Hey guys,

 

not certain where this should go, but figured "hardware" was the least inappropriate.

 

I've been running a venerable LimeTech MD-1500 for the past, well, forever. It's getting long on the tooth. There's about 24TB of stuff in it right now.

 

I'm thinking of moving the thing to the living room, so I'd need to build something super, super silent - I've got a 2009 mac mini in there, and I find that a little bit annoying and whiny and noisy at times, more a question of the quality of the sound than the volume of it, but, anyway. Obviously, I've already pretty much done all I could to quieten the LimeTech box, so the way forward likely means "new shiny". I'd also use the opportunity to get everything onto more modern drives than the motley assortment that I'm running off of right now.

 

So I've been lurking around the dark corners, and I'm starting to wonder if building something that's two-cased - I'm thinking on the lines of "Streacom case with a Supermicro Xeon-D board" would be an expensive, but interesting solution. I don't game or plan to do anything, VM-wise, that'd justify it, so don't need a GPU in there. I don't necessarily need something with the oomph to convert enough Plex streams to gift the entire African continent with the greatness of Millionnaire Matchmaker, either, but being able to transcode a stream would obviously be nice, and I'd rather size for not-too-slow HEVC.

 

My understanding is I could jack into the internal SAS ports with something like an SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 converter - the idea is to avoid having to buy an expensive, power-and-heat-hungry RAID adapter card just to do JBOD.

 

Assuming this works, the problem becomes drive housing : there doesn't seem to be a solution to silently house 10 or 15 drives and dissipate the heat.

 

This far, I've come up with two solutions, one of which is simpler in terms of build, more convenient in terms of drive swapping, but potentially noiser, the second which is a bit wilder.

 

First possibility - the easy one in terms of build - would be getting a Norco DS-12D, since I don't really want a big black ugly expensive silenced rack box thing or an equally heinous wood-covered ugly expensive silenced box thing if I can avoid them, damping the living hell out of the case, swapping the fans out for something more silent, same with the power supply, maybe repainting it candy pink with sparkles to spice up the aluminum sides a bit, and then plugging into onboard SAS via SFF converters.

 

The second possibility is wilder, more fun, potentially more silent, but more unknown, including cooling-wise would be to go completely fanless by getting a chunk of black something or the other and a bunch of screws, attaching a bunch of Sycthe Himuros to that, then into backplanes and then into the motherboard. I haven't laid the whole thing out, but I'd figure I should be able to get 12 relatively accessible drives that way - it's less space-efficient, but surface is less of a problem than rackmount depth. There's of course the problem of cable mess, but that can possibly be tidied up with holes in the chunk of black something at the bottom.

 

So - is this all totally, completely in the "more money and time than sense" side of the spectrum ? Has anybody managed to silence the hell out of external SAS housings ? Would it even work ?

 

EDIT : Also, if anyone has a better idea of how to achieve what I'm trying to do - i.e, a super, super silent 10-drive-ish array with relatively accessible drives out of a non-tower chassis that's less deep than a full-blown rack case, by all means, do tell.

A nice SFF case with a SuperMicro Xeon-D board [e.g. something like this:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182963 ] would indeed give you a VERY silent (fanless) system which could support 14 drives if you added an 8-port SATA card to the expansion slot.  And with a PassMark of over 10,000, this system could easily handle any transcoding streams you might want to throw at it (easily 5 at once, and likely more).

 

Your second idea of mounting all the drives in Scythe SCH-1000 Himuro coolers would indeed let you run the drives with no cooling fans -- so the entire system should be virtually silent.    The only issue would, as you've noted, be how to cleanly mount the Himuro's and route the cables ... but you seem to have that well in hand.