NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224

You looking to find the "NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224" Good news! You can purchase NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224 with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

Price: $399.99 $367.99   

Product Feature

• 4U rack mount design
• 24x hot-swappable SATA/SAS 6G drive bays
• Six internal SFF-8087 Mini SAS connectors support up to twenty-four 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (II or III) or SAS hard drives
• Backplanes are horizontal mounted for better ventilation
• LED indicators for power and activity on each HDD tray
• Redundant 4pin Molex PSU connectors support redundant power supply
• Support EEB (12"x13"), CEB(12"x10.5"), ATX (12"x9.6"), Micro ATX (9.6" x 9.6"), Mini-ITX (6.7" x 6.7") motherboard
• Two front USB ports

Product Description

NORCO RPC-4224 4U rack mount 24x hot-swappable SATA/SAS 6G drive bays Server Rack mount

NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224 Review

A beautiful idea - quickly throw together serious wads of disk space for just a few grand. This product, teamed with commodity PC parts, a semi-enterprisey RAID card and a bunch of SATA drives, can create just such a beast. If you want a bit more protection, get a redundant power supply. If you want to pay even less - or depending on your application - use something like FreeBSD running ZFS (software RAID, more or less) and a cheap SAS Expander.

The fans

There are 6-80mm fans in this thing and they are loud as hell. In a server room you won't care, but just about anywhere else you'll go crazy. This 120mm fan "plate" that can be swapped in may help: 120mm fan wall bracket. I don't have any personal experience with it, but for about 11 bucks it's probably worth a shot. That, along with a fan speed controller, may bring the noise down to reasonable levels. The fans all use old-school Molex power connectors so there's no way to connect them to motherboard fan headers without adapters. It would be easy enough to cobble one together, but I've looked around both on Amazon and monoprice and haven't yet found a pre-made 3-pin fan header-to-molex power adapter or cable.

Backplane connections

You'll need SFF-8087 connectors to hook up your disks to whatever motherboard, RAID card or SAS Expander you're using. SFF-8087 allows you to make four disk connections via one cable. If you're going from this backplane to your motherboard's SATA connectors, be aware that you'll need what's called a REVERSE breakout cable, not the forward breakout.

The access to the disk backplanes is a bit cramped because the "Wail of Hades Fan Plate" (the plate containing four 80mm fan right behind the drives) sits just a couple of inches back from these connectors. That makes it a bit of a challenge to get both the SFF-8087 connectors as well as the Molex power connectors hooked up. There's a ton of space behind this fan plate, so I wish it was located about 1 inch farther towards the back of the case. Perhaps Norco purposely puts it closer because some larger server motherboards or redundant PSU's might then get cramped. In any case, this is generally just a one-time experience, so once you've got everything hooked up you're likely to never have to worry about it again.

In the first RPC-4224 I received (I've ordered two of them so far), two of the 24 drive bays were dead. Since I was only hooking up a total of 15 drives (13 storage & 2 mirrored system drives) I was able to work around it very easily. I've seen other reviewers with the same complaint, and from what they say, Norco is VERY responsive about getting these problems addressed. Apparently, swapping out these backplanes is fairly straightforward, but I didn't bother to pursue it. I took off one star because this looks like a persistent issue.

What I did with this thing

I put together a 32 TB system using this case, a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard, Intel 2500K CPU, and 8 GB RAM. Those parts were installed into this case along with one Megaraid Sas 9260-16I Single, 16-PORT Int, 6GB/S Sata+sas, Pcie 2.0, 512MB; In T and 13 Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 3 TB CoolSpin SATA 6Gb/s Internal Hard Drive Retail Kit 0S03228. Running those disks on that controller in RAID 6 nets just over 32 TB of storage. It's not the fastest disk subsystem in the world - you don't want to run your main SQL databases on it, for example. But we've been backing up our production databases to it at work (as part of a disk to disk to tape strategy) and it's substantially faster than the HP SAN we were previously using. The HP SAN I just mentioned is a few years old, so I'm not saying that this setup is faster/better than enterprise SAN technology. But that SAN was considered state of the art not that long ago.

If anything breaks on this "backup server," in an emergency I can head over to Fry's and pick up just about anything I need and be back up and running in at most a couple of hours. Hell, for a fraction of the price of just about any other "true enterprise" SAN solution with comparable capacity (especially with the SAN's support costs) I could build TWO of these boxes and have complete redundancy top to bottom, then use rsync to efficiently keep all our backup data synchronized across both machines.

As far as power consumption goes, I'd bet that even though I'd be doubling up on my disks, two complete sets (64 TB in all across the two machines) of these low-power Hitachis would compare favorably with an Enterprise SAN using 2.5" drives. Since I'm getting ~3 TB per low-power drive and the 2.5" units would have much less capacity, it would have to use a lot more disks to get to 32 TB. I with I had the equipment necessary to accurately do a comparison.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from NORCO 4U Rack Mount 24 x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS 6G Drive Bays Server Rack mount RPC-4224 ...