4RU Rosewill RSV-L4500 ~22TB usable storage FreeNAS Build

James

This is my current storage/labbing box, which originally started in a Fractal R3 Define case, and had slowly been upgraded over the years.

  • Rosewill RSV-L4500 Chassis
  • Seasonic S12II 620W Power Supply
  • Front fans - 3x Corsair SP120 Performance Edition ~2350 RPM (these are way louder than the stock fans!)
  • Center bracket fans - 3x Corsair SP120 Quite Edition ~1450 RPM
  • Rear fans - 2x stock 80mm fans that come with the case
  • CPU Fan - Noctua NH-L9i
  • Motherboard - ASUS P8B-X
  • CPU - Xeon E3-1220 - 3.1ghz (LGA1155)
  • RAM - 2x - Kingston Technology ValueRAM 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC CL9 DIMM (16GB total)
  • LSI 9220-8i in IT Mode + motherboard SATA for disks
  • 6x 4TB Toshiba MD04ACA400 in RAIDZ2
  • 6x 2TB Hitachi (5200rpm model) in RAIDZ2

As you can see, it's pretty damn messy to cable when you have no backplane!

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The front fans and also the rear fans are powered using chained molex adaptors which is certainly messy. The center bracket fans are plugged straight into the motherboard. I'm considering one of those fan controllers that have something like 8x 3pin fan headers powered by a single molex, which can then either float in the case or be mounted somewhere. Not sure yet if I should replace the rear 80mm fans or not. There is a single fan header empty near that end of the motherboard, running one off that would be neater than the molex.

It took quite some time to choose a power supply for this build. This PSU was chosen based on how I could distribute the rail amperage for the disks. You will find it's not really possible to use the chained SATA power due to how close the drives are together when bending the cable. A bunch of SATA power and SATA>Molex splitters have been used, however everything is distributed so that no single cable has too many drives so that the rails are not overloaded.

Ambient temperatures are pretty high here. I'm yet to do a full load/temp test on the CPU since changing all of the cooling from stock - previously when the ambient temp was ~27c the CPU at ~90% load was hitting ~65c on all cores - not great considering the intel rated max for this CPU is apparently 69c.

I think if you live somewhere with an ambient temperature that sits around 20c, you'd be totally fine using all of the stock cooling for this case.

This article was updated on October 3, 2021