My unRAID server has 12 data drives, 2 parity drives, and 3 SSD cache pools. Plus dual Xeons on a SuperMicro ATX board.
I currently have the Deep Silence 5 case by Nanoxia. But things are cramped. I’ve filled all the standard drive bays, plus put in a 4-bay 5.25 enclosure. But I still have one of the SSDs just floating around.
What would a better case to put all this stuff in?
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Define affordable
Fair question, difficult to answer.
I bought the Deep Silence around $180. So maybe $250 or so/less? Flexible. Definitely not Storinator prices (though I wish they sold the chassis separate).
At that price, your only real option is to get lucky on eBay with an old supermicro rack mount chassis.
Did you have something else in mind?
The fractal design 7 xl might give you what you want, but at $200 + 5x drive cage kits at $20 each + upgrading and maxing out the fans ~$100, you’re looking at closer to $400, and there are mixed reviews on how well it can keep your drives cool.
Once you get above 10-12 drives, you’re going to need to look at enterprise gear, or building a custom solution. There just isn’t much consumer hardware at that level.
I have a 12 drive setup in a define 7 (not xl) and it’s working fine. As long as I keep the filters decently clean from dust the temps are fine.
Can you say what those temps are?
Around 40C
Have you looked at PCPartPicker with it’s filters? There’s only a few full atx cases with that many drive slots.
The problem that I find is that most cases only say they support x drives, but with some additional (official) drive cages can support more, but stuff like PC Part Picker doesn’t show that, so hard to search that way.
I would put that in your original post next time. It’s hard to know what kind of things to recommend if we don’t know what you have already looked at. Knowing that there are standard ways of increasing drive count (such as the 4x drive pay you are using now). You can search by internal drive count and reduce your search significantly.
That said I think the fractal design 7 looks good.
Their website says a max of 18 HDDs and 5 SSDs in the storage layout. I have the R5 and am pretty happy with it.
You need to obtain the drive bays separately though.
fractal design meshify 2 xl
I got an old atx case off craigslist with 9 5.25” hotswap bays and put in 3x 5bay hotswap cages in the front. plenty of room for the smaller SSDs inside
Came with a free i5 system and a 1050ti I use for transcoding.
all casez can fit that if you try hard enough
This was my thought as well. Most cases could fit 14 hdds and 3 ssds if you don’t put anything else in them and don’t actually mount the drives to racks/bays.
And nobody in their right minds would set up such a system.
This looks like a good(?) way to have lots of drives connected to one machine: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/wiki/Real-World-Deployments I don’t have any experience like this, I have the CS380 with standard loadout… just thought it was a funny way to add lots more drives.
Can you get bigger drives instead? So you have to use fewer of them?
