Which cases offer the best air circulation for 9 or more internal 3.5" hard drives?

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NeverDie

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Jan 28, 2015
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I finally finished the prescribed FreeNAS burn-in. During the last leg of it I turned all the fan's down to the Nanoxia controller's minimums (no idea what RPM that is), and I turned off the Zalman arm-brace fan completely off, because it wasn't relevant to drive temperature.

So, the good news is that from doing that noise decreased noticeably and maximum drive temperature rose to just 35C (up from 31C with fans at maximum). Ambient air temperature while testing was 24C. Also, power utilization dropped to 92 watts, so plainly the fans aren't giant power hogs.
 
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NeverDie

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Jan 28, 2015
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I replaced the HX1050 PSU with an RM450 PSU. Now the the hottest temperature drive is just 31C with all the fans set on minimum. I didn't expect such a big drop, so it's a pleasant surprise.

When idling with the new configuration, it consumes 66 watts.
When all the drives are active, such as when running the long-version of SMART's self diagnostic, it consumes 85 watts.
 
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NeverDie

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Jan 28, 2015
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Ah well hopefully you've caught it then - unsure if the LCC issue is as prevalent under BSD/FreeNAS as it is under linux but once the idle timer is disabled I don't think there's much in the way of a functional difference between the WD greens and reds. I've certainly had no problems running greens in my mdadm RAID arrays for the last five years (indeed I still have many 5yr old 2TB greens in active use) but from reading the internet you'd think that putting a green in the same building as a RAID array would bring about armageddon.
By the way, I booted from DOS and used Western Digital's wdidle3 utility program to disable the setting. As predicted, it had been set at the factory to 8 seconds. I'm mentioning the wdidle3 program only because the linux equivalent from somebody else had so many warnings and disclaimers that I didn't feel comfortable using it.