16-plus terabyte small form factor PC

18 thoughts on “16-plus terabyte small form factor PC”

1. What a nice video, the camera work is fantastic and a cool looking end result. I was cringing when the grinder sparks were hitting the drives though, I was just imagining all the small metal pieces that were finding their way behind the circuit board just waiting to introduce future gremlins.

   Reply

2. Nice! I was going to comment on MIG welding with drives in place until I realised they were dead drives just for fabbing with. I would cringe about the sparks going on the VW in the background. Having worked on cars and had hot sparks melt into the glass I know how annoying that can be!

   Reply

3. Comment about ridgid on youtube: “TTI is the company that manufactures ridgid tools who I noted as a sponsor. Their terms required me to use the tools for something awesome.”

   Indeed

   Reply

4. I get the feeling that Will is a “shoot from the hip” kind of guy. Truly unique work.

   Reply

5. I saw the TTI commercial. LOL

   The guy really worked them for some stuff. Personally I prefer Milwaukee tools to the Rigid stuff. By the way, Milwaukee is also a TTI brand as well.

   I have to ask how he plans to cool that mess of drives in that tight a stack. The sparks were nice but I would bet you all that the drives were not those that were “Donated” to the build and were instead just old form factors for the mock up.

   Gets the gears spinning though on what you can get a company to throw at you. I will have to ruminate on that for a bit.

   Reply

   1. What his plan appeared to be: he put air vents on the bottom of the case, the fan blows out. This way, cool air comes up into the case, travels up between the hard drives, then out.

      and yes, they were old HDDs as simon already pointed out.

      Reply

6. Watched this several times. Agree with the comments made so far and I assumed that these were dead drives anyway.
   What I’m still puzzled about though is just how were these drives connected to the motherboard?
   Suppose I wanted to use these in a non-RAID configuration?
   RAID (any form of RAID) does carry risks which are never written about, several of these result in data loss with no chance of re-building, there are better options involving multi backup which is easily transferred to another computer. Been using this method for many years.
   Has it’s downsides also, but best for my purposes.
   Might be obvious to someone, but I can’t for the life of me see or find any connection details and I have looked at the motherboard used, manufacturers information on this board is very sketchy, it’s also pricey. All the rest is obviously all mechanical forming and undoubted skill.

   What am I missing – no guesses please – what did he do to connect?

   Reply

7. Well, power is easy and you can buy IDC style power connectors and cable to make a power strip to connect directly to a ribbon bus.

   Since the unit doesn’t have 8 SATA connectors there are a couple of options. The first is a SATA port multiplier. One in and four out. Since the board has a pair of ports this will work just fine.

   Second option is to use a basic 8 port RAID card with a 4X PCIe interface.

   The video I watched was shy on details. I suspect that it won’t be an elegant solution. The build seemed more of a kludge to me than anything. Then again I come from a metal fabrication background so it is not that bad for a garage hack.

   I know you didn’t want guessing but… I figure an informed guess is better than no info at all. Take it or leave it, YMMV.

   Mike

   Reply

8. The details of the build can be found on the Black Dwarf link in the post. He used a HighPoint Rocket RAID 2680 8 Port Sata/SAS controller.

   And those were dummy drives during the case construction, so no HDDs were harmed in the making of this video.

   Reply

Comments are closed.