StarTech's Affordable Server Racks Continue Working Out Great - 2 More Racks Installed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: StarTech's Affordable Server Racks Continue Working Out Great - 2 More Racks Installed

For those looking at affordable metal server racks / open rack cabinets, I continue to be quite impressed by the StarTech.com four-post server racks. Recently I commissioned two more of their 12U racks in order to accommodate the latest Threadripper 2 systems in our Linux benchmarking farm...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=StarTech-2-More-Racks

[browseria]

What are the cases you are mounting inside these racks? I'm assuming they are home-built, and not OEM equipment from Dell or somebody...

[Michael]

What are the cases you are mounting inside these racks? I'm assuming they are home-built, and not OEM equipment from Dell or somebody...

The cases I generally go for in a majority of my racks are Rosewill... Their standard 4U chassis or they also have a decent 2U chassis as well, It's been the best combination of quality / price / front air filters that I've been able to find.

[sdack]

Assembling them are very easy. I used to have my wife take care of them as she has more patience and the assembly is really that easy, but in having built enough of them now, it only takes a few minutes with an impact driver.

This should become StarTech's new slogan... "So easy wife can do it".

[NotMine999]

Michael, do you get complaints from the wife about not keeping your hobby confined to the basement?

If I placed racks anywhere near the living spaces of the house I would be sleeping in the dog house ... literally!

[edwaleni]

Michael, do you get complaints from the wife about not keeping your hobby confined to the basement?

If I placed racks anywhere near the living spaces of the house I would be sleeping in the dog house ... literally!

Since his sole income is dependent on a working PTS environment, I would imagine she is good with it. I have bread racks of equipment in my home office and my wife doesn't care as long as the power bill doesn't go through the roof, an issue Michael is well aware of.

My only question is, on those 4 post StarTech racks, it appears you aren't using a back rack brace or 4 post rails for the back of the servers. Had any issues with server weight on the front rack mounts? Especially ones with dual power supplies?

[Michael]

Michael, do you get complaints from the wife about not keeping your hobby confined to the basement?

If I placed racks anywhere near the living spaces of the house I would be sleeping in the dog house ... literally!

She gets more upset over my 100+ hour work weeks.... But about hardware, no, as long as I am still paying the bills. Or she does get disgruntled when graphics cards are laid all around like on her own desk.

[Michael]

My only question is, on those 4 post StarTech racks, it appears you aren't using a back rack brace or 4 post rails for the back of the servers. Had any issues with server weight on the front rack mounts? Especially ones with dual power supplies?

No issues I've run into with any of my racks. On my dual PSU systems they are all Tyan or other servers that have rails or otherwise mounts to both ends.

[waxhead]

I actually find these articles very interesting. I myself have a small "datacenter" in my basement which consist of multiple computers. I have used racks that where thrown away at work and so far I have:

2x 42U racks
1x 4U fileserver (NORCON 4224 chassis, with 20 drives)
1x 1U backup server with two esata external cabinets with 10 drives in total
1x 2U webserver
1x 2U router/firewall - OPNsense
1x 3U UPS and I got a second 2U UPS standby as well.
A bunch of Raspberry PI's - One RPI3 works great as a wireless accesspoint (really great in fact) and the rest is just for me to play with

This is just my hobby and except the OPNsense box I exclusively run Debian GNU/Linux powering the entire thing. And while the machines are idle they do in fact contribute to BOINC and I mainly run projects such as rosetta@home and dennis@home. This is what some obviously describes as "old" hardware e.g. Core 2 duo era as previously discussed in another thread.

While I am at it I would really like to encourage people to run health / medicine related projects on their idle time, even if you don't discover anything you at least rule out certain things which is great! Some day it may (and in fact already have) saved somebody's life - perhaps yours or mine.

I don't know how may others are interested in this , but I myself have a particular interest for putting loads of harddrive in my computers (BTRFS is partly to blame for this joy), I use some STLabs A590 8 port SAS/SATA HBA's and my chassis was rather cheap. If anyone have a dirt cheap alternative for a (rack) chassis that can fit lots of disks I am very interested to know about it. There is some threads about DIY on FreeNAS and some ZFS people and in general most storage geeks tend to have the same interest, but sadly there is not *that* much useful to find on this on the web regarding cheap chassis with loads of disk bays. Just maybe someone here can contribute to that. I actually run most of my stuff on trash hardware as it is cheap to replace when it breaks!

[boxie]

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This should become StarTech's new slogan... "So easy wife can do it".

just a tad sexist there - "Easier than Ikea", or "Look like a pro because you won't need instructions"