Recommend a Case

po0k

I'm building a file/game server in the next 3months and want to get this out of the way.
Requirements:
Space for 5 3.5" drives, which may rise to 7 or 9 in 6months time.
They will be 7200rpm and I'd like to keep em as cool and happy as possible, so I'd like to have a few fans blowing in from the front across them, ideally in brackets.
Removable drive cages would also be very nice.
The other possibility is to have a case with 1 3.5" for floppy and 10 5.25" bays and get a load of mounting brackets and places fans in front of them, with the top bay holding a CD/DVD drive.
Anyone know any product which would take up the front of 3 5.25" bays with a 120mm fan, while still leaving room behind it so I could fit 3 hdds in 3.5"-5.25" adapter brackets?
I'd be needing 3 of em for the system.
Removable caddies with inbuilt fans would be nice, but are a bit out of my budget, and I was hoping the 3x 120mm fans would also help keep the whole system cool.

A 80-120mm fan port on the side panel would also be nice.
Will be running 2 2Ghz XPs modded to MPs inside it with a RAID card which I'd like to keep nice and cool.
A few exhaust ports in the back and maybe one on the top would be nice too.
Once the system is up and running it won't be touched really again, but the case will be moved every now and then (LAN parties) so it would need to be able to take a bit of wear & tear.

Suggestions?
Asthetics aren't terribly important, though I may mod it later.

strat

chieftec dragon full tower

a bit on the generic side at this stage but the overall quality of it makes up for it

Cyrus

would an antec slk3700bqe fit your requirments?

120mm intake and exhaust

ARGINITE

Coolermaster ATCS-101B-SX4
AVANTECH Midi Server Tower
But if your just looking for a case and are not to bordered what it looks like
Try maplin and go to computers/cases and cooling/case ATX/Full Tower Case.
I know a guy that will be working in the Galway branch if u want a discount.

astrofool

Lian Li PC-75 has a removable drive cage which fits 6 drives in the lower right. Two large(ish) fans blow air across it, and the fan speed is adjustable for them.

Besides that there's the usual 3 3.5" bays and 6 5.25" bays. It also has room for a second psu.

PC-75 is the one I have and has a window, afaik the pc-70 is the exact same inside but no window. Full tower cases. The pc-60 has the same internal layout but with 4 5.25" drives afaik (midi tower)

po0k

Strat: the Dragon DA-01WD would be my pick there.

Cyrus: The SLK3700-BQE doesn't have the (at this time) required drive capacity nor does it have any provision for cooling the 3.5" drives which is pretty much essential.

ARGINITE: The Coolermaster is totally out of the question
The Avantech I'm having serious trouble trying to find information on. It's on komplett, but they don't mention how mnay fan mountings, or their locations or anything, and I can't find the Avantech homepage cos too many companies use that tradename and if you put in server or case or tower beside it you get nothing but dealtime pages and price comparison shite. They should be stripped from Google tbh ad moved to a seperate area.
And the Jupiter Full Tower case has only 4 3.5" bays and only a 300W PSU.

I'm looking at spending €70-80 on a ~400W PFC PSU
Anyone have an reccomendations?

I'm basically looking for a file server case or a full tower that has fan pods infront of the 3.2" drive cages.
Need space for at least 6 3.5" drives, 5 of which have to be cooled by the fans, plus 5-7 5.25" bays.
If I can find the 3x5.25" 120mm fan bay thing I'm looking for 10 5.25" bays and 1x 3.5" would be perfect and would let me get any old piece of shit steel file server case which I could then mod to improve air cooling and flow in the case.
Will be using mostly sATA drives (4-8 of them), with at most 2 IDE and 1 floppy cable.
The case requirements all depend on what sATA RAID5 card I can get (4 or 8 channel).

po0k

The Lian-Li is far too high-class for what I have in mind, nice feature set, but I don't like or trust Aluminium cases.
It'd be scuffed and scraped within one or two LANs and I just like working with steel more.

This is really starting to get my goat, seems all the case manufacturers are concentrating on makin "pretty" consumer desktop cases and you have to go to an enterprise supplier and pay the associated inflated costs to get what you really want, even though it should be cheaper then the consumer stuff.
Christ on a bike

po0k

Having looked at the Dragon again it seems to ilustrate what I'm looking for:
http://www.directron.com/da01wd.html and click on the "Inside View1" link.
The 3 fan brackets there are what I'm looking for.

ARGINITE

SyxPak u dont happen to know how much shipping would cos of that site www.directron.com any idea at all?
or would it still cheaper to buy the same case of komplett?

po0k

I just used the Directron link to show the picture.

