what the f.. you need that thing for? o_O

Storing data on collisions of matter and antimatter, apparently.

OO;; woa, that is alot of data!
quick question, how are you going to be able to plug all the hard drives in? or will you swap the connections depending witch drive you wish to access?

All the hard drives can be plugged in at the same time, actually... well almost.

Look on the right side of the picture. Those things sticking out are the hot swappable trays that slide into the 15 slots in the front. 12 of them are 750 GiB drives hooked into a RAID card using RAID 5, 2 of them are mirrored RAID for the OS and also hooked into the card, and one of them is a ready-to-go spare. As they're hot-swappable and it's RAID 5, if any one of the drives fails, you just pop it out, put the new one in, and it fixes itself.

But yeah, this is before I do the cables. 14 of them, about 3 feet long and bright red, and they have to plug into a single RAID card. It's quite a bit of work actually ><

Ack. the 2 drives for the OS are the 80 GB drives. They don't need to be too big, obviously, and below 80 GB they start to get -more- expensive :p

That is truly terrifying.

Wow... over 9 terabytes... I'm scared. D:

Does it make smoothies too?

Possibly if you taped a blender to the fans?

..... nerd XD

Says the jealous nerd.

Bah Im just a simple minded fox.

Yes, I noticed, mister Macbook.

Whats wrong wif mac? :P

Ahhh, that's a topic for another time and place, no need to pollute such a nice picture with further discussion of it ^_^

My idea of building a computer is plugging it in. So to me, this is amazing loking and sounding.

'tis actually a pretty easy thing to do. Every part comes with explicit instructions, and to make your life a little easier, unlike Legos each part basically only fits into one spot. It can take some time though, many screws and cables :P

hah, lol. But its the static discharge that worries me the most

It's actually never been an issue for me, I just try not to scoot around on rugs too much beforehand. Though maybe I'm just lucky.

Yea... well the only place I can do it at is in my room... on a rug...

You can either use a static discharge wrist-strap, or just make sure you're touching the case (metal and unpainted portions) of the system before touching any sensitive components. Or if you want to get fancy, you can buy a static discharge mat that will go overtop of a rug or a tabletop.

Or I could just let my friend upgrade my computer when it needs to be upgraded, lolz.

Or stick a metal rod in the ground port of a nearby receptical, or just get totally naked.... that sounds good

I think you just like getting naked. =p

shh shh noones supposed to know

Helped set up two raid 5 with 5 drives once for a pair of win2003 server machines. I spent many a good valuable moment playing with the hot swap trays and making sci-fi noises... >.>;;
Vrrrrrrrrm, Click, CHUNK! bwooooOOOOHWP! Power-up complete, systems nominal...
okay I'll stop making myself look really dorky now.

I enjoyed clicking the drives in and out of place, though I did so without sound effects :p

Lazy + cheap hard drive companies trying to pass off GiB as GB. So when you buy a 120 drive you only get 114!

And the worst part is, it gets worse with each subsequent prefix. With TiB versus TB it becomes pretty out of hand. That shiny "1 TB" hard drive you bought is actually only 909 GB. You just "lost" 91 GB of space you thought you were buying. That's more than some people's entire computers contain.

Mmmmm... and uh... mmmmmmm! Judging by those numbers, I'm guessing you're going SCSI then, yes? And what mobo is that with 8 ram slots!? O.O

It's all hot-swappable SATA, actually. The RAID card hasn't been put in yet :p As far as the motherboard, I dunno the model, but this thing is a big ol' file server, not some standard consumer thing so I doubt it would help anyway.

Hehehe, I used to own a computer company and ISP and still have reseller agreements with most manufacturers, so chances are I could easily find the MB. ;) And yeah, I was kind of figuring that was it's main purpose. Either that or you work for WETA or ILM. ;)

Interesting that you're using molex instead of the SATA power connectors for the drives. Is there a reason for that other than convenience?

