I’m looking into the possibility of adding more drives to my server, without using a long/deep “rack mount” server case.
Ideally the solution would have hot swap bays and fit on top of a desk for easy access to the drives.
Might there be a cheaper alternative to putting hot-swap cages in PC cases with lots of 5.25” bays?
To help quantify the question, how many is “lots”? Are we talking single digits, or dozens? My idea of “lots” is something like “90 bays in 4U,” but that obviously wouldn’t fit on a desk (at least, not if you wanted room for anything else there).
There are some external disk chassis that are desktop models. Here are 2, one is 4 disks and the other is 8 disks:
I have no connection to the company. Further, make sure you don’t buy a hardware RAID controller card. Just get a LSI HBA SAS card.
Next, you do want to keep the cables shorter, like 0.5 meters. (Or less if you can.) Though if you are using actual SAS disks, (HDDs or SSDs), you can use longer cables.
I was thinking of having dozens of drives, and those JBOD enclosures seem unnecessarily expensive…
This Craigslist posting seems to be on to something: The drive bays and backplane of a rackmount system with a 3D-printed fan housing on the back.
https://seattle.craigslist.org/est/sys/d/bothell-inspur-12-bay-sas3-hard-disk/7910710454.html
I don’t think I trust the printed portion to hold together though.
There is always a difference between improvised chassis and built to purpose chassis, besides cost.
If you want cheap, (and you mentioned “top of a desk”), then many tower PC computer chassis’ can be converted to disk only roles. As long as the power supply can be switched on, and keeps working without a system board installed, most will work fine. (There are little power supply adapters that allow the PS to function without a system board…)
However, some of these improvised disk chassis’ configurations are not as reliable as purpose built ones. For example, using too long data cables with SATA disks can reduce reliability. The fix is to add a SAS Expander, (which adds cost), but does allow dozens of disks to be added.
Obviously your opinions are up to you. But about US$1100 for 45 bays seems reasonable. See:
Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), 60- and 84-bay units cost less. See:
(OK, price is less, but shipping is much higher so that it’s about a wash).
Big, bulky, heavy, and noisy–yes to all of those things, though I don’t think you’re going to get away from them to hold that many drives. But it’s a purpose-built device, designed to hold, power, and cool all of those drives, and handle the hot-swap (both mechanically and electrically) as well.
If I could put a top-loading enclosure on its side, that might be perfect!
