What to do when the Chieftec is not big enough anymore.

[Chu]

Hello all. I am currently putting together a system, and the rebadged Chieftek case that everyone and their mother (including me) has just isn't big enough, since I need more then 6 3.5 inc slots, and all my 5.25 slots are occupied. My question is, without spending $200+ for a bigger case, what are my options? The one feature that I really need from the Chieftek design is some active cooling for all the hard drives (6-10 hard drives w/o tons of cooling turns your case into an oven), but that seems to be the one feature that sends the price into the stratosphere.

-Chu

 

[Mday]

it looks like you're going to need a server case in full tower or cube form.

 

[Jhhnn]

When headed in the direction you're going, there's a point where you need to decide whether to just build another computer and use a KVM, or break down and buy something like this-

http://servercase.com/cgi-bin/miva.cgi?/Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SC&Product_Code=YY0221B&Category_Code=ALS

There's also room on the mobo side to mount a couple of drive cages from www.addtronics.com. Click "order" at the top of the page, the "addtronics parts" from the displayed list, then down the list...

 

[mechBgon]

Also have a look at the next-larger Chieftec tower: one example at Directron and an inside view. Note that both 3.5" cages have fan holders and are dedicated to internal drives... the two external 3.5 bays are in a slide-in tray above those. Also note the 92mm exhaust above the PSU, nice for keeping the upper deck cooled off.

This case would be at its best with SCSI drives since the upper 5.25" bays are so far from the mobo that a standard IDE cable won't be long enough. With optical drives I suppose you could get away with 36" IDE cables if you're lucky. Something to think about, I guess.

 

[Chu]

Thanks for the links. That $150 xeon case looks pretty nice. Basically, this case is to set up a huge IDE Raid cluster with some old harddrives, think 60-80mb x 10-15. The hard drives are essentially free (long story), so all the cost would be in the case and controllers. About the two computer option though, considering how saturated the PCI bus is going to get, splitting it up into two arrays does seem like a tempting option, unless we can find a really good deal on 64bit PCI controllers an a motherboard, but somehow that seems doubtful.

-Chu