0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
Every once in a while, I get a really perverse idea. One of my most perverse was the idea of building my own computers without any kind of a case. Instead of building them into a case, my idea was to attach the mother boards, disk drives, power supplies, ..., to the walls and ceiling of my office. My office would become the computer case. Each computer would be grouped together on the wall, but there could be overlap between adjacent computers.
Ventilation shouldn't be a problem.
Another idea was to use an old telephone system cabinet. This is a big cabinet for a telephone system that had been installed a large, regional bank about 30 years ago. It was something like 6 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The front of the cabinet had three doors -- a big door on the left, a big door on the right, and a small door in the center. The cabinet is built with different dimensions than a normal computer cabinet. My idea there was to get some thin sheets of metal on which to fasten the mother boards and the other components and mount those inside the telephone case. Using that method, I could have put ten to twenty computers quite easily in that cabinet. The question was what to do with the center part which was only about a foot and a half wide. I decided that what I needed to do was to build a shatterproof plexiglass case in the middle and keep rattlesnakes in it. I ended up getting a standard sized computer cabinet and gave the telephone system cabinet away.
Hate to tell you this but Darren Kitchen from Hak5 beat you to that idea. He built a server and hung it on the wall. Believe me ventilation is a factor. I had this NAS that was poorly ventilated and now the hard drives are cooked literally. The circuits are brown and burnt. Gaming cases are designed to be RAID ready because the load time is much faster on RAID drives than non-RAID. So they have a hard drive cage where you can store four to five hard drives and has a huge fan in front of the hard drives.
11 Jul 2013, 11:10 pm
