I have a friend/client who wants me to build a new custom workstation for him. He insists that he wants a single, stand-alone chassis similar to a full-tower style case. It needs to house a dual processor E-ATX motherboard, four (4) optical burners and at least sixteen (16) to twenty (20) 3.5" hard drives (huge RAID-50 array). His primary application is video NLE.
I know there are rack-mounts for such things; however, I haven't seen a full-tower style case configured this way (although there is certainly plenty of room, given a reasonable layout). What I envision is a chassis with 16 drive bays in its base (4 columns of 4 drives each would comfortably fit typical full-tower dimensions with room for intake and exhaust fans at the front and rear) and 7-to-9 5.25" front bays, 4 of which would house the optical drives and 3 would house the extra 4 hard drives in a front-mount, 3-bay, 4-drive caddy. Power supply would probably be one of the extended-length 1000-1200 watt models. Video will be one of nVidia's high-end professional graphics cards.
Anyone know of such a monster? Suggestions greatly appreciated.
P.S. His current system is a standard mid-tower chassis with four (4) 4-drive cases stacked next to it -- each housing four (4) 500GB hard drives. We are probably going to replace the drives with 1.5TB Seagate drives, tripling his total array space using the Adaptec 51645 array controller.