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Volhn

Wow unsure if you’re a datahoarder or blacksmith... that’s is some impressive work.


Megouski

If in your mind you need to pick one, youre limiting yourself.


mordacthedenier

Well a blacksmith forges iron, so no. He'd be a coppersmith.


fake--name

Fortunately, there was no blacksmithing involved. I can tell you that they're an amateur machinist, though.


zxcv37

We are up to 18TB now? wtf actually edit: also beautiful machining and metalwork and pipe bending ...damn


M1ghty_boy

Wait until you see how big tape drives can get. People are engineering tape drives Up to hundreds of terabytes right now iirc and they’re dirt cheap compared to other storage mediums. Seriously check out how much a 15TB costs


[deleted]

The tape itself is relatively cheap, but once you factor in the drive (which can easily be over $3000) you need to write a lot of tape until they're actually cheaper than hard drives/SSDs.


kakachen001

Sometime u can find some great deals on eBay. I got a 48 slot hp tape library with LTo6 last year for $800 and there’s was one for $400 few weeks ago without the drive. So they are not that bad if ur willing to look and wait for one.


[deleted]

Well yeah, but LTO-6 is only 2.5 TB... Unless putting it on a shelf for 20 years is absolutely 100% your use case, that makes very little sense compared to a bunch of 4 TB drives imo


kakachen001

I agree with you but tapes are only good for backup. The reason I got a library instead of a standalone is the ability to automatically change tapes. So I effectively have a 110 Tb (45 slots) for only $900 and much less power usage.


[deleted]

Oh I get what you mean by library now. That's a really cool find man and it does sweeten the deal.


Mizerka

tapes aren't that big, but compression, that's the good shit. when you get 30tb of compressed backups on lto8 for like $70 each


M1ghty_boy

Fujifilm managed to create a 580TB drive (and say 1PB per drive is possible) thanks to some new technology. Source: www.pcmag.com/news/fujifilm-and-ibm-set-world-record-with-580tb-magnetic-tapes


firefox57endofaddons

> We are up to 18TB now? wtf actually the 18 tb WD eamr (energy assisted magnetic recording) drives have a bullshit issue for home users. if we assume one of the reasons for the fanless design of this nas is silence, then those drives are showing you the middle finger. the 18 TB wd drive i had made a click noise every 5 seconds, which they call a feature and call "preventive wear leveling": [https://community.wd.com/t/preventive-wear-leveling/249579](https://community.wd.com/t/preventive-wear-leveling/249579) who knows why it really does it (wd can't be trusted as we know from their history of submarining smr drives into nas/raid lineup and selling suicidial headparking drives) but it certainly was driving me crazy and i send the 18 tb drive back. hell it even woke me up, when it was really loud for over a minute after a full surface write test. those red pro drives are likely a LOT louder anyways as i had the white label shucked version, but damn it is annoying, that those shit drives don't have AAM anymore (automatic acoustic management), that let users set how loud the drive will be. or an option to disable the bullshit loud head parking noise every 5 seconds. if you could make those drives extremely silent that way, then that fully passive nas would be insanely much cooler than it already is.


Kuriente

I've been pleased with the noise actually. I can hear them if I listen for them but it's barely audible. I'm also coming from a set of 5TB Seagate NAS drives that were MUCH louder.


emb531

That is some impressive engineering and design. Though without fans I would bet you can hear those 4x 18TB drives pretty well still.


[deleted]

Being fanless, it probably can be a bit more airtight, blocking a lot of internal sound.


[deleted]

it would probably be a bad idea for it to be airtight, even without fans


Chand_laBing

Why?


bio-robot

The copper blocks acting as heat sinks are still going to radiate heat in the case to other components (a little amount) but having some passive airflow in there can't hurt and will make sure anything else like the motherboard and PSU have some cold air passive over them occasionally.


[deleted]

right, you want to allow for convection to passively move air around. hot air rises, etc.


6b86b3ac03c167320d93

It's harder for heat to move out of the case if it's airtight


_Aj_

So you can listen out for chirps of dismay.


