About a couple of weeks ago one of the drives in my RAID array failed. I managed to find a similar drive to replace it on eBay, though not the exact same model of drive. From my research, so long as the drive is the exact same size (or larger) and same speed (RPM) then it should work fine.
I posted on this blog previously (Why did I do this?! (RAID)) about how I'd fitted the drives into my case (Corsair Air 540). When the replacement drive arrived last week I noticed that the drive temperatures being reported in the RAID console were around 50°C on the drives. And when I took the 'drive cage' out of the case they were indeed pretty hot.
My 'drive cage' (top right) in the rear of the Corsair Air 540 case
Although they had a fan in front of them and two behind them (push - pull configuration) this obviously wasn't enough. I suspect it's that there's not really anywhere in this half of the case for the fans to pull air in from. The front fan is on the rear of a backplane, so most of it is covered by the backplane circuit board, and then the backplane just has a few small holes in the front drive bay doors for air to get pulled through. (I don't normally have any drives in the backplane, so it's not also dealing with having to pull the air past hot drives before it even gets to the drives in my 'drive cage').
All 3 fans cooling the drives were also quite small, around 80 - 90mm. So when I swapped out the dead drive I temporarily ran the drives outside of the case with a couple of spare 140mm fans to keep them nice and cool. This actually worked pretty well.
But it's not really a permanent solution. I managed to procure an old 5U Server case from work, this can be used in rack or tower configuration and is made by PCI Case. In terms of total volume (space) it's probably around the same size as the Air 540. But it's longer and shorter. With a bit of modding, this allows mounting drives at the front of the case with 140mm fans in a push pull configuration in front of and behind them to keep them cool.
Everything else fits in nicely, though I had to swap my Quadro and RAID card slots. While I can't remember off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure the lowest PCI-e slot is faster than the middle slot, so it's a bit annoying to have to swap the cards over. But the bottom slot is right next to the bottom of the case, so the graphics card's fan wouldn't be able to pull in air very well if positioned in the bottom slot.
There's no provision for cable management on the case, so it's a case of zip-tying everything. It took me ages to get the cables looking reasonable, it was a right mess before!
The front 4 fans and the fan on the rear of the backplane I put into a fan splitter. After now having used the machine for a bit, I want to swap a couple of the fans. The pull fan behind the hard drives (on the right) is a Noctua Industrial fan, which I thought would be good placed there because it's so powerful. However, it can be quite noisy, and since it is on the fan hub, it's on the same PWM signal as the other front fans. So I intend to swap that with the rear case fan.
The push fan in front of the hard drives (not visible in the pic above) is a Corsair 3 pin fan. So that's also a bit noisy. I had to use this fan here as the Noctua fans with their square design won't fit in the same position as they block a peg on the front panel. I intend on getting a circular Noctua fan (speed and airflow specs look to be the same as the other fans I'm using, which are NF-AF14 PWM models). Just need something else to buy from Amazon so I can meet the £20 free postage limit. I guess I could get 2 of the circular fans to give a consistent look at the front of the case but I don't care too much how it looks.
The case only has one 3.5″ bay, the rest is all 5.25″ bays. I 'borrowed' a load of adapters from work, which I think are actually meant for floppy drives, but they worked for mounting the hard drives. It gives a lot more space between each drive than they had previously in the DIY 'drive cage'. For the RAID drives I mounted one in the 3.5″ slot, then 3 in the 3 5.25″ bays above that.
In the middle of the case is my backplane, which takes up 2 5.25″ bays. Then there's another single mechanical drive (connected to the motherboard SATA) below that. In the bay below that are 2 2.5″ SATA SSDs, each screwed in just at one edge of the bay. Then the area below that is empty.
You can also see in the above pic one of the smaller fans (that was previously cooling the hard drives in my old case) resting on the rear left corner of the case. This is screwed into side panel to pull in air towards the graphics cards. There aren't actually any mounting holes for the fan, but like in the previous case you can just screw it through the ventilation holes in the panel.
