SilverStone DS380 Enclosure

400W PSU, 16 GB ECC RAM

It's a very nicely built case

Dimpled fans for low noise

Hot-swap backplane

8x 3.5" hot-swap drive caddies

4x 2.5" internal drive cage

Small but well-laid-out internals

ASRock Rack C2550D4I motherboard

ASRock Rack C2550D4I motherboard

Installing the RAM

Installing drive cage

Drive cage installed

Mounting drives in caddies

Installing the 8 drives

All buttoned up

Mounting the 2x mirrored 2.5" drives (home dirs, logs, etc)

2.5" drive cage installed

The OS will live on my beloved Hello Kitty flash drive

Good job, Hello Kitty flash drive

I get silly and start thinking about turning an old PC case into an external eSATA enclosure for more HDs

eSATA -> SATA adapter

Sticking 4x old drives in the external enclosure

Shorting the PSU so it will run without a motherboard

The external enclosure

The motheboard isn't connected, it's just there from the PC's former life

The external enclosure installed and connected

This external enclosure setup didn't work reliably and so was retired

Upgrading the first of the 3TB drives to 6TB

Cooling was an issue

Drives should be kept below 40C for longevity, but with the stock fans, they were climbing to 47C under load. This was the temporary solution - I took the fan meant to cool the whole rack and placed it right on the case. It certainly worked

Permanent solution

3x SilverStone FM121 fans. 110CFM each

New fans installed

They were loud, but the drives sat at 34C

Stepping up - SuperMicro 4U rackmount enclosure

A used SuperMicro 846E16-R1200B from eBay

With 24-bay SAS2 backplane

Dual redundant 1200W power supplies

SuperMicro X10SL7-F motherboard

Motherboard installed

Intel G3258 Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPI

CPU Installed

CPU cooler installed

SSD drive for OS

SSD drive installed

2x SAS2->SATA backplane cables installed

SAS2->SATA cables connected to motherboard

All wired up. So much room for activities!