How To store/organize physical hard drives

[BobCochran]

In the photo below, I'm sure you can see the hard drives stuffed into the system case, and in the two shiny metal 5-drive hard drive packs that are in front of the system. The over all impression is of disorganization. The rat's nest of wires especially makes me wince. The truth is it is all my fault. I built that.

How can I make it better? I also need a way to add more capacity. Adding capacity will come later, after I figure out my woes (discussed in a different thread.)

Thanks a ton

Bob

 

[Nick2253]

The simple solution is a rack-mountable case with lots of hot-swap bays. See, for example, http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...ver-AMD-QC-1-80GHz-16GB-H8DME-2-/172266892004 There are also options with fewer drives.

eBay is a pretty good way of getting those (just toss the old server components), or you could buy a new case from Newegg, but the build quality won't be nearly the same.

If you really want a freestanding case, then there are a few tower cases with lots of 5 1/4" bays (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119260), and you can get a couple 3 1/2" to 5 1/4" hotswap enclosures (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994155).

 

[BobCochran]

Thanks again, @Nick2253! I'll look into these after repairing my current, broken system.

Bob

 

[Z300M]

In the photo below, I'm sure you can see the hard drives stuffed into the system case, and in the two shiny metal 5-drive hard drive packs that are in front of the system. The over all impression is of disorganization. The rat's nest of wires especially makes me wince. The truth is it is all my fault. I built that.

How can I make it better? I also need a way to add more capacity. Adding capacity will come later, after I figure out my woes (discussed in a different thread.)

Thanks a ton

Bob

View attachment 12869

Those are iStarUSA drive cages, right? I have four of their BPU350SATA cages (so 20 drives altogether) in an Antec Twelve Hundred case. I had to flatten out the tabs (on which individual 5 1/4 in. drives would have rested) in the Antec case, but otherwise no problems. Perhaps a rack-mounting case would have been better, but my setup seems to work OK. How many drives do you see yourself needing?

 

[BobCochran]

Hi!

Thanks a lot for getting back to me. Yes, you are spot on, these are iStarUSA cages, and the same model as what you have...BPU350SATA. The primary user of the FreeNAS system needs to store thousands of videos and various other research artifacts like statistical data, etc. So I can see the system growing pretty rapidly. Once I get this current system repaired properly, I'd like to add about another 10 terabytes of actual ZFS storage. I'm quite open to advice.

Thanks a ton

Bob