Lots of drives

Tom Brown · Post by **Tom Brown** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 12:17 pm

I have a machine in a modded Sonata v 1.0 that runs well but one of the five drives runs pretty warm. I'm starting to think it's time for something new.

What cases should I look at for a system with 5 or 6 SATA drives? I know I'm never going to have a silent system with that many spindles but I'd like to find something that is reasonably quiet and provides decent cooling to the drives.

The P180/P182 has 6 hdd cages but 4 are in the lower compartment while 2 are in the top. Is that a decent setup? The P182 seems to be the case to beat in it's niche.

Tom Brown · Post by **Tom Brown** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 3:44 pm

Any comments on the Cooler Master Centurian 590?

It looks like a good case for a big storage server but a lousy case to make quiet.

I would imagine I could tape up most of the vents and get the air flowing the way it should.

ACook · Post by **ACook** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 7:09 am

p182 works fine with 6 hds, the top 2 will probably need a slow fan blowing in to keep cool, but bottom is cool with the psu fan alone usually.

Tom Brown · Post by **Tom Brown** » Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:34 am

Thanks. I'm going to try a P183 when they come out

Tom Brown · Post by **Tom Brown** » Mon Feb 23, 2009 7:21 am

Realizing I can't wait for the P183, I ordered a P182 on the weekend.

Me patient? What was I thinking?

I had a closer look at the venting around the perimeter of the door of the P182. It looks quite sufficient to me.

The only deficiency I see are the short feet which will make it difficult to get free airflow into the bottom of the front bezel since the my office is carpeted. I expect I'll have to put something under the feed of the machine, like I do with my Sonatas.

I tried really hard to not buy an Antec product. When I bought my first Sonatas, I was discouraged with how much modifying I had to do and how expensive it was to get the case quiet. They were sold as a quiet case but they were far from it, back when the original Sonata came out. In fact, I'd guess the originals to be somewhere around average loudness, no better.

Antec does make nice looking stuff and I feel their quality is good so I'm going for the P182 based on the widespread excellent reports on this site. I understand having 6 spindles disallows me from having a quiet machine but I'm hoping the closed front bezel
of the P182 will contain more noise than the more open front bezel of the P183.

Thanks Acook.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 1:36 pm

A new single HDD might be a less expensive option than a new case. Unless you just really need over 2TB of space or a RAID5 configuration.