| I bought an ESATA box to replace the crappy Synology RAID thing. It’s a very simple external enclosure with no brains whatsoever, so I can just string four ESATA cables out of the computer in the cupboard to the enclosure, and run standard Linux soft raid.
I installed four 5900RPM Seagate Green disks into the box, which has the snappy name “RaidSonic Stardom ST5610-4S-S2”. It seems to be working fine. It’s much snappier than the Synology box, especially when traversing large directories and displaying small pictures, which is something that my music browser does a lot. But the design of the cooling system is rather odd. |
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There’s a nice and big fan at the back. But it’s rather noisy, so I unscrewed the back cover and removed the fan to see what was going on. It turns out that the fan blows straight onto that red backplane there. There are three holes in the backplane, but they are completely covered up by the disks on the other side of the backplane.
It’s rather puzzling. As far as I can tell, there’s virtually no cooling of the disks themselves with this “design”. I could detect no draft from the front while the fan was working like crazy at the back.
Oh well. I guess that this means that the fan is non-functional, so I just unplugged it. That means that the box is quite silent, which is nice. And that the disks will die a lot sooner, which isn’t.
All hardware sucks.