Aesthetic and very quiet 240 TB backup server

Last updated on 22. Februar 2022

On the main image you see our two versions

Left, wall mounted with red felt cover – right, free standing (here without hood).

Servers don’t have to be noisy, power-hungry tin boxes

With some space, you can use large oversized heatsinks and don’t need loud, annoying and power-hungry fans. The make is supporting airflow with the natural chimney effect inside the hood. This server can be placed in an office area without any noise issues.

Server position in another building

To be safe from natural disasters, water breaches inside a building or fires, the server should be placed in a different location than the computers intended for backup. For this reason, you are seeing a blue standard power meter below left.

Hard Drives, RAID and Vibrations

RAID 6 can loose 2 HDDs without problems and one hot swap will take over automatically after the first loss. So even if the server is placed on a remote position, in case of a hard drive loss there is sufficient time to react and replace the non-functioning hard disk.

The raid controller has 24 direct ports, so we used 23 HDDs and 1 spare, which gives us under RAID 6 conditions a usable space of 191 TB.

All hard drives are mounted on a layer of felt to eliminate mutual vibrations. This is a big problem with hard drives in normal housings. The micro vibrations from multible hard drives, all mounted in one enclosure, will cause significant failures.
In addition, there is a so-called heavy foil (the black layer) between the hard disk metal base plate and the thick mounting plate, also eliminating vibrations.

Value of the investment

At Amazon Web Services AWS you would pay 0,06 USD per month per giga byte of data, this would be 11460 USD monthly cost.

Here are the basic data

Motherboard:
Supermicro H12 SSL-NT – 7x PCI – 2x M.2 for SSD – 2 TB possible RAM

Processor:
AMD EPYC 7252 8-Core Processor – 3100 MHz – 150 TDP Watts – Threads 16

Cooler:
Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3

Cooler for RAID controller:
self-made from aluminium cooler block

RAM:
2x DDR4 – MultiBitECC – 3200 MHz – 32 GB – Samsung
(can be extended to 2 TB)

RAID:
Adaptec SmartRAID 3154-24i – 24 x direkt SATA – 12Gb/s per port

SSD for Linux OS:
Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250 GB – m.2 PCIE – NVMe SSD

SSD for SWAP:
Samsung PM981a – 1024 GB – m.2 PCIe – 3.0 x4 NVMe 0,3 DWPD SSD

Hard Drives:
15 x Seagate Exos X16 – 10TB – 6Gb/s – 7200 rpm – buffer 256 MB
9 x Seagate Exos X10 – 10TB – 6Gb/s – 7200 rpm – buffer 256 MB

1x for Hot Swap

Fans:
2x beQuiet Silent Wings 3 – 140 mm (840 RPM), only 15,5 dB noise, air flow rate 59,5 CFM / 101 m3/h, power consumption 0,72 W

Power Consumption:
idle: 85 Watts
busy: approx. 280 Watts
annual: approx. 250 Euro (with sleep time of 21 h per day and 3 hours for backups)

Measurements:
height: 180 cm
width: 59 cm
depth: 30 cm

A detailed description of the 48 TB office linux file server can be found here –>

The matching backup script is described here –>

If you like the server, we can build it for you, exactly according to your needs.

Just email us:
info@zazu.berlin

Author:
Thomas Hezel
zazu.berlin February 2022 – Version 1.0