Budget 31-40k Storage Mountain

I wont be getting this from US. Already i have a tonne of stuff. And also, I have no idea about customs. If they start stacking up 30% flat duty on all... then no point.
Otherwise i would have considered it. Thght of picking up a NIC and RAM from here though. But I dont have a use for NIC. so that entire plan went out.

Check my signature for a cabinet. I already have one that can take "6" HDD's. It was a pain in the ass to install them all.. and doing wire management gave me nightmares. Too cramped of a space. So a cabby like Elite is out of the question. Mid tower ones. No. Unless there is a Mid tower case that will let me fit 3 of CM 4 in 3 modules. Then I am happy. But all the mid tower has 3 or 4 drive bays.

I do that everyday. and I rewatch more than u possibly imagine.
 
My suggestion is to attack the problem one at a time.

Proccy - Rather than the AMD proccy, go for the Intel ones for better power efficiency. Get a G2010 from US - Are you still in the land of sunny beaches and white sand :p

Mobo - B75 or whatever, just avoid Gigabyte if they have not improved their cable managment. You will need a full ATX if possible.

SATA expansion cards/port multipliers - Get the best according to reviews, ensure that the mobo supports the same. Keep one spare if needed. At least get 1+1 spare. Get these too from the states

Cabby - I think the cheapest way to go about this is use the older NZXT cabbies which were enormous. Use 3.5>2.5 bay adapters. Add extra fans and dust filter later on.

SMPS - Not my area of expertise. However, according to sorcy, avoid Corsair, opt for Seasonic/CM - But ASS is a big Q. And opt for modular ones, you can customize it later on.

SATA Cables - Get long ones.

OS - AFAIK, WHS is dead. For such a NAS, you may need to use Storage Server 2012. I would say chuck it and use FreeNAS instead.

Optional - Keep a small GPU (AMD 6450/Nvidia 610) also ready, might speedup your NAS a bit.
 
I don't mean to be rude, but this is probably going to sound like it.

You have your priorities backward. Basically, the way you're planning the build, it's a mountain of wastage, not a mountain of storage.

A mid-tower case has 4 to 5 3.5" bays, and maybe 1 or two floppy drive bays (known as 'exposed' bays). It also has three or four usable 5.25" bays. The floppy bays take a regular hard disk no problem, except it's held with two screws instead of four. I have disks installed like this and it's not an issue. Each 5.25" bay can house one drive using a single adapter, and using a CM bay adapter or similar, you can mount 4 drives in 3 bay space.

This is how a normal Elite can hold 9 drives, as mine can. An no modding required at all, just a few pieces of metal (I'm selling a few of these adapters - though I'm not shipping anywhere, you're welcome to have a look at my thread to see what they look like). Now, if you want more drives and/or more room, a CM690 will do 10 drives and so will a N300, if you convert the bays correctly. That is precisely one more drive than the Elite can. Maybe the HAF X and so on will do one or two more.

Unfortunately, even in a very large case cable clutter is inevitable when you install more than 3 SATA cables. This is unavoidable because inherently wiring up a drive is messy. If this is a problem I would advise you to buy 10 external cases and install a drive in each one, and connect them using USB hubs. You're not going to have it all.

I have a monster of a case, the Xigmatek Elysium, and I have 5 devices (2 optical, 1SSD and 2 hard disk drives) plus the cables for the front panel eSATA and the drive dock - so 7 cables total, and you won't believe how messy it is in spite of all the cables going through the back of the tray. At some time closing the side panel is a challenge too. The case itself will handle 14 drives using adapters, and I'm not sure of many cases that will do more. It does come with two 4-in-3 modules which actually work as 3-in-3 modules because of the shitty East Asian design 'gurus' who managed to get a lot of things wrong when they did this case. I have had a rig with 5 drives and excellent cable management for the day (the Antec Solo, circa 2005), and it was still a pain in the ass because of the thick and inflexible SATA cables plus a power cable. No matter how great you are at cabling, 5 drives or more is gonna be spaghetti kitchen redux.

Only when you actually implement something like this you will realise how ambitious it is to make special purpose rigs. Compromises that you wouldn't make in other kinds of rigs are inevitable here. In my fileserver, all the cables are on the motherboard side. This makes it look very messy, but every cable has a coded tag and changing a drive is a matter of 15 seconds excluding power up and power down. I don't mind the clutter and having a very low power board means the reduced airflow does not cause any issues there either. Serviceability and identification are key concerns in that case and I manage fine.

