4-in-3 hard drive enclosures, hot swap etc

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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matt_garman
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4-in-3 hard drive enclosures, hot swap etc

Post by matt_garman » Thu Feb 22, 2007 9:52 am

In a continuation of this thread (Case for many hard drives with ample space between), I'm now curious about the cooling and quietness capabilities of "4-in-3" type devices. I'm also asserting that having some extra space (say 1/2 inch) between hard drives drastically improves cooling.

A case like the CM Stacker is great, because you can use all those 5.25" bays to mount hard drives and ensure plenty of room between each. But, using "x-in-y" type devices such as this one, you can store many more hard drives in the same space.

But at what cooling/noise cost?

I've seen 4-in-3 and 5-in-3 devices; the 5-in-3s clearly put the drives too close together to cool quietly.

But I can't tell from the pictures if the 4-in-3 devices have enough "breathing" room between drives. My ideal would be such a device that could keep the drives plenty cool (target = 30 degrees C) with a quiet, low-RPM fan (preferably a 120mm or 92mm).

Cooler Master themselves make a 4-in-3 device specifically designed for the Stacker; looks ideal, except I can't find a picture that illustrates how much room (if any) it allows between drives.

Thanks!
Matt

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Post by Ralf Hutter » Thu Feb 22, 2007 10:32 am

I've played with them over the years and always found the stock 92mm cooling fans to be ridiculously loud. And unfortunately, you seem to need a fairly hefty amount of airflow in these things to keep the drives cool. They're only about 1/4" apart from each other in the case so they do tend to run warm. I've played with L1A and M1A Panaflos and they just do not give enough cooling when undervolted to the 7V range, and are too loud at 12V.

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Post by UrbanVoyeur » Thu Feb 22, 2007 11:59 am

I have two 3-in-2 Lian-Li Racks - one in each PC. It is packed a little tighter than the 4-in-3.

I swapped out the stock 80 for a Nexus and under volted to 7v. Each rack has 2x 500 GB WD SATA and 1 x 320 Gb Seagate SATA. The WD's are set to AAM 128. I regret the Seagate and plan to swap out for a quieter Samsung.

The drives stay very cool (low to mid 30's). Temp rises to 40's and 50's w/o fan. The fan is quiet - the drives are much louder than the fans.

In fact, the only thing you hear in my system is the drives - each has 6 HD's.

NB: Most of the HD noise radiates out of the front 3-in-2 enclosure.

Take a look at the Lian-Li 4-in-3. Rubber grommet hard drive mounts, 120 mm fan. Swap it for a low rev Scythe and you're good to go.

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Re: 4-in-3 hard drive enclosures, hot swap etc

Post by EsaT » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:18 pm

matt_garman wrote:Cooler Master themselves make a 4-in-3 device specifically designed for the Stacker; looks ideal, except I can't find a picture that illustrates how much room (if any) it allows between drives.
With four drives it's quite tight spacing for low speed (and low pressure) fan:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... id=22&pg=6
Coolermaster fan provided with module would work well, when I asked about this tight spacing in Finnish MuroBBS one answered that he had four Maxtors in one module and that they stayed at just little above 30C.

When I have enough spare time (and find inspiration for going through required hassle) I could try how cool Nexus would keep four HDs.
If three drives per module would be enough you can have very nice sized even cooling gaps between drives by putting one of them upside down.

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Re: 4-in-3 hard drive enclosures, hot swap etc

