2 Terabytes of Storage Goodness! (New Pic w/Cooling)

[jcrouse]

All ready to roll.

[testicle187]

Please tell me that's not for an arcade cabinet    I wouldn't think anyone would need that kind of space without a chronic porno addiction.

[pointdablame]

Please tell me that's not for an arcade cabinet    I wouldn't think anyone would need that kind of space without a chronic porno addiction.

TV and Movies.   I could fill that without even trying.

[jcrouse]

Yep. It's for my upright cabinet. The darn CD games take up a lot of space.

John

[Goz]

Please tell me you are adding some fans for those hard drives....

You will burn them up if not adequately cooled.

-Goz

[jcrouse]

I'm thinking about it. Probably will just to be safe although I don't believe it would be necessary.

John

[dabone]

Those drives will cook.


You need more space in between them and forced cooling with a clear path for the air to exhaust the cab.

(Don't want to keep recycling the hot air, it just keep getting hotter)

Run it like that for 24 hours and see how hot those get, you will be real suprised.

Later,
dabone

[2600]

Besides the heat of the drives, I'm worried about the power supplies.  Two separate power supplies like that is generally not a good idea.

[quarterback]

Those drives will cook.

You need more space in between them and forced cooling with a clear path for the air to exhaust the cab.

Although it's probable that most of those drives will spin down, unless the whole thing is RAIDed.  They're 250gig each, right?   I wouldn't think he'd be using all of them at once, it seems like most of them are 'storage'.

But yeah, I'd still move them further apart and put some fans on them.  I've got three 250 gigs and a 300gig (or 360?) in my video editing machine and those drives get pretty warm.

[JustMichael]

I would put more space in between the drives and add fans to cool them.  You won't believe how hot a hard drive can get with no active cooling.  The drives will thank you...   

[CJK]

Besides the heat of the drives, I'm worried about the power supplies.

[tivogre]

Are those drives RAIDed?

I have a similar set up as my main server... 8 250 Gig Drives.

Mine are set up on a 3Ware controller in RAID 5.

Take the advice of these folks;  make sure you get plenty of fresh cool air across those drives.

[elvis]

Personally I wouldn't have used plastic to hold the drives together.  You'll get an insulation effect and thins will warm up considerably.

Sheet metal of almost any description would have been a better alternative.

Besides the heat of the drives, I'm worried about the power supplies.  Two separate power supplies like that is generally not a good idea.

2 PSUs are fine if you wire your relay correctly.

In fact, the number 2 destroyer of equipment is bad power input (the number 1 cause is people doing stupid things and destroying it themselves).  Separating drives and system power sources is a good idea.  Especially when the drivers power up for the first time, the surge from the initial spinup can be quite large, and dangerously undervolt the rest of your system.

Keep the 2 separate power supplies, and use good name-brand parts (Antec, Enermax, etc) and not crappy no-name stuff (NO CODEGEN!!!) with bad components that blow at the slightest sign of stress.

[jcrouse]

Are those drives RAIDed?

I have a similar set up as my main server... 8 250 Gig Drives.

Mine are set up on a 3Ware controller in RAID 5.

Nope. They are all Windows XP "basic disks" except two which are dynamic disks with one volume spanning two disks.

John

[jcrouse]

Personally I wouldn't have used plastic to hold the drives together.

[Timoe]

Looks really clean, I like your use of plexi.  What are these CD games you are talking about?  PLaystation?

[Havok]

Sweet! You'll have just enough storage for MAME 3.0, with all the CHD files!

 

[jcrouse]

What are these CD games you are talking about?

[USSEnterprise]

i thought 3DO was cartridge based?

[TheGatesofBill]

i thought 3DO was cartridge based?

Nope. Definately CD based. I still have my Goldstar 3DO.

[elvis]

I would have preferred aluminum but when you're using free stock from work you take what they got.

2 pieces of sheet metal (even some cheapy galvanised stuff) would have cost you a couple of bucks at worst.  You could have picked up building or automotive scrap for free too.

But anyways... get some good forced cooling between the drives, and all should be well.

And you'll have no problems with the smart strip.  Worst case scenario is the mobo powers up without the drives, or vice versa.  And either is not going to affect the well being of your hardware.

