Interesting, I'd previously rejected this cooler for a Linux system I'm working on because of the lack of PWM control for the pump, but if it only effective adds 1 dBA, I could deal with that (looking for quiet, not truly silent and in case that wouldn't allow for a tower cooler). Regarding the revi...

At the end of the day, a system is only as quiet as what you put into it. If you want a system with that many hard drives to be quiet, I think your first concern should be how and where the drives are mounted. Sturdy metal drive cage and soft decoupled mounts is what to look for there. Basically, if...

Sounds like what you'd need is a tower HSF that used a 92mm fan. Something like: Thermalright True Spirit 90 ($35 on amazon) http://www.thermalright.com/html/products/cpu_cooler/true_spirit_90.html or Noctua NH-U9B SE2 ($50 on amazon) http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=32&lng...

The drive should be fine with an older SATA port, aside from it possibly not being as fast as it could be in a newer rig.

Another option may be to use the lockers Amazon has: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200689010 I haven't used that service as anything that I'm being paranoid about I get delivered to work. I work at an office with a proper shipping department so that may make it easier t...

I want to implement Intel SRT Smart Response Technology on my next PC, which also uses an SSD as a huge cache, but right now Intel requires your setup be RAID 0 for that to happen. That's an idiotic requirement. Oh well, never underestimate the use of a good software cache. I'm not sure where you g...

We're starting with 4 HDs, and I thought 6 would be better for the reasons you state. It's also the reason I don't want spanned volumes, individual drives allows for a degree of traffic control. We could easily end up swapping out all the drives for a high number of SAS 10K or even 15K RPM units. S...

There is a lot of talk about CPU, RAM, and licensing. Nothing about Storage though... If any of your workloads are IO intensive at all that could easily become a bottleneck (more VM's = more seeks). I definitely recommend multiple spindles and a hardware controller with a battery backed or flash bac...