So, you have a good HiFi and you’ve ripped your entire music collection in uncompressed WAV format.  You also have full ISO images of all your DVD films and of course you’ll need lots of space for ripping HiDef Blu-ray flicks too.

So what sort of space is it going to take – allowing a little room for expansion of course – and how do you run a server like that at home?

How about 18 SATA drives, across a range of 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB sizes, all installed into two high densiity towers.  This baby could heat your home!  noise is apparently not an issue as it has had quieter fans fitted as well as other noise-reducing work.

The owner says he’s “too scared” to test the power usage with this setup, lets just say its not going to be low-cost to run.

High density SATA drive bays – Neatly wired on the inside

The motherboard used is an ASUS M2N32WS pro with an AMD X2 CPU and 2Gb of RAM.  (All the Esata-to-sata port multiplier boards, external cases and PCI-X to e-sata card were supplied by span.com).

With room in the second enclosure for a even more 10 drives, he’s not going to run out of space anytime soon!

One of the 2 towers holding the 18 drives

It’s all tied together using Windows home Sever which aggregates all the drives into a single storage pool. Our reader reports the WHS setup has shown stable and fast and adding new drives to increase the pool is trivial.  Here’s a screenshot from the WHS Console showing the 18 drives and the pooled space.

Click for full size version

Our own diy JukeBox Server MkII : SATA Drives

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