Why store it in the cloud when you could have a 90 Terabyte hard drive (translated) array in your house? The drives are mostly Western Digital Caviar Green EARS 2TB models which are known for energy efficiency and quiet operation. It’s a little unclear as to whether this is using one or two motherboards, but the drives are connected using PCI RAID5 and RAID5+0 controller cards. There’s a total of 40 cooling fans built into the case, half on the bottom and the rest on the top. They move air up through the case, with plans to add a dust filter in the future. Heck, with that type of air movement you could throw on a standard furnace filter. Apparently it is quiet enough to talk in “almost a whisper” while next to the plywood monolith. But we’re a bit skeptical of that claim.
It’s not quite as fancy looking as the 67 TB storage from last year… but it does look pretty easy to build at home.
[Thanks Henrique via EnglishRussia]
For a home array where each drive contains similar files.
only a few drives every need be powered on at a time.
my ideal home storage.
can hold a growing amount of drives 10 20 50 100…
each drive has its own directory file structure
all drives can be treated like 1 drive no file ever spans 2 drives.
one or 2 drive can cache all the directories and recovery data of other drives to prevent all the drives spinning when exploring them.
each drive could have a reserve area of 20% or so to use to store recovery data for another drive. data is not mission critical so loose of a file is not disastrous.
drives are easy to add and remove
drives are mounted in on a cage suspended inside another with acoustic and vibration damping.
the air is filtered
the power supply’s exhaust air is also filtered in way that brings the ion charge on the air back to the charge of the room air.
a vibration alarm could be handy and an audible detector to listen for drive anomalies.
power supply’s monitor the current to each drive on spin-up and warn if any changes occur.
power supply’s can run the drives for up to 5 minutes if primary power fails.
those green drives drop like flies. i hate them.
i bet he has them dying in 2’s