Hi

I am having a custom case built and am looking for disk recommendations.

The disks are nose down in a "cage", 3 rows of 8 disks, the disks separated on all sides by metal rods covered in rubber, the end of the disks rests on a rubber strip, so no disk touches another and they disks don't touch metal directly.

3 fans at one side and 3 fans at the other [Scythe SY1225SL12L "Slipstream" Case Fans], push/pull, air will blow over the top and bottom of the disks.

It will be Solaris-based, the disks will probably be striped and then mirrored, the CPU's will be watercooled.

Priorities (taking the restrictions of the cage into consideration):

As quiet as possible with 3.5" disks (there are 24 of them)
As cool as possible with 3.5" disks (the sides don't touch metal so it's just keeping the temperature manageable)
Cost per TB (2TB disks seem to be the sweet spot in terms of price but 1TB are an option)
100MB/s reads per disk would be nice to have.

As an aside the build will take 2-3 months so should I wait for 1TB per platter disks?

Thanks for looking.

--Richard

what materials are you making the case out of? how thick, etc.

for the rubber at the bottom, is it super cushy like silicone, or no? that would seem to make a difference.

i'd hold off until later for buying the drives, because the 2tb/3platter drives will probably drop in price.

with the areal density increases, you should know that sequential access is faster, but random performance is hurt. depending on your stripe size, performance could suffer quite a bit.

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

The material is Aluminium, i'm not building it but on the sketches it looks very sturdy.

Do you have any recommendations on the rubber that the nose of the drive rests on? Builder has ordered this from http://www.mcmaster.com/.

UPDATE: the tubing separating the drives is 64A (says "Soft" though, which is weird, I doubt you could stretch 64A to twice its length, so I think 64A is wrong) and strip the drives rest on is 50A, I would love advice on this as we can change it.

Tubing McMaster part #: 51225K27, strip part #: 7665K18

I will hold off on the drives.

A 1TB WD Green with 1TB platters would probably be the way to go

Or a 2TB drive with higher BER (like 1e15 on the Samsung F4)

Although in saying that BER doesn't seem to make as much difference when your using mirroring in ZFS...