Yes, you could get some of the fancy Lian Li cabling and bay multiplier options but for basically a fileserver I don't see the point. Still, it's your money and you're entitled to do with it as you see fit.

I hope you have enough information to make a decision now. I will leave you to it, with my best wishes.
 
U are welcome to do word play as u wish. Free forum and all.

My current cabinet is setup EXACTLY like you already said. I been trying to say that for sometime, it kinda goes over your head. and the wires in it are a mess. and it gets heated a lot, according to that temperature thing. Adding more fans means more noise and dust inside. And I live in Trivandrum, Its hot and humid as hell. I have few other stuff in the room, running all these things the temperature goes up. It reduces my comfort in that room and dunno what it does to the components inside that room. Running the fan and AC all the time, Electricity bills are also sky high whenever i am there.

So for once I am trying, trying be the keyword to move away from the obvious ways. Coz even before you typed that I already have that in place. I am looking for a very low temperature setup. If it cannot be, then...
 
Have you considered a 6 bay nas unit? May cost same initially but power savings may be higher, my bills have reduced since I switched to a nas unit.
 
Please give more details regarding pricing. but they are all NAS units r8? Means the HDD needs to be formatted?
 
So some updates...

Right now i am looking through some off the shelf 4, 6, 8 BAY Enclosures or NAS. Coz i can spend some money on HDD. Looked through some Mediasonic, QNAP, Synology ones. But almost all have pros and cons. :D
So still searching. Till then core components for this build is on hold.

and another update, I bought the Cosmos 2. I just loved them both very much. Waiting for it to be shipped by FK. Coz even if i didn't go through this, I want this cabinet for my main PC.
 
So some updates...

Right now i am looking through some off the shelf 4, 6, 8 BAY Enclosures or NAS. Coz i can spend some money on HDD. Looked through some Mediasonic, QNAP, Synology ones. But almost all have pros and cons. :D
So still searching. Till then core components for this build is on hold.

and another update, I bought the Cosmos 2. I just loved them both very much. Waiting for it to be shipped by FK. Coz even if i didn't go through this, I want this cabinet for my main PC.
I guess you have spent more by buying from Fk @ 26K

Cosmos II is available @ snapdeal.com for 20.4K

If flipkart not yet delivered the cabinet call them and cancel the order.

I bought CM Storm Stryker from snapdeal.com 6 months back for 11K Packaging was excellent
 
I am in Miami. the Case will go to my home in Trivandrum. :(. Kinda sad to think that it is there waiting for me.

This is going to be one LOOOONG build log. :(
 
And regarding which solution to use for storage. Have a look at Window 8 Storage Spaces
You will have 4 Resiliency options
  1. None: Data will be stored as a single copy. If one of the drives fails, you will lose the data. However, no backup space will be used.
  2. Two-way mirror: Requires at least two drives. Two copies of the data will be saved and won’t be lost if one of the drives fails.
  3. Three-way mirror: If one or two of the drives fail, you will not lose data as Windows will save three copies.
  4. Parity: Parity information is stored with the data protecting it from failure of a single drive. Efficient for storing video files, but time for accessing files will be slower.
The best thing about storage spaces is you will add the drives to a pool in Storage Spaces and you can create Multiple drives with different resiliency options. And you an also thin provision your drives

My Setup is as below
4 * 2 TB WD Green EARS

3 TB partition with Parity for entertainment stuff
500 GB for personal photos with Two-Way Mirror
200 GB for Download and temp storage with None
etc....

The only problem i faced is with Parity write speeds i get a 25 MB/Sec on average. Where as the actual drive speed is nearly 100 MB/sec, but as the entertainment drive which i use to store for Movies, songs & videos writes are frequent and only once when i download content so its not a problem
 
Software RAID wont be speedy as hardware, but atleast the data is retrievable. But I think you don't need RAID, so not a must to use Windows Server. Plus, think of the overheads! FreeNAS would work much better.
 
Software RAID wont be speedy as hardware, but atleast the data is retrievable. But I think you don't need RAID, so not a must to use Windows Server. Plus, think of the overheads! FreeNAS would work much better.
Windows Server is not required for Storage Spaces, Its available in Windows 8.

I for sure need RAID, because i know how it feels to lose data as i lost my 3 years of works done as freelancer, My Personal information like College Photos, Family Photos etc which you can't get back once lost.

So i use RAID and on top of this i Backup my personal irreplaceable content to Crashplan

And one other feature of Windows 8 most people don't know is Hyper-V, with which you can create Virtual Machines like VMWare Workstation
 
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