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I moved into an apartment, and no longer have the luxury of keeping my drives in an enormously loud server. So I put the drives in the lower drive bay of the Antec P180 case. Now the drives have one low-speed (quiet) 120mm fan behind them. The drives stay in the mid 30s, which is plenty cool. But the case is very quiet. I credit the fact that the P180 gives a good 1/2 inch or so between each drive. Compared to the Chenbro (and every other X-in-Y solution I've seen), which sandwich the drives together as close as possible, you get effective cooling with substantially less airflow.

I have a p180 case as well. The middle set of drive bays (with a 120mm fan in front and (2) hard drives installed in the chassis) does very well. The air flow for the units down below is okay with 4 drives installed, but not great. I've also used a CM 4:3 unit in the top bays to hold another (4) drives.

But along those lines, I used to be able to buy a 3:2 unit with a 80mm fan. It's similar to the CM 4:3 unit, except it has a front filter, an 80mm fan (intake) and room for 3 3.5" hard drives taking up (2) 5.25" bays. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in the unit, the 80mm fan (which is pretty quiet) draws excellent airflow across the two drives. Enough airflow that active temp (drive under heavy seeks / activity) will only be 1-2C above idle temp.

Unfortunately, MWave doesn't seem to carry the 3:2 w/ 80mm bay cooler anymore. It's a rare find (bought my first one from DirtCheapDrives in Texas about a decade ago and I still use it). I've bought a few more since then because they come in handy for times when you absolutely need assured cooling for a pair of drives. Ah, you might find it here (unit on the right in the picture at the top).

1. don't buy an Itanic, if you're going with Opteron for its ultra-fast RAM ( compared with Itanic ) and drastic cost-effectiveness ( ditto ), an Itanic won't show you whether Opteron'd be a good match: the architectures are totally different.

2. RAID storage: don't buy Promise 'raid' cards ( and DON'T do 'raid' 0/1, do RAID-5 ).

Why? ..
1. it ISN'T possible to use S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics in your drives with the Promise ones, at least ( you'll crash the PCI-bus, hanging, fatally, the machine, using Promise chips .. don't know about Highpoint or Adaptec ), and...
2. they oppose Open Source drivers, and coders, for their own products.

Highpoint has only SuSE 7.3-8.0/Redhat-whatever ( IIRC ) drivers for their fast 1520 cards, but if you want compute performance, you want Gentoo... ( and SuSE's been at 8.1 for ages, now... )

Adaptec? I don't know if their cards have the same issues as the Promise/Highpoint, but their cards compete with Promise's, and so probably cut corners in similar ways ( I'd love to see hard data on that point, though )...

3ware are the only cheap ( compared with SCSI ) RAID controllers I know-of, that offer bootable, real, actual, S.M.A.R.T.able RAID on ATA drives.

( I'd stick scads of 120GB IBM 180GXPs on 'em, because they're cooler-running than the 180GB versions, and better than most other drives: fast, quiet, reliable-looking, etc .. quiet means, to me, that wear&tear isn't happening as much, though I wonder-at the No-Seagate rule expressed earlier... is it that fluid-bearings fail soon? or that Seagate has worthless support from our perspective? )

3. SuSE or Gentoo are really your only choice, that I can see.

Why? .. 1. Redhat's trying to microsoft linux, by ignoring standards and making its way law, and Mandrake's .. a flaky ( though fast ) variant originally based on Redhat... I'm fed-up with both, but YKMV ( metric, here )..
2. SuSE includes damn-near every program-capability one could imagine, and has excellent hardware support ( beyond any others' )..
3. Gentoo's compiled specifically for the hardware you are running, and with --buildpkg you get to build on one, then copy all the tbz2's built, to all of the other ( identical ) machines, and just install 'em, and voilá: ultra-performance.

Misc Links:

Chassis, suitable for lots-of-drives NAS type thing.. or this one for well-cooled system ( thick aluminum's a good conductor of heat, and that makes for a longer-living, less-downtime machine )

I'd use Athlons, but that's just me ( Intel's murdered/crippled WAY too many CPUs, and chipsets, for me to be loyal to them ), and would use these HSFs with Verax.de ( or Panasonic Panaflo ) fans on 'em, just because the noise machines make increase sick-time and reduce health/sanity/productivity so damn much.

Consider using P/Ss like these, remembering that 1. they're REALLY quiet only when running at about 50% load, and 2. the UPS-VA-rating you need for each one is DOUBLE the delivered-watts rating of the P/S.
Also, you want LINE-INTERACTIVE UPSs on all machines. ( NO data-corruption due to brown-outs or other glitches ).

I'd consider dual-CPU machines standard for the desktop, simply because even if a CPU was saturated, on that machine, the machine'd still respond, and I'd stuff as much quick RAM into it as I possibly could ( 3GB/desktop, for engineers ), and I'd ALWAYS use ECC RAM.

