PC Enthusiast Builds 70TB Loaded PC with 40 Fans

Published on 10-25-2010 06:53 PM

Better too much storage space than not enough?
You might have a couple of terabyte drives at home to store all of the media you've accumulated over the years, but you probably don't know many people who have a home computer packing 70 terabytes of storage.
English Russia has a post up about a Russian PC enthusiast who decided to upgrade his storage so he would have room for all of his movies. He now has room for 70,000 movies (more if they're lower than DVD quality), or about 24 million songs. Of course, with that many hard drives in one place, you're going to need some serious cooling. Gizmodo reports that to cool the 60 hard drives (adding up to a massive 70TB of storage) housed inside a homemade wooden cabinet, this guy installed a total of 40 fans.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Categories:
Hardware

12 Comments

brilman - 10-25-2010, 08:52 PM
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Why so many small fans? Think it would be cheaper to have just a few

tesco - 10-25-2010, 09:08 PM
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Originally Posted by brilman

Why so many small fans? Think it would be cheaper to have just a few

One large fan would be cheaper, quieter (run at a really small RPM), and all around more efficient (cost efficiency, power efficiency, airflow efficiency).

lordgamar - 10-25-2010, 10:34 PM
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Window fan would've done the trick. One blowing in and other out.

duke0102 - 10-26-2010, 08:37 AM
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If he's sticking with the open top style do you really think one giant fan would be safe? But I guess that's what mesh is for lol
Because there's that ridge at the bottom is there an real air flow to the hard drives anyway?

TheFoX - 10-26-2010, 10:22 AM
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Raise the drives off the floor by about a foot or two, then have a normal fan directing air to the base of the unit. Since heat rises, and air is being forced from below, the units should keep quite cool.

Another option would be to have greater spacing between each unit, allowing natural airflow, as a single hard drive does not normally need cooling. In addition, drives usually have power saving options, so that when they are not being used, they go into a sleep mode, using less power and generating less heat.

unclemilty74 - 10-26-2010, 01:00 PM
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it doesn't really sound like this guy is concerned about the efficiency of the system - i mean, 60 drives and ONLY 70 TB of storage? Unless he's got these running multiple RAID configurations, which it doesn't appear or mention, then he could have easily done the same storage for a lot less hardware.

bobbintb - 10-26-2010, 04:52 PM
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whoopie.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01...cloud-storage/

Cabalo - 10-26-2010, 04:58 PM
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The noise... can you imagine?

darkstate01 - 10-27-2010, 12:21 AM
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This is hideous and pointless, unless he has a business of people using all these files (films/music) why not just hotplug the drive you want when you need it?

If a drive becomes full or you just want to keep a daily record of what you put on your drives, use a script called GetDirListing.bat
http://renegademinds.com/TipsTricks/...6/Default.aspx

Then to scan the output of that file, use a program called "prgrep"
http://www.prgrep.com/?lng=en
Then you don't have to waste money on electric bills running all those damn drives.
If its a raid array setup, that's just overkill.

godofhell - 10-27-2010, 03:23 PM
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Stupid.

TheFoX - 10-29-2010, 11:08 AM
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I bet those drives are of all different sizes, ranging from big gigabytes right down to megabyte versions.

For large storage options, he should consider a CD or DVD jukebox setup.

Xbox_360 - 11-17-2010, 06:22 AM
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Wow not only stupid it's just plain ugly. There is two computers, there's two motherboards in there with about 30 hard drives going to each computer. Would have been more efficient to buy 35 2Tb hard drives would have saved on space, heat, and power usage. I wonder if you detached the fans from the worlds ugliest pc case if they would hover at full speed.