Hi all,
I'm planning for a home fileserver, need a case (rackmount if possible, this is going inside a closet) with at least 12 drive bays. I know there are many rackmount cases that fit the specs, but most of those use noisy 80mm fans.

Do you know of a case with these specs that's easy to silence?

TIA!

Will you be running 12 drives in those bays? IMO, 12 drives cannot be silenced (not in SPCR terms). sound proof the closet and vent it with outside air, air conditioning or water cooling.

you could also use two large regular (spcr recommended) cases that have drive grommets mounting and 120mm or bigger fans (also spcr recommended) in them, and hook it all to one mobo.

Thanks for the input!
I know they can't be silenced (especially being hardmounted), but at least I'd like get a case with 120mm fans so I can replace them and avoid the jet noise usually associated with rackmount cases.

The idea of two cases would be good if I had more space there

I have a Norco RPC-4116 along with the 120 mm fan bracket. It's a 16 bay case, but it has room for 120 mm fans if you buy the fan bracket, which is not expensive. I have 3 X 120 mm Scythe Slipstreams running at ~1200 RPM along with 2 X Arctic Cooling F8-PRO PWM fans in the back. It is "quiet" but certainly not silent. I have some 7200 RPM drives plus a RAID controller and SAS expander which need a fair bit of cooling, but with 5400 RPM "green" drives and no controller one could probably get away with much lower fan RPMs. With the 120s at 800 RPM or less it I could see the RPC-4116 being quite quiet if the drives are good.

The fan bracket fits most if not all of Norco's 4U cases, so you can find one to fit your needs. The included 80 mm bracket and fans will not do, they are crazy loud.

great! i'll check that out, thanks!

Second on the Norco case. 4216, 4220 or 4224 with the 120mm fan bracket. I'll agree with xan_user that you'll never achieve "silent". But you can certainly get to "living room quiet". When all 12 drives get going you're going to hear it - but you can make the cooling and the computer driving them near silent. I know - my 4224 spent almost a year in our family room without complaint from the wife (and if it wasn't quiet enough I definitely would have heard about it!).

Basically this: Norco 4224 case, near-silent PSU (Corsair 650HX in my case, but you can get more efficient quiet ones now), 3x Noctua 120 fans in the midplane, 2x 80mm Noctua's on the rear running on motherboard PWM control (nominally 800rpm, speeds up if it gets hot - which has only happened when I force-tested it by blocking all the airflow from the drive trays). Big-Shuriken with the fan real slow on the CPU (the computer compartment is just plain cavernous - don't need to do anything special there).

I also dremeled out the "grid" over the rear fan mounts and duct-tape sealed everyplace air could get in without passing through the vented drive trays - keeps the drives cooler because all intake air passes over the drives on its way in. Finally, seal up the extra holes/spaces between front and back compartments in the midplane fan tray. This eliminates any circulating flow between the front/rear compartments, increasing the efficiency of the midplane fans and allowing you to run them slower while still keeping the drives cool.

Basically nothing more than the normal SPCR treatment to the case...

thanks for the detailed info! One question: have you tried it without the rear fans? I try to avoid 80mm units like the plague.

cheers!

It would probably be OK without the rear fans, but running slow they are reasonably quiet and I wanted to make sure any heat gets evacuated efficiently. There is not room for 120s on the back.

I can't hear the two rear fans over the 120s and the drives. I have mine connected with the CPU PWM header, so they ramp up and down with CPU temp. They idle around 1000 RPM and can go up to 2000 RPM, but I've never seen them go that fast even when running prime95.

I too am using a Norco 4220 with a 3x120mm "fan wall". Right now it's in the basement next to my noisy furnace and washer/dryer, so silence hasn't been a huge concern so far, except to say that the default 80mm fan board it came with has no place inside a home. Even in a data center that thing would be obscene without ear protection.

One thing I've always wondered about, though, is the usefulness of running any 80mm fans in back at all. Even if you're running the 120's slow and silent, there's no way 2 80mm fans are going to be able to match them, in the push-pull sense, at least not quietly. It seems like they would, if anything, just impede the air exhaust, and you'd be better off removing them and just go with positive pressure. Unfortunately I'm running a server motherboard that doesn't seem to allow precise CPU and drive temperature monitoring (other than reporting "high" "medium" and "low"), so I haven't been able to get any conclusive data as to whether the rear fans are making any real difference. Has anyone experimented with removing the rear fans?

Not sure if i should put this here: what SATA controller are you guys using? I was considering Supermicro's AOC-SASLP-MV8​.
Since I'm planning to use FlexRAID, JBOD controller is right for me

That depends on what OS you're using. One advantage of the controller you listed, if I remember correctly, is that the Windows driver is capable of passing SMART monitoring data to the OS, so it's a nice controller for something like WHS. The non-Windows driver support, however, is said to be poor, so this is pretty much a Windows-only solution. I still have a couple of these boards that I used to use when I was on WHS. But now that I've moved my server over to OpenIndiana/ZFS running on top of an ESXi hypervisor, I had to switch to some higher-end cards based on LSI Logic chipsets.

AOC-SASLP-MV8 is ok for modest performance applications. Do be aware that it is an older design and does not support drives over 2TB, so if you are using large drives - or think you might in the future - then you probably want something else.

A popular choice is to look for OEM versions of LSI SAS2008 based controllers on eBay. These are usually brand-new pulls from "packaged" servers where the end user didn't need the controller. A common model is the IBM M1015, which is essentially an LSI9240-8i with the "raid 5" function disabled. It is electronically close enough to the popular LSI9211-8i that it can be flashed with the 9211s firmware. And if you flash it with the "IT mode" firmware you end up with a passthrough SATA controller that is recognized by most popular OSs including all recent variants of Windows, Linux and Solaris.

You can usually find the M1015 on eBay for under $100, often for $85 or less. Of course, supplies come and go and your mileage on pricing may vary. I haven't look for a while.

This is the controller I am using (though I am running it with LSI9240 firmware). I have three of them running my 24 drives.

There are other similar controllers commonly available on eBay. You can find a lot of info about them at http://forums.servethehome.com.

I didn't see the 2TB mentioned anywhere, great info, thanks!

Of course not. When that board's specs were written 2TB drives were not even visible on the far horizon!

Xigmatek's Elysium with suspended hdd in it ?
Maybe with 12 Seagate new 4TB HD (no SPCR review of this case and of those HDD).