That's just how the parts were made. The chasis comes with the power supply all wired up to that portion.

It will take more than 9000 gig to get into Mordor!

You don't get into Mordor with 9000 gigs of hard drives. Try 9 gigs of RAM instead :3

I've wanted to rebuild my computer and give it more power (Tim Allen laugh) and more drive space like 2 250s or something. But I'll be honest I know NOTHING about computers, what RAM is for or even how to spell it!

RAM... Random Access Memory. It's more like the stuff you'd get in a USB flash drive or something. It's got no moving parts so it's way faster than a hard drive, unfortunately, doesn't have nearly as much space (most computers have between half a gig and 2 gigs of RAM). RAM is where your computer temporarily stores stuff it thinks it's going to need fast access to, like sound effects for a videogame.

Hard drives are nice and cheap now actually, if my home computer had more space I'd get a pair of 500s for it (on sale at www.newegg.com for $120 each). You can have a 400 gig for under 100 bucks too, yum ^_^

Oh snap- how did you know I was technosexual?!

D:

<3
now I'll have to go paw to the delicious pr0n. n.n

I would normally call overkill, but hey, whatever you wanna do with your money. =3

:P It's not my money, it's the lab's money, silly~

Well then you just right out suck. =P

D: It's not -my- system, why do I suck for building it? ;-;

Awww, it's okay. *Hugs and licks* -if- it was your system, you would suck terribly. =p

Actually.. That would be 1024x10^3.. 1024^3 is 1073741824
Heh
But only a nerd would be that critical to notice.. *Bows*

>.> Wait, what? What would be 1024x10^3?

'cuz like...
1 KiB = 2^10 bytes = 1024
1 MiB = 2^20 bytes = 1024^2
1 GiB = 2^30 bytes = 1024^3
1 TiB = 2^40 bytes = 1024^4

<_< How's this inconsistent with what I said earlier?

To shift by a base of ten, the proper mathmatical operation is Ex10^n
A meg however, is not 2^20. 2^20 is 1048576. 2^20, is actally the maximum number possible in a 20 digit long binary string. Which is irrelevant to megabytes.

But you have your units wrong here.. 1024 bytes is a KB, not a KiB. A KiB is a thousand bytes. and the same for GiB, TiB, and PiB.

KB stands for kilobyte, as everyone knows. That can both be taken as literal "one thousand bytes" which is what the hard drive folks like to do, or 1024 bytes which is what everyone else does.

KiB stands for Kilo Binary Byte which is meant to be the binary (1024) version. A KiB is defined as 2^10 bytes.

Let's ask Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

The only people who would have any reason to use the lower value of 1000 rather than 1024 are people selling storage who want to make it look like they're selling more than they actually are, and they're not about to adopt a special unit that nobody understands when they can plausibly keep advertising their capacity in terms of Gigabytes. Thus the nerds must take the high road and define something which is explicitly and always the binary counting version.

Indeed. Now look at your description. "Note: GiB means 1 billion bytes, whereas GB means 1024^3 bytes. It doesn't sound like a lot but there's nearly 7% difference between the two!"
Let's consult Wikipedia again, shall we?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
One GiB is not one billion bytes. It's 1 gibibyte = 230 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Just for your own corrections.

Arg, you got me there, I messed up at the end of the description. Everywhere else though--the preview picture, the Gigabyte count, and the listing of hard drive capacities--I was quite careful to use the xiB notation to mean "powers of two" and the xB notation to mean "powers of ten".

Hehe. No big deal bro. We both ended up messing up.. That's why I didn't notice my speech about the bit statement of 2^20 was about Mib, not about MB.. Hehe. All of us geeks make our mistakes.. Just that the really good ones, do it together..

Shit. Even when I was typing up the previous response I was like...

I was quite careful to use the xiB notation to mean "powers of ten" and... wait a damn minute, that's exactly the OPPOSITE of what I want to say >_<

And yet.. I knew -exactly- what you meant to say..
*Jabs you with a stick* But I demand you correct your description, before more people are like "What the hell are these two talking about!?"
Heh. No need to disseminate more misinformation from us.

