nooby question again :)

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wolverinex

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How does a stacker case work ? you know those cases that hold like 10 hdd's
the average or even high end mobo only has 4 sata ports on it so how does the stacker work exactly ?

does it somehow combine the power supply and sata ports on the mobo or does it have it's own separate ports ?

or am i totally confused and its just used to store hdd even though they may not be used all at once ?

thanks for widening my knowledge :D
 
My motherboard has 6 SATA ports :)
Usually when you go for that many hard-drives, you have to get RAID controllers.
 
ooooo 6 you say ? what mobo do you have ? i want that too :)

ok so if i understand you correctly i would have to set up the extra hdd's on a raid card (that plugs in to the mobo pce slot right ?)

maybe i should just get a raid thingy and use my current case with all my hdd's squezed into that ? :D can i ? about 6 hdd's altogether, my current case should be able to hold the 6
 
Pada said:
Usually when you go for that many hard-drives, you have to get RAID controllers.
Click to expand...

Where do you get a RAID controller from? I also want more HDD's... What about the Power supply, it usually only supports 2 SCSI HDD's?
 
my Gigabyte P45 mobo (a fairly average mobo) has 8 satas and 2 -e-sata breakouts. In addition you can get PCI sata cards with another 4-8 ports on them.

So rule of thumb is get either normal mobo and add PCI sata cards, OR, buy a decent mobo with 8-10 Sata ports and perhaps throw in a PCI for good measure.

Your biggest concern is cooling 10 HDD's stacked and spinning.
 
stricken said:
my Gigabyte P45 mobo (a fairly average mobo) has 8 satas and 2 -e-sata breakouts. In addition you can get PCI sata cards with another 4-8 ports on them.

So rule of thumb is get either normal mobo and add PCI sata cards, OR, buy a decent mobo with 8-10 Sata ports and perhaps throw in a PCI for good measure.

Your biggest concern is cooling 10 HDD's stacked and spinning.
Click to expand...

thanks ! didn't know that but what about power ? where do i get the extra power from ? or do i just split the current power cables (if thats possible)
 
Most motherboard come with 6 to 10 SATA interfaces these days.
If thats not enough you can add a PCI card to increase the amount of SATA interfaces - they're cheap.
I don't think cooling is going to be a problem - there are loads of cases around the have fans in the front that blow through the drives keeping em kewl.
You will need to get a descent power supply and if you run out of SATA power you can always buy a splitter or molex to SATA splitter because who uses IDE these days.
 
So you want a NAS(Network Attached Storage) essentially?

If that is the case I've setup 3 so far, 1 for myself that had 4x Western Digital 2TB Green Power drives, one for a friend with 3x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP drives and another one for myself with 6x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP drives (I'm now in the process of selling the WD drives).

If you want a NAS post again, I have quite a bit of info regarding what hardware you need, what software and most importantly which HDs to buy.

If you go the NAS route you shouldn't buy hardware RAID cards, you won't see better performance! (I'm already maxing out Gigabit LAN, the only way I could do better is bonded Gigabit LAN which would probably come close to saturation anyway).

Firstly state the purpose of all this storage!
 
wolverinex said:
thanks ! didn't know that but what about power ? where do i get the extra power from ? or do i just split the current power cables (if thats possible)
Click to expand...

Yeah just split the power cables, hard drives don't use a lot of power.
 
Power usage for 3.5" hard-drives are usually specified, both Western Digital and Seagate give fairly good specs. Other manufacturers would probably also.

For example:
Seagate Barracuda LP (Low Power) 2TB: Average usage - 6.90W, idle usage - 4.85W, starting current 2amp @ 12v.
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB: Average usage - 9.23W, idle usage - 6.39W, starting current 2.8amp @ 12v
Western Digital Green Power 2TB: Average usage - 6.00 Watts, idle usage - 3.70 Watts

Depends what you buy but if you have plenty of hard-drives the usage can become significant, as can the dissipated heat. With my NAS I need fans blowing on the HDs (with a FAN blowing on the hds idle temperature is 40 degrees). The startup voltage is especially significant because all those drives starting up together may exceed the maximum amps allowed by the PSU. RAID edition drives sport a feature called staggered start-up which essentially allows the drives to start up at different times. Personally on all NAS computers I've built so far the drives all start at exactly the same time.
 
i think its just for the market, companies bragging about how many drives their cases can hold just to get it sold, good observation, its not as noob a question as you think. It comes down to what you think would be enough, lol i never have enough. But if you want to expand then that case would be an option.
 
wolverinex said:
How does a stacker case work ? you know those cases that hold like 10 hdd's
the average or even high end mobo only has 4 sata ports on it so how does the stacker work exactly ?

does it somehow combine the power supply and sata ports on the mobo or does it have it's own separate ports ?

or am i totally confused and its just used to store hdd even though they may not be used all at once ?

thanks for widening my knowledge :D
Click to expand...

Stop buying cheap boards. High end gigabyte boards have 12 sata ports.

And 750watt power supplies have more than enough connectors.
 
Synaesthesia said:
Yeah just split the power cables, hard drives don't use a lot of power.
Click to expand...

One thing to remember - while hard drives do not use much power when active (usually a max of 10W) they require up to 30W to start up. So if the machine has 10 drives and the rest of the machine draws 200W you actually need a 500W PSU (200 + 10*30).
 
I just bought 2 775 mobo's for a friend the other day, both had 8 sata ports each. It doesn't matter how expensive or cheap a board is... You need to buy a board that suits your needs

My board has 6, but I have 10 hdd's so I use 2 x sunix sata 2100 cards, however for some reason they refuse to detect any seagate drives, only WD (haven't tested samsung or hitachi)

A 750/850W PSU usually comes with 9 sata connections, otherwise just buy molex to sata converter cables, I have tons of them spare, like 30 or so
 
My Board has 6 SATAs so that chassis would be great for me.....

wolverinex said:
How does a stacker case work ? you know those cases that hold like 10 hdd's
the average or even high end mobo only has 4 sata ports on it so how does the stacker work exactly ?

does it somehow combine the power supply and sata ports on the mobo or does it have it's own separate ports ?

or am i totally confused and its just used to store hdd even though they may not be used all at once ?

thanks for widening my knowledge :D
Click to expand...
 
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