Quiet and Rackmount?

[Mercutio]

Does anyone know of a rack enclosure that could qualify as quiet? Preferably one with gobs of 3.5" drive bays. I'd like to buy a couple for my apartment that are less noisy than the ones I have, but all the ones I'm looking at seem to use those 60mm 10000rpm fans or else some extra-crappy 80mm ones.

Ideally I'd like to move the rack systems out of the closet where I keep them because they're so loud.

 

[ddrueding]

The Supermicro one I was recommended about a month ago is hardly quiet, but it does use sane-sized (80mm) fans. My only concern would be that I have run into issues swapping out fast/noisy fans for slow/quiet ones. If you are lucky you can just disable the piezo buzzer, but some kill power to the array when they detect a fan failure.

Bah, I just remembered about the tiny, hyper-speed fans in the redundant power supply. Perhaps your money would be better spent insulating/ventilating that closet? Concrete board and a solid-core door with gaskets go a long way.

 

[Bozo]

Or replace the fans with temperature controlled ones.

 

[Mercutio]

I kind of want to use the closet to store clothes and comic books. It's a walk in closet, but I can't use 3/4 of the space because I need clearance to get behind the rack.

I was also thinking I could drop down to using just two enclosures instead of four. I'm looking at a half-height cabinet I can set under a table or something.

 

[ddrueding]

Are you far enough east to have a basement? IIRC, you have a house? Trying to have lots of quiet storage led me to build "The Coffin" as my wife calls it. It gets out of hand quickly and is a PITA. Even if the fans aren't noisy, that many hard drives will be. I now have 14 1TB drives in the office, vibration mounted, and it is not quiet. If I were planning it again, I would just sacrifice a closet and call it good.

 

[Mercutio]

I moved out of that house years ago. I didn't have a basement. In fact, I had a concrete slab foundation that was crumbling, which is why I moved out.

I live in 950ft^2 apartment. It's a two bedroom unit. One bedroom is devoted to my work area, but it was pointed out to me that I could declutter a lot if I actually used the storage space I have to, you know, store things.

 

[Handruin]

Do you absolutely need a rack system? What if you bought a simple shelving rack and used normal tower cases that could be immensely quieter with 120mm fans inside?

 

[Mercutio]

I have a rack mounted switch and a nice Panduit cable management setup that I'd kind of like to keep using.

 

[ddrueding]

I used to use Antec Rackmount chassis. They ship with Tri-cool fans, and they come with a nearly-normal PSU (just the cable locations change). In the older 3-U version, you could swap out the 3 5.25" bays on each side with 5-in-3 hotswap thingies from Supermicro.

Edit - Link

 

[P5-133XL]

You can muffle the sound to some extent by getting enclosed racks.

 

[LunarMist]

I would suggest that you can fit a lot of cool, quiet 2TB WD drives into a smaller space, but you might not like me anymore.

 

[Mercutio]

I was not aware, or had forgotten, that Antec offered a rackmount chassis. Hmm. This has potential.

 

[Howell]

You can muffle the sound to some extent by getting enclosed racks.

I second that emotion. You can then use larger fans to pass air through the rack.

 

[Mercutio]

My rack is enclosed. That's the only thing that makes it tolerable to begin with. I'll probably donate it to my company if I can get rid of it.

It's a 42U APC rack and it has an AC unit in it that doesn't work any more.

I don't think I like those Antec Enclosures that don't have 3 5.25" bays for me to stick my SuperMicro drive bays in.

Maybe I should just buy generic chassis and try to customize.

 

[ddrueding]

Is there a metalworking school or fab shop in your area? I had a good experience building something in SolidWorks and having the local junior college actually make it. Just don't forget to specify tolerances as well.

 

[P5-133XL]

My rack is enclosed. That's the only thing that makes it tolerable to begin with. I'll probably donate it to my company if I can get rid of it.

It's a 42U APC rack and it has an AC unit in it that doesn't work any more.

I don't think I like those Antec Enclosures that don't have 3 5.25" bays for me to stick my SuperMicro drive bays in.

Maybe I should just buy generic chassis and try to customize.

