Options for housing hard drives

[kryptoman]

Looking on ebay there are a lot of cheap, used server products and storage expansion units. A lot of these storage expansion units are fibre channel devices with a large number of hot swap drive bays across the front.
I have a nice system at the moment based on a supermicro mb, xeon processor, ecc ram, and sata drives. I am only operating 4 disks however in a raidz1 configuration and my system is housed in a typical consumer mid tower case. I would like to migrate to raidz2 and significantly increase my storage (probably 2 vdevs of 6 drives each).

Has anyone ever looked at stripping one of these enterprise server grade cases to house a system like mine?(e.g. a unit like an IBM Totalstorage 1812-81A EXP810)

The advantages I see are a good quality but cheap case with power supply(s) and fans included, and convenient access to drives for changing out when necessary. I know nothing about these enterprise products however or fibre channel. I am guessing the hot swap drive bays would have a backplane that would not be compatible with sata drives or the HBA controllers people are using for sata based FreeNAS sytems? Even still it might be worthwhile if the back plane can be removed and drives connected by cable. Hot swap would be nice, but not essential.

It just seems that a purchase like this for $200-$300 might land me a much higher quality case with decent cooling and HDD power supplies included, rather than spending $480 on an empty Norco RPC-4224 case. What do people with experience with these type of devices think? Any other good options out there?

 

[Richman]

What are your requirements? Do you for some reason definitely need a rack-mount server case? That appears to be a 2u case.I have seen 4u server cases that support 20 drives. There are also a few manufacturers that make case modules you can use in any case and installs in (3) 5.25 HDD bays and you can install 5 HDD's in them. They have hotswap backplanes compatible with SAS/SATA. You can use these with a desktop case that has a lot of bays and I think there are towers you can nearly fit almost 20 HDD's in. At least 16.

There is a case someone posted that would support 20+ disks
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/freenas-case.17301/#post-93777

 

[kryptoman]

Thanks for the response Richman. Main requirements are the conflicting cost and quality. I very flexible with the style of enclosure, though a non rack mount option would probably be more convenient for me. I have previously looked at that Lian Li case, but I would probably go for a Norco over that. That case costs $450 in Australia, there are no fans or power supply included and the drive bays are not hot swap ones. This case gets pretty expensive to outfit and it also wastes a lot of space. Searching ebay a bit more I am seeing old servers with solid looking cases, redundant power supplies and fans included for as low as $100. So stripping one of them out might still be the cheapest/best option.
I can't see myself going above 12 drives for a very long time. My main concern with most of the consumer grade towers is lack of adequate cooling for the hard drives and the way they are mounted one over the top of the other (guess could lay tower on its side...). I have lost a couple of drives over the last year in my current setup- both were on top of the stack in my existing tower, and one of them had had a SMART temperature fault at one point in its life.

 

[Richman]

Oh, I misunerstood your link and thought you were looking at new server for a rack. It sounds like you are pricing a used server for $100. I was going to ask if you were stuck on a rack-mount server chassis. SuperMicro and Lian Li make a mod that take (3) 5.25 bays and mount 5 HDD's vertical. They have a fan mounted in back. There is a ATX case that has (9) 5.25 bays where you could mount 15 disks.

 

[cyberjock]

Kryptoman:

I could have sworn you had WAY more than 8 posts.

I'm not familiar with that hardware so I can't really provide good input for you. But I'll say this as some guiding words: Be very careful walking the path from quality and compatibility to economic viability. Often when you lean on one side you make the other side very angry!