SPCR

I'm in a dilemma... I'm building a rig that will be holding alot of harddrives (5). Apart from that its pretty low end and cool stuff, but I don't want the noise of the drives to bug me.

P150 is not an option as it has too little power in the 5v

I understood that the 3000b is'nt especially good with hardisk noise?

Does that leave me with a P180?

Why will you have 5 drives? Couldn't you manage with 3 perhaps? An SLK3000B would be fine with 3 drives.

If you are thinking of RAID, are you sure it will benefit you? Don't get something just because it's 'better'. Tell me why.

Well I got the disks and the raid controller for free, and feel it would be a shame not to use them...

edit: I guess it would be appropriate to add that I would actually like to have some redundancy at home, and can easily use the space

Absolutely the P180! I just went through this exact same scenario with my old raid-5 card + drives and I have my 4 raid drives installed in the lower chamber and my boot drive installed in the upper chamber. The P180 was the ONLY case that seemed to be able to kill the vibration harmonics from this many drives, at least for my setup. I had originally tried the new SLK3000B but the resonance and vibration from the hard drives was very annoying and dissapointing.

Be careful installing the drives though as the silicon grommets are very soft and you can mess them up if you don't install them correctly. I found what worked the best was to fit the drive into the chamber, compress the drive against the surface of the grommet so that it squishes down and then install the screw till it "just touches" the outside surface of the compressed grommet and then let go of the drive. Seems to be just about perfect for suspension and vibration killing. You don't want to overtighten these screws and they will not loosen up as the silicon holds them in place.

Good luck!

James

kamina wrote:P150 is not an option as it has too little power in the 5v

Do you really believe this is an issue? I'm running 8 HDDs off of a crappy,
generic 300W PSU and have not experienced any stability issues...
erikt

The P150s PSU should be able to handle five hard drives fairly easily. The main problem with the P150 and your setup is that it only holds 4 hard drives unless you slip one into the floppy drive bay.

The main problem with the P150 is the low +5v. I don't think the dual P3 will like that.

Dual P3? The processor doesn't use much of the +5V line, if at all. From the SPCR testing (http://www.silentpcreview.com/article265-page4.html), it seems that the main components that draw power from the 5V rail are hard drives, optical drives, and RAM. The highest end system tested in that review (admittedly with only 1 HDD and 1 optical drive) only reached 3.6A on the +5V rail.

The Antec NeoHE does have a weaker +5V line than other PSUs, but that's probably because Antec realized that even with 8 optical/hard drives, the power requirements would never even get to 50% of the 20A+ 5V lines in other PSUs. The Antec NeoHE has 14A on its +5V rail which should be enough for a moderately high-end system (low-end Intel P4 dual core, 6800GT) with 5 hard disks, and 2 optical drives.

As mentioned in the review, the amount of power drawn by the processors varied alot between the motherboards / chipsets. This article is not really relevant to me though, as all 6 motherboards included are new enough to include a 4-pin connector for processor power.

As far as I'm aware, older motherboards draw their power from the 5v line. While the processors I have are not very hungry, they are still rated at over 25w each, meaning 50w for the two.

I've tried searching for similar tests that would include older systems, but have'nt managed to find them. I also asked about this issue here and in a few other places, and everyone has been convinced that the processors will be fed from the 5v line...

I'm not much of an electrician, but as far as I understood this would pretty much mean that the processors alone would (theoretically) eat up 2/3 of the available 5v power.