Post by matt_garman » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:27 pm

EsaT wrote:
matt_garman wrote:Cooler Master themselves make a 4-in-3 device specifically designed for the Stacker; looks ideal, except I can't find a picture that illustrates how much room (if any) it allows between drives.
With four drives it's quite tight spacing for low speed (and low pressure) fan:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... id=22&pg=6
Coolermaster fan provided with module would work well, when I asked about this tight spacing in Finnish MuroBBS one answered that he had four Maxtors in one module and that they stayed at just little above 30C.
Ugh, yeah, the Cooler Master 4-in-3 looks awful. I'm guessing that there aren't too many people who want to house lots of hard drives and have them spaced out sufficiently for quiet cooling---they probably want the most drives in the least space, and stick such a beast in the basement, garage, server room, etc, and use super-loud, high speed fans.
EsaT wrote: When I have enough spare time (and find inspiration for going through required hassle) I could try how cool Nexus would keep four HDs.
If three drives per module would be enough you can have very nice sized even cooling gaps between drives by putting one of them upside down.
Well, if I use a 4-in-3 module to house only three drives, then I might as well just mount the drives in the 5.25" bays. :)

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Re: 4-in-3 hard drive enclosures, hot swap etc

Post by UrbanVoyeur » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:39 pm

matt_garman wrote: Well, if I use a 4-in-3 module to house only three drives, then I might as well just mount the drives in the 5.25" bays. :)
Yes. In fact, there is a fan adapter with a 120 mm fan an filter sans drive mounts for just that purpose. Fits in 3 5.25 bays with slightly recessed had drives.

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/0 ... etail.html

This mounting would also give you the chance to use much better drive isolation.

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Post by matt_garman » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:45 pm

UrbanVoyeur wrote:I have two 3-in-2 Lian-Li Racks - one in each PC. It is packed a little tighter than the 4-in-3.

I swapped out the stock 80 for a Nexus and under volted to 7v. Each rack has 2x 500 GB WD SATA and 1 x 320 Gb Seagate SATA. The WD's are set to AAM 128. I regret the Seagate and plan to swap out for a quieter Samsung.

The drives stay very cool (low to mid 30's). Temp rises to 40's and 50's w/o fan. The fan is quiet - the drives are much louder than the fans.

In fact, the only thing you hear in my system is the drives - each has 6 HD's.

NB: Most of the HD noise radiates out of the front 3-in-2 enclosure.

Take a look at the Lian-Li 4-in-3. Rubber grommet hard drive mounts, 120 mm fan. Swap it for a low rev Scythe and you're good to go.
What is the general temperature of the room in which you keep these systems?

Just to be clear, are these the Lian Li HDD kits you're talking about? (For easy searching in the future, they are part numbers EX-23A, EX-23B, EX-34A, EX-34B.)

When searching for the Lian Li cages, I found this discussion which mentions the Silverstone CFP51.

Also mentioned in that thread was this Supermicro hot-swap 5-in-3 device. Having hot-swap capabilities would be, IMO, the best. But Ralf's comments above and in other threads confirm my suspicion: the hot-swap bays sandwich the drives too close together and also have too much "stuff" blocking airflow. :( Plus, all the hotswap devices are too expensive to experiment with!

Oh well.
Matt

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Post by UrbanVoyeur » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:05 pm

matt_garman wrote: What is the general temperature of the room in which you keep these systems?

Just to be clear, are these the Lian Li HDD kits you're talking about? (For easy searching in the future, they are part numbers EX-23A, EX-23B, EX-34A, EX-34B.)
Yes. I have the Ex-23B's. Room temp is 20-22 C Winter, 26-33 C Summer. (No AC)

Silver stone lacks the individual rubber grommets for each drive. Not as effective as good isolator, but better than nothing.

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Post by UrbanVoyeur » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:15 pm

One more thing I forgot:

To increase air flow I cut away the extraneous aluminum grill bars on the *inside* of the Lian-Li's which were in front of the fan. No impact on structural integrity. Does not change the outside appearance at all.

Made a significant increase in air flow and an audible turbulence noise reduction.

I also soft mounted the fans with rubber vibration isolators. I can't remember if it ships with plastic mounts or not.

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Post by Cerb » Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:24 pm

What tests would you guys want with no added equipment, should I get a few hours alone with the Supermicro 5in3?

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Post by UrbanVoyeur » Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:35 pm

Smart temps from the drives with stock fan and with a quiet (nexus, scythe)

- 12v, 7v, 5v
- no fan
- 1 hr after start
- heavy seek
- drives in AAM 128

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Post by Cerb » Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:23 pm

What would offer repeatable heavy seeking for at least minutes at a time?