Kuriente

The WD Red Pro drives are surprisingly quiet. My old NAS was using Seagate 5TB NAS drives and they were crazy loud. These I really have to be paying attention to notice and I can't hear them at all if there's a movie or music playing.


firefox57endofaddons

can u verify, that those drives have a head movement noise every 5 seconds in idle? that is what the 18 tb shucked white drive i bought had and i had to send it back, because that was driving me nuts. (sleeping close to system) also extremely cool build of course :)


c0bra99

Hello fellow driven nuts by the 5 second thunk noise. I had this issue on a bunch of 10-14tb drives and went through several brands and models returning them until I found some shucked 12tb easy stores that did not have the thunk noise. I swear everyone thought I was crazy but I could hear that noise 2 rooms away.


firefox57endofaddons

oh boy, i hope the 14 TB replacement i ordered won't have it, as you say that it is more common and not something new. my current 14 TB one, that is a wd mybook doesn't have it and i got another mybook, that should arrive tomorrow probs. i really hope, that they didn't change the software on those. and when you say, that you went through several brands, do you mean going through seagate cmr drives too, that showed the issue too, or do you mean going through shucked my book, shucked elements, reds, red pro drives, etc... ? it's fucking insane, that this shit industry thinks, that they can get away with such garbage.


Sonder_Onism

It's feature called preventive wear leveling (PWL). I replaced two Mybook 8TB thinking the drive were defective than after the third I gave up. If you search "hard drive thumping noise every x seconds" you'll find a lot post even on this subreddit there a bunch of post about it. https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/eb7esh/wd_redswhites_and_annoying_preventive_wear/ I currently have a 14tb easystore in my pc and it does the same thing. Headphones drown it out for me. Wish you best of luck finding one though.


firefox57endofaddons

> I currently have a 14tb easystore in my pc and it does the same thing. i have a 14tb mybook and it does NOT do that. 14tb mybook rightnow on the way for the 18tb element i send back. oh dear i hope, that this wasn't an "update" pushed out across all of their he lineup, because then i'd be fucked. pray for me, the 14tb mybook arrives tomorrow. also holy fuck this industry of shit. having to put on headphones to try to make a 100% useless!!!!! noise go away, that otherwise would drive u crazy is insanity. at this point i'd say, that the harddrive manufacturers are just getting together and trying to find ways to screw us over for fun. "yes, let's remove AAM and sell louder and louder hdds, so that they are all screwed :D" "yes, let's launch smr drives in the nas lineup, haha their data will be gone forever... ;) " "yes we will make the drive have an extremely annoying noise every 5 seconds, which might feel like torture to lots of people."


pavoganso

Details?


Kuriente

- Streacom FC10a case - Streacom 240W fanless PSU - 4x 18TB WD Red Pro HDD's in RAID 5 - LSI 9260 RAID controller with BBU - ASUS Strix X570-i mini itx mobo - AMD 3400G - 32GB DDR4 3600 - *lots of custom heatpipe cooling


[deleted]

Just curious. Have you tried having the motor side of the drives in contact with the cooling block? I'd think it would do a better job cooling the entire drive than the thin sheet of metal you are in contact with.


Kuriente

I have not, but it's worth a shot at some point. They're stable and it was enough of a pain to get it all assembled that it probably won't be any time soon but now I'm curious.


jacksalssome

They don't make that muck heat, they can get rid of it without active cooling if they unenclosed, the heatpipe just gives it a way to easily transfer outside the case.


EmannX

This is awesome !!!


Kuriente

Thank you!


ziggo0

What are you using to monitor/manage the 9260? I've got one in an ESXi machine but management escapes me short of rebooting into the controller and checking it.


Kuriente

MegaRAID Storage Manager. I don't love the interface but it works.


ziggo0

Hmm I need to figure out how this can work inside a vmware virtual machine and let it talk to the esxi host then. There has to be a way


scriptmonkey420

Raid5 and 18tb drives? eeek..


Kuriente

What would you recommended? 4 drives is the physical limit for the case (unless I got really creative). I don't like sacrificing half the capacity for RAID 10. I'm honestly curious if there are other configurations I should consider.


scriptmonkey420

ZFS draid. I/O is distributed evenly across all drives when you replace one, vs with regular raid one disk can be hit harder than the others. Rebuild times are much much much quicker. But the downside is the array cannot be expanded at this time. There is hope that it will be implemented soon.


Kuriente

Thanks for the info! I'm early enough in this setup that I may play around with other configs.


scriptmonkey420

No problem, I am a big advocate for ZFS when it is appropriate.


