubberband idea will be, I'm hoping for 11 drives still.

Later on I'll need to work on any structure support problems because of drilling out all the internals of the case. RIght now its sorta flimsy but I do not have either side panel on. Worst case this shouldn't be that big a deal.

And hopefully in the end I'll have a case holding maybe 22 drives that cost me <$15.
 
Looks good for being cheap. If I had to use that many drives I would just upgrade to a bigger drive.
 
You're going to have one hell noisy case with all the HDDs. How are you going to connect all that to your motherboard or to the PSU? The case is going to be a furnace.
 
bexamous said:
Needed more space for harddrives. All my options seemed pretty expensive for barely more space. Right now I've got 16 drives. To get 20 drives would cost a few hundered.. not worth it.

I might just have to swap to larger size drives... which would cost money as well, but imo better spent than expensive new case.


... ANYWAYS, in an effort to save even MORE money I'm trying to build something that will let me add more drives but not cost me anything.

So I went and got some random, damaged, case at work. Drilled out all the internals to make space for harddrives. My plan, right now, is to have two stacks/towers of drives holding 10-11 harddrives each, up to 22 total.

Because of spacing it will be too difficult to use screws to hold in the drives so I"m thinking of using 'stretchrite round elastic cord' to suspend all the drives. This will be cheap (20 yards cost me $3.50), easy to do (just like lacing up shoes), easy to install drives (just slide them in between strands), and cut down on vibration.

Here is current progress that I did mostly today:
casetv4.jpg


The drives will be held up by those bronze colored shelving things. Tomorrow I'll work on how to effectivly mount the entire structure to the chassis and how to keep them spaced out correctly with the weight of the drives and force of the rubberbands.

If I was just to use the premade screwholes in those shelving rails and was to screw drives to them, I coudl fit 11 drives with 1/2" between each drive. I'm not sure how efficient my rubberband idea will be, I'm hoping for 11 drives still.

Later on I'll need to work on any structure support problems because of drilling out all the internals of the case. RIght now its sorta flimsy but I do not have either side panel on. Worst case this shouldn't be that big a deal.

And hopefully in the end I'll have a case holding maybe 22 drives that cost me <$15.
Click to expand...

How big are the HD's now? If they are like 200-300, it seems it would be easier to replace with 750's? Tho not cheaper. :)
 
I see alot of problems with your thinking. First you won't ever be able to move the tower with the drives in place, also rubber degrades and heat increases the rate at which it degrades, just one of those bands break and you could lose more then just that one hard drive, its going to fall onto the others and if it shorts out you could lose everything, remember the drives are metal with sharp edges and the Circut board is exposed. What you going to use to power all those drives, power supplies cost money, you will either need one hell of a powerful PSU or you will have to run several, adding to heat and cost. Also you are going to have to have several controller cards, there again adding to cost.
Do yourself a favor and just get some larger drives, you dont say what size drives your planning on useing or what your planning to add, but I would imagine you will save alot by just getting newer larger drives and it will be alot more reliable in the long run!
 
"You're going to have one hell noisy case with all the HDDs. How are you going to connect all that to your motherboard or to the PSU? The case is going to be a furnace."

Already have controller(s), make my own set of power cables, probably 6 per cable.

"You're going to have one hell noisy case with all the HDDs. How are you going to connect all that to your motherboard or to the PSU? The case is going to be a furnace."

I've got 16 running right now with no problems at all. No heat issues at all either, drives all 30-35C, Googles reports also even show drive temp matters little. Overall power draw isn't anything special, idling at ~9 watts, allt eh drives total would be only takign 200watts most of the time. How much does SLI 8800s take?

"How big are the HD's now? If they are like 200-300, it seems it would be easier to replace with 750's? Tho not cheaper. "
8 250 6 500s adn boot drive... getting bigger drives would be good but what am I going to do throw all the current ones out? Even if I did buy new drives I'd still be doing this and use it as a backup server to rsync to. I'd need ~4.5TB of usable space, with 1TB drives that would mean at least 6, 750s that would mean 7 or so if I went with RAID5 for each.


"First you won't ever be able to move the tower with the drives in place"
Don't plan to.
"rubber degrades and heat increases the rate at which it degrades, just one of those bands break and you could lose more then just that one hard drive, its going to fall onto the others and if it shorts out you could lose everything, remember the drives are metal with sharp edges and the Circut board is exposed."
Not really any problem. Cables run in pairs up and down, 16 total, 8 per tower, any drive being held up by 4 cables total, 2 in front 2 in back, any cable holding a total of 6 drives.

Each cable is made up of 6 rubber strands wrapped in cloth see:
clothingelasticww8.jpg


Heat is not an issue, rubber is always slightly above room temp, nothing special, all 6 would have to degrade adn fail and then the cloth get cut, and even if that happens, it takes at least to cords to break to actually have anything happen to the drive... and even if that happens since the way the cords are run it could only fall at most 1/2" and then be resting on the drive below it that is held by a different set of cables all together.

In any case this cabling stuff has been used by people at SPCR for years without any failures, although thicker stuff so I'm instead using twice as many to make up.

None of the edges cords really touch anything sharp, and really there isn't enough movement possible to actually cut anything.
 
Man, you need to burn all those porn movies onto DVDs.;) By the way, hope you don't mind me asking. Why do you need all those drives? Don't tell me you have the old 40gigs here and 80 gigs there.
 
Mostly a media server for rest of house, lot of HD movies now.. but things take up space ;). Also backup for other systems ends up here and that is a chunk of it.

md1 : active raid6 sdg1[0] sdn1[7] sdm1[6] sdl1[5] sdk1[4] sdj1[3] sdi1[2] sdh1[1]
1464162816 blocks level 6, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [8/8] [UUUUUUUU]

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[0] sdo1[5] sdf1[4] sde1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
2433846400 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]


8 250 are in RAID6
6 500 are in RAID5
 
bexamous said:
Mostly a media server for rest of house, lot of HD movies now.. but things take up space ;). Also backup for other systems ends up here and that is a chunk of it.

md1 : active raid6 sdg1[0] sdn1[7] sdm1[6] sdl1[5] sdk1[4] sdj1[3] sdi1[2] sdh1[1]
1464162816 blocks level 6, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [8/8] [UUUUUUUU]

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[0] sdo1[5] sdf1[4] sde1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
2433846400 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]


8 250 are in RAID6
6 500 are in RAID5
Click to expand...

Well, I'm pretty sure you know what you're doing and looking forward to seeing the final rig.
 
Looks interesting. I would screw in the drives personaly as I don't like the cord idea.
 
Well I sorta lost steam in the process of this build. I ran out of parts one night and was too lazy to wait till the next day to do things a little more cleanly.... so I busted out a package of 5 minute epoxy and finished it ;).

In order to still be able to put the motherboard in I didn't have enough space to really suspend the harddrives. Right now they're actually held up alot by the force between the rails... there is then 4 bands in the front and 4 in the back holding the drive up, 2 in the front and 2 in the back pushing it down.

Everything worked out real well... then I bought the case to work to try putting in some old drives we had laying around to see how it worked out.... only big problem was is apparently the drive I had been using to space things out is slightly bigger than other drives... so things are a little more loose than I planned. Not sure how the actual drives that will go in this will fair.

Drives will NEVER fall down, never move left/right... they're just loose going in and out. Got the parts/cables to power the drives comming next week. I also have to decide on how to get a little more airflow in the case... fan noise ends up being much louder than the actual harddrives in my current case.

img0507gf3.jpg

img0519km4.jpg

** Note NOT the motherboard or harddrives that will actually go in the case, just used for testing
 
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