Rackmount chassis with reduced depth

[AMiGAmann]

Hi there,

I am planing to migrate from Synology to FreeNAS. I do have a rack at home with a depth of approx. 27".

In this forum are most of the time cases from SuperMicro recommended. But they are very expensive here in Germany and there do not seem to be that much used cases as in the USA.

I found the Inter-Tech IPC 2U-2412 which seems to fit my needs perfectly, because I want to use 8 to 12 3,5" HDs.

The only thing which does not fit is the depth of the Inter-Tech chassis. Its nearly 27" deep, but in my rack fit only chassis with a depth of 19,6".

Are there any (good) cases which might fit into my rack? I found some Norco cases, which might fit, but they are (a) very expensive here in Germany and (b) not recommended in the forum.

Are there any alternatives?

AMiGAmann

 

[zambanini]

a pc case with this amount of disks and this depth..I will doubt that you find one,
instead you should use a small rack case and a jbod.

http://geizhals.eu/337384337 there might be some other shops, who sell it.

http://www.stardom.com.tw/de/deck_dt8_spec.html

be aware, that I do not have any experience with this jbod.

viel spass damit.

 

[jgreco]

Well, the Norcos are not terrible, but they may take a little more work to get right than the Supermicro stuff.

 

[AMiGAmann]

I think I wrote something wrong. When I wrote "case" I meant a rackmount chassis. A PC case would be the last solution, if I don't find any rackmount chassis.

 

[norskman]

There is an excellent company I know, ACME TECHNOLOGY in the UK.

They specialise in 19 inch rack mount cases.
They have a very nice RAID case that will hold loads of drives.

http://www.acme-technology.co.uk/



Ask for Shirley. Tell her what ?Motherboard and the number of drives. They sell redundant power supplies to fit as well.

www.acmetech.

 

[jgreco]

Wow, 1999 called and they want their web site back.

 

[zambanini]

amiga, you should re read my post. use an short external jbod to connect to your whatever case via a sas hba.

 

[rogerh]

amiga, you should re read my post. use an short external jbod to connect to your whatever case via a sas hba.

I think your suggestion is a very good one I am thinking of using myself. Effectively you are trading (with a 2U motherboard chassis) one or two units increase in rack height for a considerable decrease in depth. And probably getting less densely packed drives with less intensive (i.e. noisy) cooling requirements, perhaps?

 

[rogerh]

Wow, 1999 called and they want their web site back. :)

Haven't seen such tasteful animated gifs for years! And blinking ...

 

[AMiGAmann]

amiga, you should re read my post. use an short external jbod to connect to your whatever case via a sas hba.

Ah sorry, I didn't get that the first time.

Are there any (short) external JBODs from Super Micro? I didn't find any so far.

In that case I probably will need one 2U chassis for the FreeNAS server (2U to fit a Xeon with cooler in) and another 2U for the drives (probably max. 8).

 

[zambanini]

the stardom jbod is really silent( at least from the datasheet) a supermicro jbod is much louder. well, the double sided jbods from SM break almoast the sound barrier.

 

[jgreco]

Ah sorry, I didn't get that the first time.

Are there any (short) external JBODs from Super Micro? I didn't find any so far.

I don't think so. SuperMicro is actually in the data center/server room market, where typically it is people optimizing for RU's of space rather than depth. I hear your frustration; the office rack here is not as deep as I'd like to accommodate these modern servers, but years ago servers were not so deep and fit just fine.

 

[jgreco]

Haven't seen such tasteful animated gifs for years! And blinking ...

Yeah, I was like "woah, that's even older than our web site."

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, I was like "woah, that's even older than our web site."

Wow. Image background. It's just missing a Marquee and a Blink tag and it would be the holy trifecta of deprecated HTML elements.

 

[jgreco]

Wow. Image background. It's just missing a Marquee and a Blink tag and it would be the holy trifecta of deprecated HTML elements.

Yeah, but we could move into the tackier direction if it had some music playing on load too.

 

[DJ9]

Great, now I'm having flashbacks to GeoCities.

 

[AMiGAmann]

I meanwhile found a chassis from Fantec with a shorter depth (21,65"). But there would be approx. 2,75" left to the back of my rack... I think this will be too close.
http://www.fantec.de/produkte/serve...dukt/details/artikel/1702_fantec_src_3160x07/

I guess there are no servers with integrated (hot-swappable) hds via backplane with a short depth... sad but true.

The external storage unit suggested above (from Stardom) would probably fit my needs, but it is quite expensive (and does support only SATA3).

I found a different one from RAIDON, but it's hard to get in Germany.
http://www.raidon.com.tw/RAIDON2013/RAIDON2014/st7610-4s-u5.html

Are there maybe any other suggestions for short storage units? Or alternatively for short storage chassis (for maybe 4 hds), which could be rigged up into a external storage enclosure?

 

[jgreco]

What you want is a short-depth DAS JBOD.

Checking a few of the usual suspects...

AIC, http://aicipc.com/ProductDetail.aspx?ref=J4024-01 at 21"

MyPCCase http://www.mypccase.com/2urastjb12x3.html at 18"

I guess the thing that I'd probably contemplate would be to look at some 5-in-3 mobile racks and see if I could find a short shot chassis that would work. Something like the old Kingston Data Silo DS400 (which has lots of wasted space in it) but shorter.

Three 5-in-3 mobile racks gets you 15 drives.

In the old days we often took "7 bay CDROM towers" and would convert them for use with SCSI HDD's.

There used to be several vendors for these. This would be a possibility along with a pair of 5-in-3 mobile racks (gets you 10 drives).

 

[AMiGAmann]

Well, AIC and MyPCCase seem hard to get here in Germany. And I guess they will be more expensive than the Stardom unit.

The 5-in-3 idea sounds interesting.

I found several chassis with 6+ 5,25" slots, so I could integrate 2x 5-in-3 = 10 hds. Maybe there is even a chassis for 9x 5,25" slots, so I could integrate the three 5-in-3 racks as suggested. I'll search on...

 

[rogerh]

Can I ask a slightly off-topic but hopefully helpful question? If one has a 3U chassis designed for a standard ATX board, is it likely that one would be able to fit a standard ATX PSU on its side and a mATX board in it? Given some metalwork, of course.