I'll probably buy it locally or off komplett.ie

CombatCow

SyxPak try http://www.x-case.co.uk/ they have a huge selection of cases,at good prices,i bought a chenbro gaming bomb from them,it arrived in 5 days.Check out the Antec Super LanBoy v.sexy, it has 2 120mm fans and
9 Drive Bays:
- External: 3 x 5.25", 2x 3.5"
- Internal: 4 x 3.5"


CombatCow

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by SyxPak
Having looked at the Dragon again it seems to ilustrate what I'm looking for:
http://www.directron.com/da01wd.html and click on the "Inside View1" link.
The 3 fan brackets there are what I'm looking for.

Why don't you just get one of those then? The Chieftec and Antec cases are basically the same.

po0k

Because I'm still hoping that someone has a link to a nice steel file server case with 10x 5.25" and 1x 3.5" bays, and that some company makes the 120mm 3x 5.25" fan bay assembly thing i described previously.

Also, anyone know where i might pick up an Asus A7M266-D motherboard (Dual Athlon MP).
It has a lovely power supply circuit for the CPUs, and nothing onboard except for the usual IDE interfaces and sound.

zoro

Originally posted by SyxPak
Because I'm still hoping that someone has a link to a nice steel file server case with 10x 5.25" and 1x 3.5" bays, and that some company makes the 120mm 3x 5.25" fan bay assembly thing i described previously.

i think i saw one of them in peats before they moved buildings ... no idea if it's still there though

RicardoSmith

You'd be better asking on one of the UK case modding forums. Why on earth do you need so many drive bays? If you need that many you might be better considering a server that has a proper RAID controller and hot pluggable drive bays.

joePC

Heres a proper Sever case

Sever Case

po0k

Originally posted by RicardoSmith
You'd be better asking on one of the UK case modding forums. Why on earth do you need so many drive bays? If you need that many you might be better considering a server that has a proper RAID controller and hot pluggable drive bays.

Because what I'm considering at the moment is exactly that, maybe without the hot-pluggable bays.
If you read my original post it *should8 be pretty clear why.

I'm starting out with 1 3.5" hdd, 1 floppy and 1 optical drive.
3 months later I'll be getting 4x 3.5" drives (7200rpm SATA) which I'd like to keep cool to ensure minimal chance of thermal failure.
I'd be looking at another possible 4 drives later down the line so would need more expansion.
These could be packed together in 3.5" cages as long as they have 80 or 92mm fans in front of them blowing air in through them, but I wouldn't be happy without it.
The other option is to ut all the drives, bar the floppy in 5.25" bays, the hdds in adapter brackets (taking up max of 9 5.25" bays with one more for the optical drive) and 120mm fans in front of each bank of 3 drives.
I could do a bodge mod and create my own 120mm bay covers, but I'd rather get something pre-mad if possible because I simply don't have the time right now.
The 5.25" bay solution also has the added benefit of the 120mm fans feeding plenty of nice cool air into the system case with out any obstruction from the front bezel.

/-ASIDE-/
Also, with 3x 120mm, I could 7V mod them which would give enough input while still being reasonably quiet, though I've a feeling the sound of the 9 drives spinning directly behind them with no sound baffles would negate that.

po0k

Joe - that Lian Li is just what I'm looking for, except it's a bit oversized (not a bad thing) and a bit out of budget.

RicardoSmith

That tells us what you are planning to do not WHY you are planning to do it. That many drives means you are going to have a lot of data. In which case sticking them all in one machine, without RAID is not a brilliant concept. If you are planning to use large capacity drives, of 160gb+ then you might be better with fewer bigger drives, in a smaller machine with a decent backup system, rather than the lots of cheaper drives with no backup system. It would be easier to cool, maintain and transport.

Just a thought, thats all.

astrofool

www.supermicro.com any use to u ?

I used to have the sc760a, very much a steel case (weigh's a ton), perfect for servers, but is has no rack in the bottom right, which is why i left the link to the site, they might have made one by now. Also they are built with dual cpu's in mind.

PSU wise, supermicro's again are a good choice, if pricey, their actual output is FAR above their rating, my 400w redundant cooling power supply can put out about 600w+ combined. Cost £130 (sterling) however.

po0k

Originally posted by RicardoSmith
That tells us what you are planning to do not WHY you are planning to do it. That many drives means you are going to have a lot of data. In which case sticking them all in one machine, without RAID is not a brilliant concept. If you are planning to use large capacity drives, of 160gb+ then you might be better with fewer bigger drives, in a smaller machine with a decent backup system, rather than the lots of cheaper drives with no backup system. It would be easier to cool, maintain and transport.