The rear fan I had to drill new mounting holes for as the mounting holes are for a smaller 120mm fan. The fan the case comes with is molex powered, no PWM. The ventilation holes just about cover the area of the 140mm fan though, and since 140mm fans are what I have, it made sense to make it so I could mount a 140mm fan there.
Drilling the holes took absolutely ages. I had also put my motherboard in before I remembered about drilling the holes, so I then had to take it out again (don't really want metal shavings on the motherboard). I also had to take out my motherboard again a 2nd time later - when I had the PC all ready to boot, I was plugging everything in and noticed one of the annoying bendy pieces of metal on the IO shield above a USB port had got bent down and gone inside the USB port. Very annoying and time consuming.
The only other thing to talk about from the pic above is the mounting method for the push pull fans in front of and behind the 5.25″ bays. Currently the front fans aren't secured, but once I've got the fans sorted properly I will cable tie them in place (there's no other way of attaching them).
The fans behind the drives are cable tied onto what I believe are some more 3.5 - 5.25″ bay adapters. They are only attached to the 'top' adapter. The top adapters are then attached to the 'top' of the case with twist ties. This allows undoing them relatively easily, so you can take the adapter off (with fan attached) for access to the drives hidden behind it. I had to drill an extra hole in each of these adapters to allow cable tying the fans to them at the wanted position. Again, this took ages as the metal is relatively thick and I don't have any specialist metal drilling equipment.
The same adapters are used 'below' (in rack mount configuration) each fan. These adapters are cable tied to the case, but the fan is not cable tied to the adapters. They just give a point for the fan to rest against. The adapters provide just enough extra distance for the fan to work without hitting the hard drive power and SATA cables. The bottom adapters are also used for routing cables through.
The above is a general top-down view of the interior of the case. I decided to go for 2 PCI-e 8 pin power cables to the graphics card, not sure if it'll make any difference from having a single cable plugged into both 8 pin sockets as I had before, but it can't really be worse.
This pic shows the fans behind the 5.25″ bays and the rear of the backplane in the center. Trying to manage all those SATA cables was quite tricky. The USB from the backplane doesn't actually go anywhere at the moment - it's not long enough to reach the USB headers on the motherboard, so I need to get an extension for it.
The BBU for the RAID card I just stuck to the case using some double-sided tape.
Looking at the front of the case you might spot a problem - no I/O. I may try and get a front IO panel that fits in the 3.5″ bay slot, but I'm 95% sure there isn't enough space for that due to the hard drive that is mounted in that slot behind the cover. The case does have 2 USB2 ports on the side (top in rack mount). But no headphone jack. So I've had to get out my M-Audio M-Track 2x2M audio interface for audio (this plugs into the PC via USB). I also have 2 USB3 hubs on my desk with the wires connected back to the rear of the PC.
The case does come with 5.25″ bay covers that are slotted / slatted with holes. They would fit in front of the fans okay, but they are more plastic than they are hole. Similarly, there is a front door for the PC with strips cut across it, but again it is more plastic than hole. So I prefer to leave both off for maximum airflow. When my sister's kids come over I can put the door on and lock it so they don't stick stuff into the fans. They only watch Peppa Pig on youtube anyway, so it's not like it should be needing lots of air when they're using it.
Another annoying thing that happened when I was putting the PC together in the 'new' case is that one of the SATA connectors (plastic bit) on a hard drive broke off. I've never had that before. I superglued the connector back on, though the pins don't sit flush against it. I managed to get the cable plugged back on though.
Ideally I'd like to get the Fractal Design Define 7 XL case that was recently released and a lot of youtubers have been giving positive reviews. It's by no means the perfect case for me, but it's probably the nearest to what I'm looking for that's available. Unfortunately it's pretty expensive, and as it's only just released you can't get a used one cheaper. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to do a completely new PC build using that case, but obviously a new PC will be pretty expensive. So I'll just manage with what I've got for the time being.
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