It is possible, that the excessive noise is because the AC doesn't work! In an enclosed rack w/o air conditioning, the temps can get rather excessive requiring all those small fans, in all your machines, to whirr at very excessive RPMs to produce adequate cooling. One simple test may be to simply leave the front and back doors open for a while. If the fans slow down, then maybe if you repaired the AC (depending on how loud it is) then the noise would be much improved.

It may be that my solutions are ineffective. I really don't know how loud everything is, nor do I know your particular sensitivities to noise. What was it like before the AC died? Have you added lots of small 1u machines (using 40mm-80mm fans) to your rack and thereby increasing the amount of noise.

In general, I have found that most rack-mount equipment is very loud to start with and that the manufacturers, and the end users, really don't care: there just are outright much more important matters. You may find that getting normal computer/server cases that have as an option a rack-mount accessory may help. At least there you are dealing with cases that, at least to some extent, both the end user and the manufacter care about noise.

 

[Mercutio]

It is possible, that the excessive noise is because the AC doesn't work! In an enclosed rack w/o air conditioning, the temps can get rather excessive requiring all those small fans, in all your machines, to whirr at very excessive RPMs to produce adequate cooling.

Oh, I seldom ran the AC on the rack itself, but my servers have always been desktop parts in 4U cases that are now very, very old and lacking in amenities like SATA backplanes. Heat has never particularly been an issue for my servers.

Newegg has a 4U case that supports 20 hotswap 3.5" drives and an internal drive for $300 including the shipping. I can't decide if that's "all my eggs in one basket" or worth the money to buy (including the 16-port SATA controller I'd probably want), or if I'd be better off with a pair of machines with a more realistic 10 - 12 drives per system.

 

[P5-133XL]

Generally speaking, the fewer the number of cases, the less noise. So it would be my bias, for a single case, rather than two.

That being said, there is benefit in redundancy too.

 

[ddrueding]

I too would choose to have a single system (as I have). The RAID card would be highly advised, as will significant redundancy. I'd recommend a second "offline" system that gets powered up to perform backups. Of course, that can be noisier.

 

[Mercutio]

I too would choose to have a single system (as I have). The RAID card would be highly advised, as will significant redundancy. I'd recommend a second "offline" system that gets powered up to perform backups. Of course, that can be noisier.

My standard has always been to schedule data synchronization between multiple arrays on different computers. I might lose, say, six hours of data if I hosed the data on one machine, but that's about it. Keeping the arrays fairly small (4TB at this point is probably "small") helps as well.

Part of me is giving real thought to getting an LTO4 changer as well. A couple of my customers have single drives. It'd be nice to have a back-up unit for them, and 16 800GB tapes would go a long, long way to keep my data secure.

 

[Fushigi]

Part of me is giving real thought to getting an LTO4 changer as well.

We have a couple of these on our midrange. Dual-LTO4 drives, 48 cartridge capacity, 4 Gbps Fibre connect, web-based management. IIRC the last one ran around $20 grand with rackmount kit & redundant power.

I've not really bothered to speed-test them as we do most of our backups while production is live. But I can say we were getting 275GB/hour out of an LTO3 w/SCSI attach (rated 80MBps or 288GB/hour) so you would likely be able to achieve roughly the rated 120MBps (400+GB/hour) speed from the LTO4 drives.

For the price I think a bank of eSATA hard drives (USB is too slow) would suit you better. I was going to mention how absurd it'd be to use any writable optical then I thought about how many floppies it'd take w/associated semi-truck to transport.

The major concern in your environment right now, at least to me, would be loss due to theft/fire. So something you can take off-site would be desirable. LTO4 is lightly & smaller than a 3.5" hard drive, but not by so much that it's worth the price difference.

 

[Fushigi]

Hmm. Maybe you can find out who builds this chassis for Sun. 48 drives in 4U.

 

[Mercutio]

I was thinking about a Quantum SuperChanger. 16 tape capacity with SAS connectivity for $3500 or so. The tapes drop drastically in price once the next generation comes out, but I've gotten 3-packs of LTO4/800s for $80, which is pretty reasonable compared to buying new drives all the damned time.

I pay for heated storage, so at least I'd have someplace else to put the tapes besides my apartment.

I'm not terribly jazzed about a 16 port SATA controller, either. They're expensive in the first place, but I've had to deal with controller failure a few times in the past and from a redundancy standpoint having one controller touching ALL my data seems like a big mistake.