Just a thought, thats all.

If you cast a glance towards the Technology froum you'll see my thread on RAID controllers
This will be a file dump for GalwayLAN, a games server and general network utility box which I intend to be expandible and suffice for the next 18-24 months, with possibly a second machine with maybe something like a 2.2GHz Athlon64, a gig of ram and 120Gig hdd for some of the more demanding game servers, though I doubt that will be neccessary and it's OT.
My "backup" solution is going to be satisfied by my use of sufficient cooling and RAID5 or possibly RAID0+1, though I am less than enamoured with losing half the total storage through mirroring on a server which is not mission critical.
Currently considering 4 and 8 channel SATA RAID5 solution from Adaptec or 3Ware.

RicardoSmith

I didn't see your other post. I guess it comes down to how much you value your time, if an incident (fire, theft, virus, software/hardware fault) requires the reinstallation of all the data on the machine. I wouldn't say that some of those larger cases are mobile at all. Unless you have a van/truck with a lift. If it were me I'd look to put something like that on 2 or 3 smaller server machines, rather than one huge server box. Probably take up less space and be quicker & cheaper too.

Cyrus

The SLK3700-BQE doesn't have the (at this time) required drive capacity nor does it have any provision for cooling the 3.5" drives which is pretty much essential.

dunno bout capacity, can hold 7 3.5 drives and i think the 120mm fan at the front should keep them cool

joePC

What about this one:


Here

BoobeR

My case, It's a Q-tec 6025MDL (atx) (i think its been renamed to TL-MD), Comes with a cold cathode strip light, and 3 case fans with 4 different coloured LED lights per fan (two in the side under the window and one in the back under the psu). It can be bought on Komplett.ie ( http://komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&sku=121478&p=&t=589&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=13&GrpID=6&cks=PRL )for EUR 60.50 inc. VAT.
Stats of case can be found here.
I took a picture of the side light up with my cráppy Labtec webcam but you get a clear idea on what it (kindof) looks like..
here

(aren't i helpful? )

BoobeR

Actually now that i've noticed mine has been renamed T-MD not TL-MD, as the TL-MD is a little different than mine. not as nice i think, take a look at http://www.qtec.info/products/product.htm?artnr=13478 for mine.
the TL-MD is the newer version than mine, also the borders around the cd rom bays and the squares around the power buttons and border around floppy bays etc are light blue kinda flourescent at angles its pretty nice

po0k

I'm getting the Chieftec Matrix Fulltower blue to start with.

Will eventaully get blue LED fans for the heatsink (and maybe all the fans), along with Ble UV-reactive rounded cables (maybe even blue SATA and floppy for the full effect ) with a UV tube up the top or somewhere.

Might edge the cards with UV-reactive paint.
Thinking of getting one of those back-lit case badges too, and maybe a window aplique.

This will all be down the line, eventually ending up with a full blue colour scheme with the exception of the CD and floppy drives, which will be black (no problem with a bit of careful painting )

davidclayton

maplin have a big-ass case.
"full tower case"
looks boring though.

6 x 5 & quarter inch drive bays
4 x 3 & half inch drive bays

dunno price.
is on the .co.uk site if you wanna look.

dave



here's a pic...

netman

Why don't you consider getting a separate enclosure for the drives?

I mean it's not a great idea in general to keep so many drives in the same case with the rest of your components, plus none of the PC cases provide enough cooling for so many hot devices. (the desktop / full tower cases I mean)

We had a separate enclosure for our database system in the place I last worked at, it fitted 15 3.5" drives, had it's own redundant power supply, proper cooling for all drives, and they were all hot-swappable. This was a SCSI Ultra-160 solution, you might not need something at that level, but take a look at similar IDE solutions for much less.

For example: http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.asp?familyId=6

This will probably do for what you're planning: http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=90&familyId=6

If you gotta have it all in one case, here's a few you might consider:
http://www.amtrade.com/computer/file_server_enclosures.htm - 32 / 16 bays, with 10 / 6 cooling fans (2 models shown)

Or a slightly more mainstream case:
http://www.aproimage.com.au/servercase/ghs1500.htm
15 drive bays, 5 fans

po0k

1) They're SATA drives and the card I'm getting doesn't have external sata connectors

2) The Chieftec full tower has mountings for 80mm fans right in front fo the drive bays

3) An external enclosure is outside my budget

po0k

Anyone know if there's enough space at the bottom front of the Fulltower Chieftecs to accomodate a 120mm fan?
Want to have equal CFM intake/outtake ratios, if not higher intake