[Project] Tower of Power

Well, I have been living without true redundancy for too long. Sure, my backup system has redundancy... but what if i just don't have time to go through the hassle of restoring? I wanted true RAID redundancy. And a lot of storage space. So i went pretty hog wild on the zip zoom fly 1TB Caviar black sale. This was awaiting me as I returned home from work today:



A sight to behold, trust me. When I cracked it open, I think a tear welled up in my eye. LOL.

Anyway, back to redundancy... The idea of losing a full drive to RAID1 for every drive you have was a little too much. And onboard RAID5 was so slow, it took hours just to copy a few of my files. A hardware solution was necessary.

So I have a MountainMods U2 UFO. Plenty of space. The original has a nice little hard drive tower. And by little, I mean gigantic. In total, it has 9 spaces for drives. So I thought, this is great. I can fit 8 drives in there as storage on a hardware RAID 5 card and then have one slot left over for my system drive.



I dub thee Tower of Power!

But wait. Where do my original 5 drives go in this situation? I mean, i cant let them go to waste. They are perfectly good 750 GB drives and could even be set up as a RAID0 on the onboard card for some really fast scratch disk space for DV editing and real time effects, which is mainly what I am concerned about right now. Plus I can never let good hardware go to waste. So I saw the CTO Ascension on MountainMods website and was looking at it, and realized... hey, it doesnt have the 9 bay hard drive tower... you just get those mounting brackets to attach 3 hard drives to a 120mm fan anywhere on the system. And they of course sell those plates separately. Lucky me.



So i was looking at the 80mm exhaust fans I had and they had a paltry 15cfm output. So I threw a few silenx 80mm fans in the back. Now before you start going and bashing me for getting silenx fans, just know that they are quiet and they move more air than my previous ones. That's all that matters to me. They could be made from fecal matter for all I care, if they move air and dont make noise then I am all good.



So the other side of the case needed some love too, and I kinda liked the idea of the cooler master V10, but didn't like the fact it was all integrated and covered up the RAM slots... so I just threw a scythe slipstream on the V8 and had it point at the RAM and NB area. Nice cooling and it also pushes some air diagonally through the V8's fins. Here you can also see the PERC 6/i Hardware RAID card and the other 2 750Gb HD's on the top fan. Heat rises, so i figured the best place was on the topmost of the 3 intake fans.



And finally, a little bit of labelling to make sure I know which drive is on which port and at which cable. This way if a drive goes bad I can isloate it quickly, remove it and replace with a spare or advance RMA.



And there you have it. The Tower of Power!



And... yeah. Cable management is a mess, but theres so many wires its just a nightmare. I dont really even have any plans to fix it, because I am lazy and honestly when people see my computer they already think im a whacko, so a neatly organized case isnt really even my modus operandi. I am lucky to have the U2 UFO as a platform though because it is so large that airflow is not an issue.

Hope you guys enjoy the pics and the writeup! I am really happy how it all turned out.
Edited by DJZeratul - 3/28/09 at 5:14am

I thought it was appropriate, for the duality of the statement alone... super fast RAID5, and also it now consumes about 150 watts more than it used to.

Oh, no... The Hardware RAID card was separate.

I decided to go with the PERC 6/i Hardware RAID. OCN member borito4 had a really good deal on them in the for sale thread, and I learned about them here on OCN, via DuckieHo's post. The thread is the benchmark link in my sig (just click through and hit page one, and youll see what I mean).

Basically its a hardware RAID card for the Dell PowerEdge servers, but you can modify it with a regular PCI bracket because the interface is PCI-E x8. It requires forced air to cool it off, but thats easy enough with a 40mm fan or aftermarket northbridge heat sink. It fits in any regular motherboard as well, but some hardware combinations are kind of glitchy (DuckieHo has informed me that hes having issues with the 6/i on a 790i reference board, and it has issues which are easily correctable with previous intel chipsets). Drivers for all flavors of windows and linux, plus really good speeds for really cheap if you can get them secondhand or from ebay.

The rack weighs 24 ounces unloaded, 28 pounds loaded. Holding it up with my left hand while screwing it in to the case from the back proved to be quite tiring because of the awkwardness of the thing (awkward shape, and as you can see by my skinny wrists in the 2nd to last picture, I am a skinny nerd by definition)

My case now weighs about 75 pounds total. This is definitely NOT a LAN party rig