Hey Bit-Tech.net, Allow me to introduce myself, I'm Silent1313, I am mechanical engineering student in Michigan. Below are a few shots of a concept case I am planning. Being a huge windows home server fan, with Microsoft WHS Vail just around the corner I am eager to start a new build. There are some very important features that this case must have, so for the design process I pulled Ideas and products in from all spectrum's. First what good is a home server without a ton of storage, you will notice that there are 9 hot-swap bays. There are also mountain mod brackets behind the 2 front fan grills (you can just barely catch a glimpse in one of the rear shots). Fan grills, that is my next feature I need to comment on, you will notice the mesh ones on the front. They are nice but what I would ideally put there is the large slot fan grills from mnpctech.com, those are nice because they have larger openings and split the air coming in better for lower acoustic levels (i.e. stick your head out of the windows of a moving car). Which brings me to the overall acoustic level of the case, I want this to be as quiet as possible. Being a college student means this still has to go in my room and not keep me up. You will notice a lot of mesh on the sides as well as ventilation slots on the back, and a 3x120 fan grill on top to let all that heat rising easily escape. Due to MS decision to remove Drive Extender (DE), I would like to have a significant amount of hard drive space. Because DE was removed, disk pooling with folder duplication is no longer possible natively, I plan on having a backup array stored internally with a switch to turn on when backups are necessary. this is where the conventional brackets will be used. The hot swap bays will be used for the main storage array, this way if a drive fails I will be alerted by the alarm. And lastly although it is not practical, I treat my home server like a big external hard drive it goes home with me on every break, so why not add convenient carrying handles. Well bit-tech thanks for reading this. I Hope to get some helpful constructive criticism from the community so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts, ultimately it could result in a better design. The lian-li pull out mobo tray will make upgrades in raid controllers easy. the overall case dimensions are 18x14x16 and as you can see its packed. I may need to use a U1 rack mount server PSU to get a little bit of space back. but so far the corsair 650 fits nicely. In the photo above the case is fully assembled. to the right is what I would like the front panel to look like but I am having a heck of a time push/pulling the holes for the vandal resistant buttons and vfd screen. Also trimming the mesh out and putting the holes for the fans and grills in is creating a challenge. If there are any recommendations for those or a easy way to put through holes in stacked panels so screws and threading line up it sure would be helpful to know. I am planning on printing the sides out 1:1 and 3M spray taping them to the aluminum so hole placement is critical. THANKS for reading
I like the design, but I'm having a hard time working out why you have made it so wide. Since you will be moving it around I would have thought you would want to keep internal space to a minimum. Rotating the psu by 90 degrees would allow you to move the mobo to the left (looking front on) slimming the design considerably. This is all assuming there is nothing in that space to the right of the hdd stack (I could not see anything)
I was thinking more about the depth! It appears that your hotswap bays are lower than your PSU (I'm still loving mine 4/5 years down the line) and sufficiently to the left of your mother board, that you could push the front face back by the whole depth of the drive bays... Also have you considered using a M-ITX board, that would allow you to narrow down the case a little further. ***Just re-read your text, so will there be 9 conventional HDD brackets as well as the 9 hotswapp-able bays? That makes pushing it about a bit more difficult... but I still reckon you should try and get it less deep.***
Opps my bad, did not see that first time round. Like asura mentioned depending on what your using this for outside of downloading the internet, have you considered a smaller motherboard? Also will you be using a graphics card and or other cards?
update 2 CASE UPDATE 4/18/2011 Over the weekend there was a huge restructure and re-model of silentstor. But before I get into that, I would like to say thank for the comments and views. Jehla and Asura your comments truly helped develop this case, I take all comments and suggestions very seriously and greatly welcome and appreciate all input from this dedicated community. Now for the case. I unfortunately have not had a ton of time to work on the case design due to the semester coming to an end and finals quickly approaching, but I was able to spend a few hours Saturday in Sketch-Up tweaking the design significantly. First addition is the fold out touch screen, hopefully I will be able to get one that will work well (there is conversation on another thread I am following very closely). This would be extremely useful considering most servers run headless ( no dedicated monitor), the screen would just be used to open console and restart after updates. Next I moved the motherboard over to the left creating more space in the case and allowing for a better design for my storage array. The atx mobo tray was kept due to my needs of having expandability for the future. I will need at least 2 controllers to power all the drives in this case, and because this is a home server I need to have space for my tuner card and my dedicated Intel 1000 nic. Due to constant nagging of a friend the case is now outfitted for liquid cooling though I am hesitant due to my limited knowledge of it ever being used in a storage server scenario. Next I designed a hard drive suspension system this allows for two five drive cages to be suspended above the power supply and hot swap bays. The bays are outfitted with fans that attach with thumbscrews and then when removed allows the drives to swing outward in a track and pivot to swap if need be. I have no knowledge on rendering software, but am looking into figuring out a suite so I can get some realistic renders up
Much as I'm a fan of watercooling, I don't see this as a situation that justifies it. Not only in terms of expense, but you were talking about portability. Watercooling is heavy (at least compared to air cooling) you're probably talking about an extra 2-5Kg, not a massive amount, but it could be sufficient to tip the scales between, "nah it's ok, I can manage" and"oof that's a heavy b****r!" Further to this every time you make a major move of the case you'll be best advised to do a 24h leak test (that's running just the pump so that any leeks don't short out your hardware and nuke your data) before booting everything up. And if there are any leeks at this point, you have to address the leak, and run another 24h leak test..... I just don't see it as a way forward for you in this project. Now speaking on a purely personal level, I preferred the original form, there was something hugely honest about the big stack of hotswap bays... from an aesthetic point of view, I'd have like to have seen that taken even further, removing the fanbus and optical drive and having nothing but hotswap bays on the front of the case. Appended below is an idea of how I imagined a possible working layout, with a footprint of approximately 300x300, it's fairly compact for what it is.
asura, I agree fully about the water cooling. I will air cool with a heat sink or at most a corsair h70. as far as your design goes its awesome. It is definitely small form factor. I wonder if mounting drives vertically increases cyclic loading, I read an interesting article a year or 2 about that. I wonder if hard drive manufactures have now engineered for this. Oh also I agree with the aesthetic appeal of having a whole column of hot swap bays but i was able to fit more with my custom brackets. (i don't know that i will be able to afford 13 2TB drives) Once again thank you for the input, I am taking it into consideration and will possibly make some tweaks here and there.
Orientation doesn't seem to be too much of an issue for these guys so I'd assume things are fine on that count...