I think AAM is out of the question, given Seagates. Correct?

I should be able to use a Nexus, Panaflo L (old good Japanese one), and Coolermaster (link).

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Post by EsaT » Sat Feb 24, 2007 1:39 am

Cerb wrote:What would offer repeatable heavy seeking for at least minutes at a time?
Defrag?

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Post by Cerb » Sat Feb 24, 2007 2:48 am

There isn't going to be much to defrag on a brand new install, or no install. Defragging is also a one-shot deal, not an easy way to provide a repeatable load. HDTach might do the trick, though.

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Post by matt_garman » Sat Feb 24, 2007 9:48 am

Cerb wrote:There isn't going to be much to defrag on a brand new install, or no install. Defragging is also a one-shot deal, not an easy way to provide a repeatable load. HDTach might do the trick, though.
If you use Linux, there's a program called "bonnie++" intended for hard drive benchmarking. It runs through a battery of tests, and so ought to be able to push drives to their maximum temperature.

Another idea is to constantly install/uninstall/re-install several big software packages... like an operating system. E.g., you could use the free vmware server to create a virtual machine on your PC, then install Windows or Linux or whatever to your virtual machine. That would definately give your hard drive(s) quite a workout.

-Matt

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Post by gb115b » Mon Feb 26, 2007 7:03 am

if you need hotswap capabilites its a real pain... the best solution i found was to buy a chenbro server case.

i think its model is sr107, it only has 120mm fans (2 120 mm fans at the front to cool the 2*4 hot swap drive enclosures...) once i swapped the screamers for pabst fans, it's pretty quiet, though 8 drives is a fair amount of heat and the drives aren't really cool (45C under load)

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Post by Nick Geraedts » Tue Feb 27, 2007 12:11 am

I've got the Stacker here at home, and it's got enough space for lots of drives, even without the 4-in-3 adaptor.

The only major alteration I made was to stick a circular piece of cardboard in the side vent. This forces all the air to enter from the front of the case, over the hard drives, and then out the rear. I've got 4 drives in there (see sig), and the highest I've seen any of them is 42C (the 200GB Seagate) last summer (it was 25C in the room).

I don't have the 4-in-3 right here to take a picture of, but I did toy with the notion of using it for the 4 drives and putting a Nexus on there. It does help cool things down, but the vibrations from the drives becomes quite loud. I've moved back to suspension and the passive airflow and have never had a problem since.

For what you're looking to do, the Stacker would be a good choice. Just a word of warning - the front is a mesh panel, so it doesn't completely block sounds. Then again, the hard drives I've got in that machine are the loudest thing in this room. I haven't taken a sound meter to this place, but when you move, your clothes make more noise than the two computers here.

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Raising from the dead!

Post by Cerb » Fri Jun 08, 2007 7:25 pm

I came across a piece of cabling for the Supermicro 5x3 hotswap cage (Newegg link), and thought about this thread. A couple months ago, I didn't get the time to do any rigorous testing with it, so no great temperature tables or anything. But, here's my impression:

1. It's built very well. While not geared towards silence, you see where they $100+ cost is going. The rails can double as heatsinks (they are just extruded bars), the unused slots have dummies (which can double as screw trays once you take them out), It's all built very solidly, and there's ample room for air intake, with holes in and around the rear PCB. The placement of the connectors also makes for very easy cable management.

2. The default fan is insane. Not only is it pretty loud even by normal standards, but it's quite torquey. I could not slow it down with my hand.

3. But, it can easily be removed, and another 92mm put in. Not only that, but the fan duct, covered by plastic to guard your fingers, can be modified or removed easily. It's made of somewhat soft, flexible plastic that should be easy to file and/or dremel.

