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Poster:	zippy	Date:	Jan 20, 2005 4:45am
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	petabox case design

I read in one of the earlier threads that you couldn't find the case you wanted as a standard part, and so you had a custom case designed.

I've been looking at a number of 2u and 4u cases recently, and I'm wondering if the customizations you had done were for airflow or something else?

In looking at rackmount cases, I am surprised at the monoculture of designs. Are there any OEM suppliers doing interesting rackmount cases - like doing ducted airflow, or well designed front panels like Apple's Xserve?

--Pat

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Poster:	CR Saikley	Date:	Jan 20, 2005 6:39pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: petabox case design

As you suspected, airflow was a big part of it.

We wanted to keep the disks as cool as possible, and keep all human access on a single side. This dictated placing the disks on the intake side, and everything else on the exhaust side.

Once we embarked on the custom design we were better able to optimize not only cooling and access, but also density, internal wiring, mechanical stability, ergonomics, manufacturability, serviceability and cable management.

None of that would have been possible with an off-the-shelf enclosure.

~CR