Water Cooling

[Ericloewe]

Looks like I underestimated PLX's current lineup. They even have an immense 96-lane switch that supports 24 ports. That's nearly enough to support 24 drives...
Looking at what sizes they have available, I'd guess they're using two non-cascaded 64-lane switches, each directly connected to the host with up to a potential 16 lanes (probably using x8 or x4 if they cheaped out).

 

[jgreco]

Someone looking to cut out the SAS middleman. Haha, awesome. Obviously that sort of platform could be very useful for certain types of applications, but we're going to need a faster layer than ZFS for storage redundancy if we want to be able to take advantage of the potential speeds something like that can offer.

 

[Mlovelace]

Certainly one possibility. I mean, look at this, this is crazy:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/2028/SSG-2028R-NR48N.cfm

But on the other hand, just making *all* the storage faster isn't necessarily the way to go. Storage tiering is a thing for a reason.



True, but one of my goals in life is to take every optical disc here, create an ISO on the fileserver, and then never need to go hunting for a particular magic disc ever again.

Hmm 48 nvme ssd @$1100 ea for 1.2TB + dual xeon E5-2699v3 @$4900 ea + 1.5TB RAM (24 64GB ddr4 lrdimm @$1200 ea) + $6300 for the case = $97700

I'd rather have a blade center :)

 

[jgreco]

I'd rather have a blade center :)

Me too. Generally speaking I've never really found a useful application for the fancy stuff. Almost everything I do is network-centric, so the instant we're talking about a shelf of devices that is interfaced to the system at 120Gbit/sec, but only has 40Gbit connectivity options, I have a little trouble thinking up what purpose it serves.

A blade center, though, that could make sense... though I tend to do them as discrete machines, because I hate the idea of one single chassis letting out the magic smoke which makes them run.

 

[Csaba Gajdos]

Different and fun? Without a doubt! I envision a hugh amount of inconvenience if you ever need to change out a hard drive.
As far as I know, they don't make a hot swap hard drive water block.
Not to mention, a mixture of Grinch and frivolity would be JUST WRONG man! :p

That's a fair point. The main reason one would build something like this is the FUN. I agree on that with jgreco.
It could be very boring - but safe (but you can't learn anything new about heat and watercooling systems along the way) going with the classic air-cooled solution.

 

[Csaba Gajdos]

This was my last server/NAS. Watercooling is fun but ended up being a pain for a server.

View attachment 10855

Wow. Could you be a bit more specific?
I see that it could be a pain to change any hardware parts in the build, but other than that what drawbacks did it had?
Why did you choose to build it this way?

 

[Fuganater]

I love my Case Labs box ;)

Ya it is so awesome. I just re-purposed this case to be my new gaming tower.

Wow. Could you be a bit more specific?
I see that it could be a pain to change any hardware parts in the build, but other than that what drawbacks did it had?
Why did you choose to build it this way?

Well firstly I was using Windows 7 as a "server". Worked fine for dishing out media to my PS3 and holding my data but that was about all it could do. I had to completely change out hardware because I was using gaming gear instead of server grade gear.

 

[BigDave]

Ya it is so awesome. I just re-purposed this case to be my new gaming tower.

Two weeks ago, I tore down my Mercury S8 water cooled gaming rig and re-purposed it to hold my FreeNAS hardware. lol

I have room for another 4in3 hotswap unit, then I can
fit 6 more hard drives :D