I’ve run out of space in my server’s case to fit additional hard drives, in fact I’ve run out of space on the disks too. I have 5 drives in there now but only space to screw 4 so one of them is sitting loose on top of the CD drive. Not the best place for it, luckily the server is never moved around so it’s reasonably safe. However, I want to replace (most of) the drives that are currently in the server with much larger capacity SATA drives and put them in RAID, possibly RAID 5, mainly for fault tolerance purposes.

I decided to buy a new case to replace the Chieftec Dragon I’m currently using. I settled on a black SilverStone TJ05B-T. It has 2 120mm fans as standard, one on the front and one on the back plus space for 3 additional 80mm fans, so cooling shouldn’t be a problem. The case is tool-less so it uses rails for all of the drives (HDD, floppy, CD/DVD), and thumbscrews are used to attach the side panel and the hard drive cage. The cage fits 5 hard drives, and there’s space under the 5.25″ drive bays to fit another 3. That should be more than enough space for my needs! This particular model of the case has a thermal controller on the front with 3 temperature sensors. 1 for the CPU, 1 for the case and 1 for the hard drives. It can also display fan speeds from 3 different sources. Not really necessary for a server, but still a nice addition.

I will probably transfer all the hardware over from the old case into the new one tonight, then start looking into RAID cards and 300GB+ SATA drives.