- Joined
- May 15, 2006
Hello all, I've been doing a ton of research this week. I've been doing a ton of stuff with software RAID and hardware RAID, so I'm in a good mood. To make that even better, I thought of an idea that would be absolutely amazing to see. I'm sure that some of you have heard of the Backblaze server, link if you haven't. The design is ingenious, 45 hard drives in a vertical orientation with backplanes. The problem is, these cases cost a blazing $750 each (not including the $450 for backplanes, or hard drives or other server components). Quite costly for a home setup. I've had my Norco 470 sitting in my rack doing absolutely nothing. I've been working with RAID this entire weekend and it got me thinking about doing this here.
I'm going to test this out and see if I can get this working. I'm using a Norco 470 that costs around $87 for the unit itself. Pick it up when it has free shipping, if you want it; otherwise that is another $27. The idea is going to be the same hard drive orientation to achieve the same result with substantially lower unit cost. With this case, you can run it with two different configurations; a 30 drive setup and a 45 drive setup. If you use a eATX mtoherboard, you will be limited to 30 drives since the motherboard takes up more space. If you stick with a normal ATX motherboard, you could do the full 45. It may even be possible to fill the ENTIRE CASE with these and use another server to process the data.
Bottom line: Depending on the size of the drives, you could fit anywhere from 30 tb (30x 1tb) up to a massive 90tb (45x 2tb) in a SINGLE 4U UNIT. Unit cost would be around $500 per case, not including any hardware (including backplanes). Combine this with software RAID and you have some extremely cheap space.
As of right now, I stripped the case down and verified that drives will fit. This will be a project log as I get the money to test this out. Depending on how this works, I may keep it and upgrade my other server to this case. It will all depends on the results.
Am I crazy? Absolutely.
I'm going to test this out and see if I can get this working. I'm using a Norco 470 that costs around $87 for the unit itself. Pick it up when it has free shipping, if you want it; otherwise that is another $27. The idea is going to be the same hard drive orientation to achieve the same result with substantially lower unit cost. With this case, you can run it with two different configurations; a 30 drive setup and a 45 drive setup. If you use a eATX mtoherboard, you will be limited to 30 drives since the motherboard takes up more space. If you stick with a normal ATX motherboard, you could do the full 45. It may even be possible to fill the ENTIRE CASE with these and use another server to process the data.
Bottom line: Depending on the size of the drives, you could fit anywhere from 30 tb (30x 1tb) up to a massive 90tb (45x 2tb) in a SINGLE 4U UNIT. Unit cost would be around $500 per case, not including any hardware (including backplanes). Combine this with software RAID and you have some extremely cheap space.
As of right now, I stripped the case down and verified that drives will fit. This will be a project log as I get the money to test this out. Depending on how this works, I may keep it and upgrade my other server to this case. It will all depends on the results.
Am I crazy? Absolutely.
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