[xonix_digital]

Its not so much that they would overheat, just get unstable and slow. Hot hard drives at any ratio are more likely to fault...

$.0000002


-=XD=-

[Xiaou2]

 When HD's get hot, the metal expands.  When metal expands, the drive heads get out of alignment and can do permanent damage to the disk surface and to the read heads.

 You definitely will need at least 3/4" between them.  Id go with 1" personally.

 You will want to use metal - esp aluminum for the sides if possible.  Plastic is an awesome heat isulator.  (try wearing a 100% acrylic sweater to find out)

 You should make half of that storage, and half that backup.   Cause if any one of those drives fail.. you will most likely cry.   

 Im running 4 drives in my system.   2 for storage, 2 for backup.   Ive lost at least 4 drives in my short life with pcs.   Ive since learned the hard way... that backups are needed.  (lost all my data a few times!  ):   

 Ive learned that heat does in fact destroy them quickly.   I bought a huge tower case, spaced the drives one full drivespace appart, and put fans in front of them all to keep them very cool.    After that, Ive never had a failure anymore, and its been years.

 The other thing.. is room tempature.    On really hot days, I noticed that the drives were cooking even with the fans.  In that case, I removed the towers side door, and placed a huge 2ft box fan right next to the case.   And if that didnt work, I turned the pc off.  (but that always seemed to do the trick)

 If case of an enclosed space such as a cab, you may need to get an industrial blower fan.   They move air much quicker than typical case fans.    And or use industrial printer fans (or real arcade cab fans).  They are almost 1" in thickness,  and have heavy duty, powerfull, high  rev, ball bearing  motors in them.  They are rated to move much more air than pc case fans.

   I will stress this once more...

- Heat will Destroy HD's in a very short time period. 
- Have equal backup's to data (else you are gambling your data, and may lose
huge.  HDs have a huge failure rate.  I used to work in a pc shop, and I had like 30 bad hds a week to send back cause of failures within less than 1yr service.

 Id tried to backup with cds.. and you could try dvd.. but thats actually more costly and time consuming.  You will find out that you will forget what you have and have not backed up.. and how little you actually do back up.   And if a cd gets a scratch, you will lose that too.

 Hd's are great for backup, cause they are so fast to backup, and have such huge space capacity.   But backup you must, unless you care less about your data.

 Its almost a gaurentee that one day, your drive(s) will fail.   They are mechanical in nature, and in time parts will wear and misalign.     

[elvis]

Nice fan additions.  That should see you right.

I wouldn't mind a few TB myself for general storage around the house, especially considering the volume of home movies of the kids we seem to have bulking up on hard disks spread across the house.

[tivogre]

I can highly recommend the 3ware RAID controller that I use.

It takes 8 drives, up to 2 TB total storage;  RAID 5 is AWESOME.

Out of the 8 drives, you get 1.75 TB of available storage.  the other .25TB is used by the RAID algorithms. 

For that sacrifice ALL of the drives are "redundant".  Any single drive can fail in the chain, and you just keep on truckin';  it looks like one giant drive to the PC.

Power down, replace the bad drive, boot up, and the array re-builds the new drive.

I've had to do this in my array once;  it works as advertised.

I echo the comments above... you may not think so now, but it will SUCK WHEN (not if) you lose 250GB of data.

[jcrouse]

I am an IT Manager for a living, both Microsoft and Compaq (HP now) certified. I have lots of experience with RAID. I run RAID5 on ALL my servers at work and Mirroring on my FTP servers. It's also hot swappable with the controller cards I use. I agree that it's the way to go.

John

[tivogre]

I am an IT Manager for a living, both Microsoft and Compaq (HP now) certified. I have lots of experience with RAID. I run RAID5 on ALL my servers at work and Mirroring on my FTP servers. It's also hot swappable with the controller cards I use. I agree that it's the way to go.

John

Yeah... I could have gone hot-swappable with the controller card I used, but it wasn't worth the extra expense (~$400) to me.  It's not the end of the world in my house if I have to turn off the server for an hour.

In a more "real world" application though, I could EASILY see it worth the expense.

[jcrouse]

The hot swappability is nice in business class servers. The even have hot swappable I/O (PCI) cards. THere is a utility that kills power to the slot, you swap the card and then return power. Pretty neat stuff. The also do the same with redundant swappable power supplies.

John