30-bay Dual Tower

[bfeist]

I'm a long-time UNRAID user. If i had to guess, I'd say this might be the 7th iteration of my unraid setup.

 

Years ago, I came up with a very inexpensive way to make 5in3 racks 

 I have been using this approach all of this time, slowly replacing my 1tb drives with 2tb, then 4tb, now 8tb (soon 16tb). At the same time I also expanded the number of drives in my mid-tower case to 19. This meant bolting a 4 drive bay with a fan in front of it to the top of my already janky build. It was time to clean things up somehow. My data is precious.

 

Old server case.

 

 

124TB with dual parity.

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by bfeist

[bfeist]

I have no room for a rackmount solution, the cases are too long, even if I converted one to be floor-standing. Plus they're much too loud, even when fans are replaced. 

 

I had an extra Cooler Master Centurion 590 case from an old PC--the same model case that I have been using for years for my unraid box. I thought if I could chain the two cases together somehow, I could create a floor-standing tower solution with 30 bays.

 

I bought six Icy Dock MB155SP-B 5 in 3 drive cages--the very devices I had spent all that effort to avoid buying years ago (and wound up spending too much on each unit. Would have been cheaper to just get them years ago). In order to mount these into the Centurion 590s, I had to cut off the 5 1/4 bay tabs with a dremel.

 

I took out all electronics from both cases before doing this and washed the cases down to remove any metal flecks left over to reduce the risk of shorting something out.

 

The finished, slotless 5 1/4 bays had some sharp edges, but nothing that would damage any equpment (only my hands).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by bfeist

[bfeist]

The two-case solution would mean that the motherboard was in one case (just as it already was) and I needed to find a way to power and connect the drives in the other "slave" case. I found the solution on the excellent Art of Server YouTube channel. He was selling a SAS expander on eBay that didn't need to be plugged into a motherboard: 

 

 

For the slave case, I bought a PSU (and a simple switch to turn on the PSU without a motherboard) and powered the SAS expander and 3 drive bays. Four  SFF-8087 to 4 SATA breakout cables gave me 16 SATA connections in the slave, and two external Mini SAS 26pin (SFF-8088) Male to Mini SAS 26 (SFF-8088) Male cables would allow me to connect the slave to my LSI 9201-16i card, which has 4 SAS SFF-8087 connections. This provides enough bandwidth to the slave for all 15 spinning disks and leaves 8 SATA connections plus the SATA connections on my motherboard (8 of them) for the "master" case drives.

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by bfeist

[bfeist]

The "master" case is more your typical unraid build except I added an external SFF-8088 adapter card that accepted the external cables from the slave and made the connections internally to the SAS card. Still the same old motherboard in the master.

 

 

Finally, I put all of the drives in the drive trays, connected the two boxes together, and spun up UNRAID.

 

 

I put the two machines on a cheap set of wheels (I can't believe this thing could take the weight, but it did) https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08R1F9S17/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

It's tucked away under a desk in the corner, easy to clean under, etc.

 

I'm using negative air pressure in the case for cooling with all air coming in through the drive bays. I plan on building a screen I can place over the front of the two cases to catch dust. I'll post pictures of that when it's done.

 

So that's how you spend a bunch of money on your unraid setup without adding any more drive space!

Thanks for reading, and happy compulsive designing.

 

Ben

 

 

 

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by bfeist

[bfeist]

I bought some foam mesh and wrapped the front to filter dust. Looks pretty good and works great.

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by bfeist

[Vr2Io]

Congratulation finish the DIY !!

 

Did you found out left bay no power / no LED ?

[bfeist]

4 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

Congratulation finish the DIY !!

 

Did you found out left bay no power / no LED ?

Nope. Icy Dock support has no idea what's going on. It's possible the amazon seller who sold me the drive cages was shipping faulty cages. 

[JorgeB]

 

Nice led work :), like those Cooler Master cases, have some myself.

[Agamemnon]

Looks great. How are the HDD temps?

[bfeist]

Sorry for the delayed reply. Temps are great. Below is an image I just took of current temps, and this is after I added a dust cover across the front of the cases.

 

Edited December 11, 2021 by bfeist