Case to minimise noise/vibration from eight hard drives?
Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2010 5:40 am
I have a home-built NAS that has been running happily for years. It used to live in a cupboard but since moving house it's had to live in my study, and I've realised that the one mistake I made when building the NAS was to use a cheap case without any option for damping for the hard drives. Even adding thin rubber washers would be very difficult. With eight drives, the case resonates and the drives create an annoying humming.
So I need to replace the case, and the overriding priority is find one that offers the best features for controlling hard drive noise and vibration. It also needs to hold eight drives (using 3.5 and 5.25 bays).
From reading the reviews and discussions here the Antec P183 seems an obvious choice, but I'd be interested to hear of any alternatives. There will be little else in the case apart from the motherboard and CPU. It's just a file server.
And a secondary question. Given that I have to rebuild the server in the new case, I was wondering if it's time to replace the motherboard, CPU etc. I did build the NAS originally to be as low power as possible, using old hardware, but things have moved on. Would moving to mini-ITX cut power usage significantly? The NAS idles at 80-90W, but I've assumed that's because some of my hard drives are old and power hungry. I'm gradually swapping out to newer drives.
The current spec is:
ITOX IF15 motherboard (a FlexATX board, socket 370, Intel 815E chipset).
Celeron 700MHz processor, 256MB RAM.
Seasonic 430w PSU.
NasLite OS.
Any advice appreciated.
So I need to replace the case, and the overriding priority is find one that offers the best features for controlling hard drive noise and vibration. It also needs to hold eight drives (using 3.5 and 5.25 bays).
From reading the reviews and discussions here the Antec P183 seems an obvious choice, but I'd be interested to hear of any alternatives. There will be little else in the case apart from the motherboard and CPU. It's just a file server.
And a secondary question. Given that I have to rebuild the server in the new case, I was wondering if it's time to replace the motherboard, CPU etc. I did build the NAS originally to be as low power as possible, using old hardware, but things have moved on. Would moving to mini-ITX cut power usage significantly? The NAS idles at 80-90W, but I've assumed that's because some of my hard drives are old and power hungry. I'm gradually swapping out to newer drives.
The current spec is:
ITOX IF15 motherboard (a FlexATX board, socket 370, Intel 815E chipset).
Celeron 700MHz processor, 256MB RAM.
Seasonic 430w PSU.
NasLite OS.
Any advice appreciated.