4. Not having any good 92mm fans handy, I checked with a Top Motor and a Sunon I had spare from some older Micron boxes. The Top Motor is slow, and varies by temperature. The Sunon is slow, but constant, and I'd wager the Top Motor to be around 15-20CFM (you can actually see the blades as it spins), the Sunon 35 or so (guestimates, based on other fans with trusted rating). Both kept air moving over the HDDs. It was obvious even with dry fingers in front of the installed enclosure.

Especially if you're using small drives like Seagates (FYI, their newer drives are not the full 1" height of others), cooling the drives will not be a problem with this enclosure, and custom ducting should be a breeze. For silencing, the real concern would be that the drives are hard-mounted, and that the vibration is quite audible.

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Post by Wibla » Fri Jun 08, 2007 9:54 pm

The Coolermaster 4in3 is pretty good actually, but I miss better vibration reduction. The fans are audible above 9V, but not annoying even at full speed.
I have 8x500GB Samsung 500GB's in a stacker, and the drives idle at around 28-31C with ambient temp 20-23C.
With ambient temp soaring up in high 20's I'm seeing temps from 31 to 37C

As usual with Seagate drives, I see about 4-5C higher temps across the board compared to Samsung.

Image
Here's the last few weeks, you can see the increase of temps after the summer (finally) arrived - with 25-28C ambient.

During the last two weeks, I've lost two harddrives, both seagate, one 160GB 7200.7 SATA and one 250GB 7200.8 SATA (refurbished)... both have been running under actively cooled conditions - around 30-35C normal operating temps..

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Re: Raising from the dead!

Post by matt_garman » Mon Nov 19, 2007 9:05 am

Cerb wrote:I came across a piece of cabling for the Supermicro 5x3 hotswap cage (Newegg link), and thought about this thread. A couple months ago, I didn't get the time to do any rigorous testing with it, so no great temperature tables or anything. But, here's my impression:

1. It's built very well. While not geared towards silence, you see where they $100+ cost is going. The rails can double as heatsinks (they are just extruded bars), the unused slots have dummies (which can double as screw trays once you take them out), It's all built very solidly, and there's ample room for air intake, with holes in and around the rear PCB. The placement of the connectors also makes for very easy cable management.

2. The default fan is insane. Not only is it pretty loud even by normal standards, but it's quite torquey. I could not slow it down with my hand.

3. But, it can easily be removed, and another 92mm put in. Not only that, but the fan duct, covered by plastic to guard your fingers, can be modified or removed easily. It's made of somewhat soft, flexible plastic that should be easy to file and/or dremel.

4. Not having any good 92mm fans handy, I checked with a Top Motor and a Sunon I had spare from some older Micron boxes. The Top Motor is slow, and varies by temperature. The Sunon is slow, but constant, and I'd wager the Top Motor to be around 15-20CFM (you can actually see the blades as it spins), the Sunon 35 or so (guestimates, based on other fans with trusted rating). Both kept air moving over the HDDs. It was obvious even with dry fingers in front of the installed enclosure.

Especially if you're using small drives like Seagates (FYI, their newer drives are not the full 1" height of others), cooling the drives will not be a problem with this enclosure, and custom ducting should be a breeze. For silencing, the real concern would be that the drives are hard-mounted, and that the vibration is quite audible.
Have you done any more testing (or had any other experience) with this Supermicro 5-in-3 hotswap backplane since this post?

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My Experience with Lian-Li EX-34 Racks

Post by fri2219 » Mon Nov 19, 2007 11:32 am

I'm using the EX-34's in a PC-A16, which I'm using for the sake of airflow, not silence. I'm also using Seagate ES series drives, for the sake of reliability, not silence. Overall, my setup does a good job at keeping the drives cool. (12 drives in 3 racks ~ 32C.), but silence is probably the last thing I'd associate with how I'm using them.

From a silence standpoint, the mounting scheme doesn't help much, since drive vibration resonates in the case. The rubber grommets do make mounting ridiculously easy, however.

The stock 120mm fan is loud for how little air it moves, but is easy enough to replace- I finally wound up using medium speed Panflo fans- chosen for CFM, not silence. I'll probably try out the latest Scythe high CFM fans sometime in the next few months.