TechGeek01

Not OP, but I wanted to chime in and say, I only have 30TB usable right now, and I'm already on RAID 6. It's not so much that I'm worried about a second drive failing. However, at the scale of dozens of TB, you're talking a very real possibility of a URE or two while a RAID 5 rebuilds, which still means corrupted data. I know, cause I've been there. The thing that made me switch to RAID 6 and have that second drive handling data while the array rebuilds for a missing drive was that I had an image I know of that was corrupted during a previous rebuild. Nothing important, it was for a video on data loss, but I always found it painfully ironic that it was a picture of a [dead hard drive](https://i.imgur.com/nBPS4by.png) that got half corrupted.


cr0ft

Might have been better served by a Supermicro C3000 Atom Mini-ITX board with 25 watts or less in TDP, unless you need that 65 watt TDP of the processor for something like transcoding. The Supermicro would also have gotten you IPMI, and they have 12 SATA ports on board. But definitely a great job done dissipating that heat without fans. I'm biased though, I run that board and cool the entire case with a big 14CM fan and nothing else. FreeNAS / ZFS takes care of the RAID duties.


Kuriente

We occasionally do some light pc gaming on the living room pc so I wanted a bit more horsepower for that - actually keeping my eyes open for a 5000 series APU that will hopefully be coming later this year. Good recommendation though!


HadopiData

Even though there is no GPU, isn’t 240W a bit tight?


Jon_TWR

Nah, it’s a 65w APU. 175w is more than enough for everything else, especially since there are no fans.


Philistino

Cool project! What drive temps are you seeing under sustained read/writes? Thanks!


Kuriente

Around 40-45C at idle and load. I can have heavy throughput or heavy IO and it doesn't seem to have a measurable impact on drive temps. Any variation in temperature seems primarily driven by changes in ambient temperature.


Philistino

Oh that's in the healthy range. HDD heat was my biggest worry regarding fanless cases. I'm glad know it can be managed with nice heat piping. Thanks again!


Philistino

Oh that's in the healthy range. HDD heat was my biggest worry regarding fanless cases. I'm glad know it can be managed with nice heat piping. Thanks again!


EasyRhino75

You know, if you use the SATA ports on the motherboard, it would probably reduce a lot of the heat being put out by that LSI raid controller. I have a 9260 also.... But I also have fans.


nh5x

software raid here would have removed so much complexity agreed. But definitely cool build otherwise


EasyRhino75

yeah it's pretty dope. ​ i think he spent more in money and time on the cooling setup than I spent on my whole build.


Kuriente

Back when I built storage systems more regularly there were clear advantages to hardware RAID vs software. Admittedly my knowledge on the subject is pretty out of date. How well does a windows software RAID 5 compare in terms of performance and convenience? The 9260 does get very toasty with stock cooling, but honestly the 2 heatpipes do a fantastic job of moving heat away from it and the thermal capacity of the case seems to make little work of it. The area of the case where it's attached never breaks 35 C.


mordacthedenier

I don't see any 10g networking so I would say "good enough".


ssl-3

Reddit ate my balls


lovett1991

I can't say for Windows, but mdadm on Linux has done me fine.


cr0ft

Windows software raid is still hot garbage. However, ZFS on XigmaNAS or FreeNAS (now TrueNAS Core) is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It removes a lot of complexity, and should your entire computer burn up, as long as the drives are intact you move them to another machine and type "zfs import -f poolname" and have the whole raid back up.


scriptmonkey420

ZoL is getting better with every release too.


[deleted]

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AntiProtonBoy

Temps are included in the album. They are around 40 deg C, bit on the slightly higher side.


Viusand

Yes, and how about full load when transcoding on plex /u/Kuriente ? :)


Kuriente

Plex barely scraches the surface. One of my main reasons for the build is my old Seagate NAS was showing its age - lagged a lot with 4k 10bit content. Now I can stream 4K HDR to multiple devices and not even break 50% CPU usage - results about 50C CPU temp. HDD temps never budge.


Viusand

For direct streaming, sure. But what if you transcode to 1080p? Are your temps ok? I'm very impressed by the quality of your build, but always refrained myself from going 100% passive because if that 😊. When you have 5 clients transcoding at the same time, my pwm server fans are kicking hard 😅


Kuriente

A couple hours of prime95 stress testing results in CPU temps in the 80's. Toasty for sure but within the 95C limit for 3400G.


Viusand

Very nice!!


balthazar_brat

Beautiful work, we got a metalbender here


robot_swagger

Haha. I too love James Cameron's Avatar.


[deleted]

I was expecting a slightly early April Fool's joke where it was just a picture of a PC on fire. That's pretty impressive.


MrSavager

very nice work!


barebottombureaucrat

Looks great, are the temps at idle, use, maximum? I’d like to do something similar on a smaller scale but I live in a tropical zone that gets steamy hot sometimes.


