Quiet RAID ?

P

Phixzet

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 9, 2005
Messages
196
Hey folks.

I'm thinking of putting an Areca 1220 board in a new system (worstation) I am building. Mostly for survivability of losing a drive, but also for performance reasons.

I'm looking however to find the most quiet way to implement this. I don't want to use NAS because of the comparably lower performance... I don't have a close "closet" to mount a separate HD enclosure in... And well I'm just curious if anyone has some advice on alternative solutions for mounting 3 or 4 7200RPM (500gb) drives in a way to keep them as quiet and reasonably cool as possible. For now I'm considering the Antec P180 for my main system case. This likely isn't a bad solution - I'll use a Scythe Ninja and a quiet 120mm case fan, and other quiet components... And overall I am just concerned that if I do go RAID 5 with 3 fast HD's, that the drive noise might become a problem.

I know HardOPC visitors are probably the most creative on the net - so maybe someone has something I haven't thought about.

Oh and for the most part - I'm willing to spend money, within reason. I don't have a blank check here - but if a special solution cost a few hundred to put together - I would consider it just for the piece of mind (and sanity - I hate my current loud system)
 
If money were no object I wanted to try something like this just for the hell of it. Unfortunately speed and noise are at opposite ends of the spectrum... the more of one you want the less of the other you'll get. I have heard, no pun intended, that the newer samsung drives are some of the quietest available at the cost of performance.
 
I'm working on a silent fileserver at the moment...

I haven't ordered the RAID controller yet (pending response from Areca about having an array span multiple controllers in the future... either that or I go for Broadcom) or the storage drives (deciding between 250GB Spinpoints, 300GB MaxLine IIIs, 320GB Raid Editions, 400GB Raid Edition IIs, 300GB Seagate Barracudas, and 250GB 7K250 Deskstars).

Apart from that, I'm going to be running:
2x Opteron 246 /w Scythe Ninja heatsink /w 120mm Nexus fan.
1x 1GB OCZ PC3200 ECC Registered DDR.
Tyan K8SE Motherboard
2x 80GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA II HDD in RAID 1 on the onboard controller.
Seasonic S-12 500W Power Supply.

I haven't settled on a case quite yet, but I'm narrowing it down to a cube case that has 120mm exhaust ports on each side, I'll be using a supermicro CSE-M35T-1 hot-swap rack to hold the storage drives.
 
Yeah the Spinpoint drives are the best.

However - I'd like to be future-proof - and I have money I can spend this year on it... So I want to maximize space with minimum drive quantity. The largest spinpoints are 250GB, while I can get 500GB elsewhere. 3 500GB's in RAID 5 makes 1 TB, and I just never forsee outgrowing that between SW development and gaming, etc...

So part of it is - I can't get the quietest drives and still get the large capacity with only 3 drives.
 
One thing off the top of my head would be to use a nice thick steel case to muffle the sound of the drives a bit. I happen to like the old boat anchor's more than newer cases but recognise that many people hate anything not all aluminum :D .
 
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