Large size PC case?

[ponder]

Guys, I need a large size PC case that can easily take 8 to 10 hard drives with room to spare.

How much room to spare, 35 drives?

Anyway, I have just the chassis for you (it's rackmount though):

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

You can build your own or buy the chassis online as a few places make them. You can even take the CAD files and change the design.

 

[davemc]

Thanks Tango, ponder, separate HDD trays makes sense.

 

[robdutchmonkey]

Just for the record, I don't have any vibrations of any sorts with my hard drives and no I don't get any issues with them provided I don't mess around with my case too often. You must remember that most the drives just sit on idle 95% of the time unless I decide to watch something or listen to music. Only problems I have had was with sata data cables. Seems Matrix sell rubbish, because in the past few months I had about 3 faulty cables I had to pull so I swapped them all out for lian li pre-sleeved black cables and only have the one orange one for my OS drive. In the pic I had 2 red ones but those didn't last long, something happened and I replaced those with black ones as well.

@ Keeper, no I never bothered connecting all the LED fans to the front LED switch. The back door can barely fit on as it is with all the cables coming from my rig, and I don't even wanna imagine all the converters I might need to get that to work, so my rig is like an xmas tree.

1 x 230mm red fan
3 x 200mm red fans
2 x 120mm red fans
1 x 120mm blue fan
the V6GT light
and the GPU cooler lights

lol, I like it that way though. Stands out from the crowd when I go to lans. The wheels help a lot as well

 

[TopCa7]

Guys, I need a large size PC case that can easily take 8 to 10 hard drives with room to spare. I really don't care about brand name or the coolness factor. Any one will do as long as it is not cheap junk. Does anybody know of a nice one for about R1000 to R2000? I will fit all my own components inside.

Managed to get 13 hard drives into my Evo 830, picked it up second hand off Carbonite for R650 with 3 of those 4-in-3 modules. Perfect case for a server pc, and its on wheels
When I was looking for a PC case for just this reason the cases that caught my eye where the Antec 900/1200. The 1200 has 12 drive bays, so if you are using those 4-in-3 modules thats 16 hdds you can shove in there if my fail maths is right and comes in just under 2k.
Otherwise there were a few 9 bay chassis that areocool make which are pretty decent and all come in under 1k.

 

[general_koffi]

/off topic with apologies:

The vibration from 10 hard drives must be quite extreme.
I would speculate that the drives are probably having difficulty reading and writing data, causing ugly delays and bizzare bad sectors that disappear when the drives are tested.

Do any of you implement some sort of vibration isolation/dampening in this kind of mass drive configuration?

Decent cases are supposed to come with dampening technology built in, especially with that many.

If it's really a problem once it's set up, one non-ideal solution would be to use OS power settings to spin-down the drives when they aren't in use, which they probably won't be unless it's a server. Of course the problem here is the small delay to spin-up the drive when you do want to access it, and the damage that gets done to HDD's over time if they have to spin-up and spin-down too frequently.