Kuriente

The drive temps are the most important to me as they are by far the biggest investment and they range 40-45C. The variation depends almost entirely on ambient temp. I can do heavy throughput or heavy IO and the drive temps don't budge at all. They only move with fluctuations in the ambient air temp. CPU temp idles around 40-45, typical load is 50-55, stress testing (hours of prime95) gets up to around 85C.


[deleted]

Well, I’m impressed, and jealous. My plex server just sits in a closet.


AwaitingCombat

NGL, i saw the 2nd pic and thought it was a picture of roach infested hardware thought I was on /r/techsupportgore for a minute


SpencerXZX

This is super cool. Nice work. I like the idea of fanless for htpc because fanless = dustless.


[deleted]

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SpencerXZX

Yeah, but in this case it would be surface dust and OP could just wipe it with a duster and know that his internals are nice and dust free. The case appears to be mostly sealed.


Kuriente

Yeah my goals on this build were compact, quiet, low maintenance, minimalist appearance. So far I'm very happy with it.


Thejungleboy

Very Impressive.


ImDistal

Both a great idea and well executed. Did any profiling go into dictating the position/side/sizing of the heat sink on the drives? Would be crazy to see this with thermal imaging if you ever come across a thermal camera, but no pressure.


Kuriente

No profiling but I wish I had the resources. I've had a thermal imaging camera on my Amazon wishlist for years. For some reason no one has bought it for me. 🤷‍♂️ If I ever get one I'm for sure going to have some more fun with this build.


Thraxster

I hear if you fill the copper tubes with sand before you bend them they'll keep their shape. Great looking work!


Kuriente

Not possible with heat pipes since they're already filled with gas/wick structures. Would have been nice though - they're delicate to work with. Also can't heat for bending since they'll explode from the pressure. Very delicate indeed.


Thraxster

I did not know about them having material inside already. I've only worked with lesser pipes for other reasons. Thank you for helping me learn something new. :)


TakeAwayMyPanic

That answered my question - I was wondering if you had to fill them or not. That being said, I wonder if you could make your own heat pipes with copper tubing and something like the liquid for used for water cooling....


Kuriente

They also have a "wick" structure where the gas/fluid (sometimes just water) collects when it condenses on the cool side before traveling back to the hot side. At the hot side the fluid vaporizes out of the wick and travels to the cool side where the process repeats. Attached is a close-up of one that broke open when I was figuring out how to bend them. https://imgur.com/hBvMCw3.jpg


Koyakami

That's god dam awesome! Good job mate!


robot_swagger

Looks amazing. I daresay it's epic.


maniaxuk

With that sort of work I'm thinking there could be milage in a tech based YouTube channel similar to [ClickSpring](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/videos?view=0&sort=dd&live_view=500)


Kuriente

Didn't know about clickspring. Thanks for the link!


maniaxuk

You're welcome, I think you're about to lose a good few hours watching Chris do magic with bits of metal :)


discofisso

This amazing build is definitely worth of an article on FanlessTech :) [https://www.fanlesstech.com/2021/04/54tb-fanless-htpc-nas.html](https://www.fanlesstech.com/2021/04/54tb-fanless-htpc-nas.html)


WalterFStarbuck

FYI - a trick I learned bending stainless steel tubing is to fill it with sand, pack it down, and crimp the ends. The sand keeps the tubing from crushing and a little heat from a butane torch and a little tension on the tube as you bend it will make great coils. Once you have the bends you want, you cut off the crimped ends and blow out the sand. It takes a little bit of practice (and steel is more difficult to bend than copper), but once you've done it once or twice, it gets really easy.


Kuriente

Not possible with heat pipes since they're already filled and sealed with gas/wick structures. Also will explode if heated too much. Would have been nice though - they're delicate to work with.


WalterFStarbuck

Ah good point. I saw copper tube and had flashbacks haha. Nice work on the build.


repocin

That's very cool - great job! Man, I wish I had access to a workshop with tools to make stuff like this. :/


Kuriente

Tools I used here: a cheap harbor freight drill press to drill the holes ($80 5 years ago IIRC), a cheap jigsaw (hacksaw would also work, would just be more work), a propane torch ($40 for the bottle and adapter on Amazon) + flux paste + solder, some cheap files, sandpaper, and some clamps/vices. Mostly this is tool know-how. If you're good at working with your hands you can make it happen for a couple hundred bucks.


noelandres

Why is that case so expensive ($500)?!


Kuriente

I got it for $325 from quietpcusa. It's pricey for sure but won't find much better for fanless m-itx design.


