This machine will go in a network rack at the office, noise doesn’t matter 
I like this rack, I think time to thinking about cooling because HDD inside can achieve high temperature very quickly and will be damaged. Please keep your eyes on HDD temperature. A lot of disks produce a lot of problem with cooling, I sad it like the developer of “Capacitor-1”
Jeap, i have to find siliant way how to do it.
i don’t suppose this is a problem in an enterprise server thats made for lots of drives… or i suppose that’s more an issue with the rack cabinet, requiring proper airflow… and are there any things to keep an eye on in that aspect when browsing for a rack cabinet that might end up having a metric sh!t ton of drives?
I just bought a 12TB WD black. That‘s an external drive with active cooling
4 way Supermicro server hoked up to a bunch of old 2TB sas hdd’s, configured as a raid60 system.
th3van.dk
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How bad is the power consumption?
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@Th3Van
don’t you get into trouble running SATA and SAS on the same back planes and or logical volumes…
from what i know the indicator lights on the server bays often seem to light up with sata drives while most sata they are not lit…
ofc with that many drives i suppose those lighting up might just be sata exceptions of that rule…
@hoarder
well if was as to make a guess then if the setup is full… 24 x 2½" in the top image
and 12 bays pr 2U and 8 of those so 96 bays of 3½"
most 7200rpm drives, which are the best bang for the buck, is 6-7 watts when working.
so a fully populated and busy setup like that would take like a 1kw all in all, ofc then the less active it is the less power it will use, which will also depend a lot on stuff like populated bays, cpu’s, fan
it would surprise me if it ever went below 500watts while active, but kinda not super well educated in this area yet… haven’t really had the need…
my own setup has 11 hdd’s and 2 ssds, with dual cpu reasonable wattage usage … really for me the main power usage still i think is my insane fans which are bugged and want to run a full tilt… so they eat like 70 watts each…
i should most likely get that looked at… ofc i don’t have to worry to much about my cooling 
thats what i get for cheaping out on the rack case… freaking chenbro long term it only cost more… i really like my Tyan mobo tho…just brilliant
alas my system pulls 300 watts when booting and rarely peaks above that… only seems to settle at around 260… but that may just be my setup thats bad… and well cannot really blame it if the fans pull like 200 of those… but one needs cooling… tried to fix it, but i always trigger some safeguard and the just start cycling in RPM, which i suppose is almost worse than full tilt. atleast wear wise…
ofc then comes the whole temperature control, humidity control, server room security and wire pulling and maybe noise insulation if needed… my server got all corroded enough that some of the fan wires corroded over and fell off causing fans to fail… because of poorly controlled temperature and humidity …
but i took the consideration that i might run into such issues, so i started with a cheap test bed essentially… but did go a bit to cheap on the case… so not worth it… pick a popular brand so you get cheap spare parts and cheap hdd trays…i think i ended up paying 7-10$ pr tray… while some brands are sold at like 1-2$… doesn’t seem like much but it adds up when you got 12 of them
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- Supermicro server : 448 W
- 11 x 12Bay HDD Enclosures : 1540 W
A total of : 1988 W
I agree, it’s a bit high for power consumption, but taken in considerations that I did get the 11 enclosures for free (including the hdd’s), and currently running 29 SN’s on it, i think it’s ok.
Also, the company i work for has agreed host it for free.
th3van.dk
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All hdd’s (both 3.5" and 2.5") are using SAS interfaces, so no sas/sata mix here.
th3van.dk
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well that explains the low density am i also to assume that they are mostly 15k rpm also?
kinda means a lot for the power requirements… and would give you quite the advantage in latency since most of the latency or much is often created locally when accessing the hdd’s
ofc the longer the data moves the higher the latency but i think 60-80ms should reach most places
and even with my fairly elaborate setup i still get like 20-30ms seek time on random reads when the node is running
should be able to cut maybe 30-40% of that time with 15k rpm drives…
The 2.5" hdd’s are 10K, and the 3.5" are 7.2K.
http://www.th3van.dk/24_hdd_2.5in_.txt
http://www.th3van.dk/132_hdd_3.5in_.txt
th3van.dk
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My latest arrangement has 2 x 12TB wd elements external 3.5" drives driven by raspberry pi 4 4GB
I went back to 32 bit raspian for this experiment.
This is 25W measured at the wall so 1W/TB .The SSD. and NVMe setup above somewhere were more like 4W/TB.
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That’s an interesting heat sink.
oh dear, you caught me. It’s 13mm copper pipe cut in half, hammered flat then bent into a u-shape
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You could make it an even more efficient cooling element making rectangular cut outs in the top and sides of the U shape. If you don’t have anything to make cut outs, you simply drill several small holes in the material… either method will increase the surface area by a lot… sometimes by an order of magnitude…
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I like it. What is the attachment method? Adhesive?
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It is a special glue for joining glass that makes an almost invisible joint. Some people use thermal pads though
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3 posts were split to a new topic: How do Rpis deal with the much memory load