I think they're wildly overpriced, but they seem like they'll hold up much better than a plastic internal enclosure, and aren't quite as ridiculously priced as the ones from SuperMicro or Silverstone.

I have no idea whose product fits in whose cases, so take that into consideration, too. I know some of the reviews I've seen online have mentioned it as an issue.

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Post by matt_garman » Wed Nov 21, 2007 8:55 am

Well, I bit the bullet and ordered one of the SuperMicro 5-in-3 hotswap SATA backplanes. Worst case, I'll eat the 15% newegg restocking fee if it's too loud. What I like though is that it has a 92mm fan. Most of those hotswap backplanes have an 80mm or smaller fan. So I'm sure the stock fan will be loud, but we'll see what can be done with quieter fans.

One of the newegg reviews talked about how the design leaks/short circuits air. But as far as I can tell, that situation should be easily remedied with some tape.

I spent a lot of time looking at all the server chassis available on newegg. I really like the Supermicro CSE-932T-R760B. I can only judge by the pictures, and newegg seems to have the best, but it looks to me like there's a good "seal" between the four 92mm fans and the hard drive compartment. So my thought is that you could probably put in slower fans and still have acceptable drive temps. But the price!

But I also found the hec/compucase RA466A00. It's even cheaper on directron.com. But anyway, it looks fairly versatile: you could probably suspend nine 3.5" hard drives in those nine 5.25" bays. With the drives spaced that far apart and those 3 120mm fans (and probably some tape to ensure the desired air flow path), I think a reasonably quiet file server is possible. Reading on hec/compucase's website, they seem to suggest that some casters are available, so you could use that case as a standard tower.

And if the Supermicro 5-in-3 hotswap backplane turns out to be practical, you could load three of them up in that hec case, and still have 15 SATA hotswap bays at a fraction of the price of the Supermicro.

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Post by matt_garman » Wed Nov 28, 2007 8:41 am

matt_garman wrote:Well, I bit the bullet and ordered one of the SuperMicro 5-in-3 hotswap SATA backplanes. Worst case, I'll eat the 15% newegg restocking fee if it's too loud. What I like though is that it has a 92mm fan. Most of those hotswap backplanes have an 80mm or smaller fan. So I'm sure the stock fan will be loud, but we'll see what can be done with quieter fans.

One of the newegg reviews talked about how the design leaks/short circuits air. But as far as I can tell, that situation should be easily remedied with some tape.
I received the SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-in-3 hotwswap backplane last night. So far, the results are surprisingly encouraging.

First thing I did was to remove the stock 92mm fan, a Sanyo Denki "Mini Ace" 109P0912H201. Specs say 55 CFM at 36 DBA. I plugged it in just to see how loud it was---quite loud, and an annoying tone to boot.

I replaced the fan with a Delta AFB0912L Rev. A, which is specified as 37 CFM at 25 DBA. It's actually a fairly quiet fan; not silent, but probably could be with some undervolting. But, for this experiment, I'm not going for silent, just reasonably quiet. (I'd go so far as to say this fan is "virtually" silent at full voltage, given the ambient noise of my apartment.)

I put in four Western Digital RE2 400 GB (wd400yr) drives in the top four slots. This enclosure supports five drives. I thought the top four would be the hottest, since the fan is aligned against the bottom of the cage; also, heat rises.

I haven't done any taping yet. I didn't mount the enclosure in a case; I just let it sit on the floor. With only four drives, and the slower/quieter fan, my drives have been running at 34 to 36 degrees Celsius. Note that I'm achieving those temperatures while rebuilding the RAID5 array and also running bonnie++ (a Linux hard drive benchmarking tool).

I don't have a spare SATA hard drive, or I'd throw in a fifth drive. But at least with four drives, this enclosure looks promising. I believe I could lower temps another degree or two with some taping and cutting. (I didn't want to do anything too invasive until I was sure I wanted to keep it.)

I'll keep testing, and eventually post some graphs of the drive temps. Given the performance I've seen of this so far, I think I'm going to buy another and stick them both in that hec/Compucase RA466A00 I mentioned above.

