case for 16 + hard drives

Pandobear

Pandobear

Pandobear

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Aylesbury, Bucks
I need a case to rebuild my media server. I currently use a silverstone media case which has 7 hard drives squeezed in, but I really would like to be able to expand the storage capacity. I would even consider a external hdd case, but it needs to support sata drives. I would also prefer if it were to be a single case to be desktop or rack style. Any advice would be gratefully received.
 
I'd have a hunt around m8 for an external enclosure, i'm sure you can get a SATA one.


But on the other hand, why do you need so many disks?

You may find it cheaper, although more work to buy fewer larger disks.
 
I have 18 320Gb drives to use, 6 used in the current media machine, then four each in my other two machines plus a few unused, and I wanted to put them all in one machine and keep all the storage together. I have two adaptec sata raid 5 controllers one a four port one six. I have been looking to get a sixteen port so that I have some room to expand, but due to the expense I may just get another six port, as they are happy to work together. So changing the drives would be expensive. The only external cases that I have found are £1000+ for this amount of drives.
 
A normal case to hold that many, you will seriously be pushing it.

Let me take a look at what I can work out.

Ding:

Lian Li v2000+ and a couple of MF-30 enclosures, fits the bill perfectly. :cool:

I would count 18 hard drives with that setup, and one CDrom.

I believe that is what you are looking for.
 
You will need a full tower for that many drives.

Lian Li V2000 series and PC-201A/PC-201B have twelve Hdd bays as standard, the rest could be adapted into some of the seven 5 1/4" bays.
 
DaveMac said:
You will need a full tower for that many drives.

Lian Li V2000 series and PC-201A/PC-201B have twelve Hdd bays as standard, the rest could be adapted into some of the seven 5 1/4" bays.
Click to expand...

Same thought as I had. :)
 
For that number of hard drives I would build a cheap server with biggest case you can buy and place it somewhere else in the house Fit a few SATA controllers. That'll work out cheaper than a hard drive server, those cost a fair bit. look into Supermicro server cases. even these only hold 10

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/pedestal/800/SC850P4.cfm

Alternatively buy a server cabinet and just buy a few hard drive cages, screw them together and place mobo tray. Bit of a hodgepodge, but cheap.

Stream the data over LAN to your HTPC.

That's a lot of porn. :p
 
Im building something similar atm, im buying a 12 Bay Case Aluminium(5.25" Tower Cases ) for £89 and then im going to custom mount the HDD on there edge, fitting 4x3.5" drives in 3x 5.25" bays....

So I should be able to fit 20HDD in the case, ill be adding in a few fans, ill be using IDE->USB adapters for each drive and then a couple of USB2 hubs inside the case, im hoping to run 2 or 3 USB leads and 1 power lead into the case.
 
Last edited:
Mohinder said:
I really want to know how addicted to piracy you people are to need that many drives.
Click to expand...


A large DVD collection stored as ISO would most likely need that many hard drives, upto 9 GB per film excluding any extra discs. TV series- 8 DL discs 64GB for just one season. Plus if you record from TV/sky. Then music, my own collection stored as flac will take up one hard drive, and I have a fairly small CD collection.
 
The DVD argument I never get for storage, if you are watching it for 45+ minutes then getting out a disk is no big issue.

Backing your music up is another thing though, as you may want to make on the fly changes every track, 5 minutes or so.

Image editing on the serious side can use up 100gb easy per stupidly complicated picture, although how many people actually use this much storage, I have 1.2tb storage, mainly downloaded demos, trailers and random files I have aquired.

Have 290gb of music stored which takes up a lot of space, but in todays terms that is one good sized drive.
 
As above, my totally legal Music collection is currently running at 1.4tb, my recorded from TV directory can be upto 700gb, my photos directory is 200gb and growing, and of course its ALL backed up weekly.

So without even looking closely im hitting 5tb of storage, thats without looking at downloaded demos and stuff, which keep getting bigger and bigger, but I dont back them up because they can be easily downloaded again.

Another factor is that most of the drives are old 250 or 320gb, only got a couple of decent sized 500gb drives.... I keep getting more when the old ones die. (just lost 160gb of downloads this morning, luckily nothing irreplaceable)
 
Mainly for the kids, I wouldn't want kids to get hold of and play around with them. Also for storage, a huge DVD-Video collection will be bulky. If you can store DVD-Videos in original non compressed format- why not? No different to music collection stored in flac. A few years ago people didn't expect to store their entire CD collection on one hard drive at lossless collection (I myself had to use OGG due to HD limitations) only now I can re-rip to FLAC as capacities have increased.
 
Most consumer hard drives are designed to function with no airflow in 45deg or more temperatures, and are safe to silly temperatures.

Doubt the heat output would effect anything really unless you are using SCSI.
 
I would also be interested in this?! How do you back up that much data? I suppose you could have a huge 500gig HD in raid 1 but what if the psu blows up or the mother board goes bang and takes out the drives to?! Its not really a safe backup?
 
Coolermaster Stacker case, with some of the Supermicro removable drive chassis thingies - 5 hotswappable SATA drive bays added at the expense of three 5.25" slots.

Since the Stacker has 11 bays, you can squeeze 15 drives into that ... the 2nd PSU slot may also be modified to hold another of these thingies maybe.
 
I'd get two YY cubes second hand - stack them and chop the appropriate holes in them.

Wait...

I did do that..

Each cube has 16 drive bays. :D

Simon/~Flibster
 
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