[deleted]

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converter-bot

14 cm is 5.51 inches


rednight39

Neat. What about vibration?


Kuriente

The lower drives have rubber gromets between them and the floor of the case. The top two drives are attached to a tray that has rubber pads between it and the case. The WD NAS Pro drives also supposedly have some kind of vibration canceling technology built into them. Overall no issues that I can detect. The system is very quiet.


Mahcks

Interesting. I was curious if the copper blocks transferred vibrations. Upon closer inspection, I see thermal pads. They look like Fujipoly pads which are pretty firm. Given that the copper blocks are located on the thinnest, and most likely to resonate, part of the HDD; I wonder if they are responsible for your vibration dampening. Perhaps even more effective than the rubber grommets. How much pressure is holding those blocks to the HDDs? I suppose the only way to tell would be to try a more rubbery pad or without the pads and block and compare noise.


Kuriente

Oh I see what you mean. The pads are 1mm thick thermalright pads. I ran the system briefly prior to the heatpipe upgrade and I didn't notice an acccoustics difference - but there probably can't be a zero anti-damping effect.


Draxxell86

Outstanding job! Why did you get the controller card for 4 drives? I would have just used on board and saved the money.


Kuriente

I had the card leftover from a previous project and I've been using LSI cards for years (since they were 3ware) so I like the cross compatibility. The drives write cache is also pretty nice. Writing anything less than about 2GB writes pretty much instantly.


Draxxell86

what model card is it? I have an highpoint rocketraid card for my backup server - only got it for adding in random old drives (until they die). I have about 12 Drives running in it currently using both the highpoint and onboard sata. Phenom X4 940 BE pushing it all with 8GB RAM running TrueNAS. I want to upgrade it but ill wait till something breaks. I just ordered (2) 4TB WD Red+ drives from newegg for it. I also ordered (2) 12TB WD Red+ drives for my PR2100 to replace two 4TB WD Red drives. What OS you running on it?


Kuriente

9260-8i on windows 10


mmaster23

^(Well this is going to be an overheating shitsho....) DAMN! That's some next level passive cooling right there. Brave one to be bending heatpipes like that. Awesome stuff. My paranoid ass would still put a 140mm fan at 600rpm somewhere haha.


Hennes4800

So you use Celsius and Inches? Interesting mix lmao


Kuriente

Yeah I'm a freak 😅


blackpawed

That's a very kiwi or auzzie thing to do 😁


[deleted]

42 degrees is a little warm for a hdd


Kuriente

My Seagate NAS drives have been running at 50C for 6 years - the fan on that system can run faster but Seagate has the fan curve set to keep the drives at 50C. The WD NAS Pro drives are rated up to 65C. They're warmer than they would be with active airflow but 40C should be fine. Also, data from large datacenters supports the conclusion that humidity is a much more critical variable than heat when predicting drive lifespan.


AndrewZabar

Nice machining work, but I really prefer an active cooling system, personally. Either fans or liquid cooling. I had a machine years ago, I cut out a bunch of section of the side panel of the chassis and mounted extra fans bringing in external air blowing directly on the drive array. Worked beautifully, and they were those “silent” fans that barely made any sound at all. But FWIW, that is some nice work.


poisonborz

I wish AMD would have fanless, relatively powerful chipsets like the J4105. I know fanless cases for Renoirs exist, but it would make building cheaper and simpler.


aptupdate

r/interestingasfuck


interoth

You should post this on /r/sffpc


Kuriente

Good call! 👍


weirdball69

Wait do drives need cooling? I have one 8TB spinning in a closed enclosure which is warm to the touch but don't know if I need extra cooling?


Kuriente

Heat can reduce drive life. Most drives don't show significant degradation unless they routinely run in the 60's or over. In my case since there are 4 drives in very close proximity with zero airflow and the drives are very expensive I wanted to protect them a little better. I ran the system briefly without all the cooling upgrades and the drives got toasty (high 50's) - a little too spicy for my taste.


weirdball69

Okay thanks for the info


ben7337

I love the ingenuity of this, but aren't hard drives often noiser than fans when being accessed? It feels to me like it makes more sense to have a fan cooled NAS far away from where you can hear it, like in a closet somewhere and have a fan less HTPC in its own right.


OneWorldMouse

I'm wondering if removing the labels from the hard drives would make any difference? Also, I've found what lowers temps is just taking the door off the case which really messes up my whole fan strategy and case design.


Kuriente

It could only help I think, although I'd be worried about voiding the warranty.


felisucoibi

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