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Post by Trekmeister » Wed Nov 28, 2007 9:07 am

Have you tested how well it handles hot-swapping? I think I read somewhere about someone having problem with swapping SATA-drives in that the computer rebooted or something.

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Post by matt_garman » Wed Nov 28, 2007 9:21 am

Trekmeister wrote:Have you tested how well it handles hot-swapping? I think I read somewhere about someone having problem with swapping SATA-drives in that the computer rebooted or something.
No, I haven't tested that. I believe that would depend on the hardware controller and whether or not the driver and operating system support it. Although I suppose faulty wiring in the backplane could cause problems as well.

I'm actually not interested in hot-swap capability. What I really want is an easy to way to replace drives when necessary. With many drives crammed into a case, it becomes a pain to replace one, with all the cabling mess and everything else. To be honest, I really don't change drives all that often... but there's something to be said for the knowledge that, when I have to, it will be easy. I know, that's kind of a stretch, but I'm just nuts like that. But, with a hot swap back plane in place, you set up all the fans and wiring once, then it becomes a trivial matter to change drives without worrying about disrupting your cabling integrity or air flow scheme or killing another component with static electricity or anything else that can go wrong in a cramped case. I guess it comes down to convenience.

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Post by Wibla » Thu Nov 29, 2007 1:50 am

The 4in3 coolermaster racks are fine, if you dont want to swap out drives often... been removing failed drives and adding in new drives lately, and its a bloody pain.

I want a 4in3 hotswap with decent airflow/low noise, but I guess that is too much to ask for..

Image
Thats how much space there is between each drive in the coolermaster 4in3's, not alot, but definently enough for my samsung drives.

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Post by matt_garman » Thu Nov 29, 2007 7:43 am

Wibla wrote:The 4in3 coolermaster racks are fine, if you dont want to swap out drives often... been removing failed drives and adding in new drives lately, and its a bloody pain.

I want a 4in3 hotswap with decent airflow/low noise, but I guess that is too much to ask for.
I think the time and money I've spent just researching the possibilities of a cool and quiet hot swap file server are much greater than the time it would take me to actually swap out drives in a "normal" configuration! But it's fun.

You might want to give this SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-in-3 hot swap backplane a try. (Newegg link, Manufacturer link) These enclosures should definitely fit in your Stacker. Someone else has already done it (note that's a link to "Galaxy 4" but there's a picture of and links to "Galaxy 3" with four of these Supermicro 5-in-3 units in a CM Stacker).
Wibla wrote:Thats how much space there is between each drive in the coolermaster 4in3's, not alot, but definently enough for my samsung drives.
That's a good illustrative picture. I think the temps you've posted in the past support the idea that there is enough space between drives in the Coolermaster 4-in-3 units. What doesn't make sense to me though is this: there's extra, unused room at the top of the enclosure---why couldn't they have distributed that extra space more evenly among all drives?

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Re: Raising from the dead!

Post by Cerb » Thu Nov 29, 2007 8:01 am

matt_garman wrote: Have you done any more testing (or had any other experience) with this Supermicro 5-in-3 hotswap backplane since this post?
No, it's been in a file nice loud server far, far away :).

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Post by matt_garman » Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:53 am

Quick update... I added a couple small pieces of tape to the enclosure, and it appears to have shaved a degree or two from the drives' temperatures.

I also increased the temperature in my apartment to about 80 degrees F (approx 26--27 degrees C). I'm also running a constant stream of bonnie++ benchmarks, and the drives are staying in the 33 to 36 degree Celsius range.

At this point, I feel the only variable I haven't addressed is the absence of a fifth drive. But I don't have a spare SATA drive laying around to test with.

But for now, I'm quite pleased with the results. Also, I encourage people in need of a 92mm fan to take a look at the Delta AFB0912L Rev. A. I know Delta's not known for quiet fans, but this was is pretty quiet. Tonally, it's pretty good IMO.

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