*Licks his 2200 gig server sitting in his room* Have You noticed how the price of hard drives is dropping? 500 gig western digital for 120$ At prices like that its easy to build a huge File server. Also i think is there isn't enough cooling for that many drives. Unless the fans on the back pull 150cfm a piece.

There should be 4 more fans in the area behind the hard drives, they actually span the entire width of the case. They're just removed because I was planning on working on some cable installation.

>.>; I want that raid card...PCI Express interface? x8, x4?

Regular PCI, actually... I think >_>

I'll take pictures of it some other time <_<

o.o dear god...

is nort 1024^3 the same as 1024^3 ? or what do I missread between those two. ?

Read it again.

"GB means 1 billion bytes or 1024^3 bytes, whereas GiB means 1024^3 bytes only"

Key word here being "or". GB can refer to either 10^9 bytes or 1024^3 bytes. GiB can ONLY mean 1024^3 bytes. You didn't misread the numbers though.

My computer has one 250 GB HD and 1 GB of memory. More than enough to do whatever I use it for. Which is not much, actually.

Those pesky Hard drive manufactures always use GB to mean 1000^3 bytes, Means they can get away with selling what looks like more.

Yeah. The funny thing is, because they all do it, it doesn't really have much effect. And a lot of people are just used to some GB disappearing for no apparent reason, because that's just what happens.

Ironically it's the Operating systems that have it wrong. The HD manufacturers are all complying with SI system.
Old post but I was browsing for hot dragon lovings :p

Think of all the porn you can store.... =)

Even as high-quality 9 MB TIFFs you could store over a million of them! :0

Of course if you have low quality stuff, say 90 KB on average, then that goes up to 100 million ^-^;

XD Unlimited!

I think it's safe to just call that a terrabyte. :P I have 2.5 of them for HD Editing.

D: but it's only like 93% of a TB!

So call it .98 TB. :P I prefer using TB because the masses still get confused by it.. It's a new word reserved for geeks that still bare a magical property to those who don't know it. XD

The mobo in Twile's picture is made by the same company that makes the chassis in the picture: SuperMicro. Many of the companies that make fileserver appliances use that same hardware.

My home system is made from SuperMicro parts, too, but it's not nearly so advanced as the system in the picture.

Ah right, that's the name! But yeah. Funny that the motherboard and chassis are made by the same people, because their installation instructions are backwards xD They tell you to install the CPU coolers before you put the motherboard in, but the CPU coolers screw into risers that are only accessible once the motherboard has been mounted. Silly silly them :P

I was expecting an old meme and instead I got sexy computer parts. :(

:< Sorry for spreading technosexual nonsense.

You should be sorry that I had to wash my pants to get out the cum stains after clicking! >:|

lol, j/k, they were cum coloured and no one noticed. :)

Very nice! I'm envious. ^^

Love it, but I'd never use that much space in my life...

woah, that's impressive o_o
to tell the truth, I didn't know you could put that much of HDD space in anything that wasn't the size of a wardrobe XD I guess I still need to learn a lot.

If I wanted to learn how to set up those things, and their use, what would I have to look for in google?

First, you'd have to do a good job search. Even at today's prices you're looking at over $2400 for the hard drives alone, more for the case and other parts.

If you don't know how to set up a typical computer, then that's the first thing to search for. A "build your own computer" tutorial. If you do know how, and you have the money, then you can fairly easily figure out how to build something like what's pictured above (or ideally, something cheaper!). The only difference between building this particular setup and a standard computer is that there were a helluva lot of cables to deal with, a RAID card (needed to connect 12 drives at once!) and no graphics card. Beyond that though, it was a typical computer building operation :3

Hmm.. I think I will go to NASA and "borrow" one.
It could replace my old one XD