Consider this board as something to compare against, with Something Like This KVR266X72C25/1G or this times 3 of 'em, per motherboard.

Like the Marines: Capability-based, not capability-choked, right?

The best advice I've seen on this page is

1. get a GOOD admin ( character, more than anything, values, sanity, cultural-harmony-with-you: you CAN change someone's skillset, you CANNOT change their nature ), and

2. metrics, understanding precisely what 'success' means, what the context is, etc...

3. do it one unit at-a-time

Oh, yeah, here's an Opteron-board news link... ( I'm waiting for lots-of-SATAs-on-board )...

Finally, change the ferro-resonant ballasts in your flourescent lighting to RF ballasts, and switch to Phillips TL-930 4' fluorescent tubes ( Colour Rendition Index of 95, rather than the cheap-cool-white CRI 50!! ), and your health will improve, significantly ( you can then ask for a raise, for your increased effectiveness, see )... if you find the warm-white of the TL-930s ( 3000K ) not brilliant/awakening enough, then mix-in a couple of TL-950s ( 5000K, mid-day-sunshine/sky colour ), to punch-up your alertness.

More info here

These cases from CalPC could house something like 30 of these, for a massive beowulf cluster. :) They cost about $500 without power supply.

These cases from CalPC could house something like 30 of these, for a massive beowulf cluster. :) They cost about $500 without power supply.

If you're predominately running Windows 98 and 2000, I recommend upgrading everyone to 2000 if at all possible. Then you can use NT Backup to write selected data to a server. It may not be the best solution in the world, but it's cheap since NT Backup comes with Win2k.

Then if you're concerned about backing up the server, you can buy a single tape drive and perform a bakup of the server; you'll get everything at once. If you need a server with more hard disk space, my company has been buying completely customized kits from California PC Products. We just put together a dual Athlon 1.9GHz w/ 1.5Gb RAM and 1.5Tb storage space (RAID 5) for about $6,000. Running Linux with Samba shares will cut the cost even more, and will also speed up data transfer rates.

If that doesn't sound like a viable option, look into Veritas backup solutions. We've been successful using their product, but it is more costly.

Much of your decision will probably come down to exactly what you need backed up and what you can afford. Good luck!

Here is your case

We used this case. You can put blocks in that allow you to install three 3.5 inch drives into two 5.25 slots, with a cooling fan, so this case holds something like 40 disks. It has two sets of two redundant power supplies available too, and room for two motherboards. It costs about $800.

You can get hot swap IDE enclosures. We got ours from California PC.

How about a 4U server. 4U = more slots and bays, at least that's important to me. I went with something very similar to this 4U 8-bay case. Heavy as hell, and more than standard rack depth, but spacious and very very sturdy. A search on Ebay for "ATX chassis" will bring up lots of rackmount cases for sale...

They don't make anything, they just stick their name on things then charge inflated prices

Take for example their full tower case. The PC Power & Cooling full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a different bezel on the front & an inflated price tag.

Its the same with every product they sell, for example their mid tower case is the same as one of the big OEMs (I forget which brand) with a different bezel & again an inflated price tag.
Their heatsinks & powersupplies are no different.

I remember when they used to sell a 275 watt 'Silencer' powersupply. It turns out it was just a generic 300 watt powersupply that was just de-rated to cope with the retro-actively fitted low speed so-called 'Silencer' fan (I think just a slow speed Adda fan).

The inside of the California PC full tower case. If you compare it with the guts of the PC Power & Cooling full tower case, you'd notice they are exactly the same except for the bezel (actually some Aopen & Antec cases are the same except for the bezel).

the thermal load vs. cooling-noise tradeoff is the effective limiting factor in the performance of personal machines

Also, I've heard arguments that a large case is not necessarily a boon for good case cooling w/ low noise: large cases require more fans to move the air effectively within--it's not the fact that there's lots of space in a case that makes for cooling, it's moving the air over and away from the components. Seems like having a mid-tower (given the low-moderate drive bay requirements) with a low-rpm 120mm intake and outake fans might have been better.

California PC Products makes great cases, and has an 8U high case, and a 20 slot 4 segment backplane for it (allows 4 PICMG SBCs), with 13 drive bays. Check out the "13 bay rack server" and the list of passive backplanes at http://www.calpc.com/.

These guys make excellent cases... www.calpc.com Jeff

Custom cases NEED a "door" to cover the beige 5.25" drives. They also need a little style.

At least my home computer is one of those MASSIVE 80's AT cases that I rescued from work. It's kinda cool, but only because it so big. AFAIK, the best pc cases are still at California PC Products.

We should make our own cases.

try www.calpc.com. very solid cases and they all come in black as an option.