Considerations for Raised Floor Installation?

shanm asks: "I'm wondering if the community would have any recommendations and or cost rules of thumb on a raised floor installation. I'm considering doing that in a basement room (soon to be PC room and office) to make network/power wiring easier, modifiable, and expandable. The biggest constraint is that the basement doesn't have a 9 or 10 foot ceiling. So I don't have an unlimited height on the floor."

Comments

basement bad

[Apreche]

basement bad! water, flooding, other things in basement! You definitely don't want to do it in your basement, especially in a normal house.

Don't do it.

[Schezar]

I work for IBM, and as such I work with raised floor environments on a daily basis. In fact, I'm sitting in one right now.

They're not worth it.

First, you can't easily clean under there. Dust will accumulate in quantities you can't begin to imagine, followed by dust mites, mold, and other assorted evil.

Second, raised floors don't make cable management any easier, they just hide the mess. Sure, the server room looks spotless and clean, but under that floor is a nightmarish rat's nest of cables. Wait until you have to move a cable from one location to another, pulling up floor tiles one at a time to untangle the various knots that have formed...

Third, you can't mop the floor anymore. This floor I'm sitting over hasn't been mopped in several decades. These tiles used to be white!

Fourth, the secondary function of a raised floor is to distribute cooling. Typically, you'll have a giant air conditioner that pumps cold air under the floor. You then have special tiles with holes in them under your racks, through which your servers draw in fresh cold air. If you're not going to set something like that up, you're losing one of the primary benefits of a raised floor.

I could go on and on.

Instead of making a raised floor, make a drop ceiling and run the cables in racks through there: simpler, easier, faster, and cheaper. If you're worried about the height of the ceiling, don't bother with the tiles and just run metal racks.

Trust me, you don't want a raised floor in your basement.