Pictures
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Front
This is how you get 24 hot swappable 3.5” drives into only 4U. Notice the Power and Reset buttons along with the indicator lights below the left case handle.
Above
There are two SAS controllers (A), each with 4 ports (1-4). Each port has 4 lanes to control 4 drives. Notice that only ports 3 and 4 are in use on each controller. The SATA/SAS cables (B red) and SGPIO cables (B gray) are jumbled together at the controllers so that I can fan each port across a single row of drives while tying together the cables that go to each column. This makes sense since there are 4 drives per row and 4 lanes per port. If the cables had been just a little longer, I could have instead had them all go together at the top of the picture and avoided the rats’ nest. You can see that the cables are going through a slot underneath the 3 hot swappable fans (E). There is just a little space between the fans and the backplane (F) but you can see that I managed to keep the area clear of cables. This is important to maximize airflow. The hard drives are on the other side of the backplane and out of this picture. The case comes with a large air shroud (C) that concentrates airflow to the 2 processors under the giant heat sinks (D). Two more hot swappable fans pull air out the back. You can see one of the power supplies going along the depth of the case (G). The other one is next to it, outside the picture. Next to the power supply are the power cables, which you can see are completely outside of the airflow due to the shroud. The DVD reader (H) opens out the back of the case and you can see I was able to route its cable over the air shroud so that it is entirely out of the airflow.
Top Front
For a little perspective, you can see the hard drives in the front and the tops of the three hot swappable fans behind the backplane.
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