Budgetary/procurement red tape can make it difficult to get new gear in a timely manner, so sometimes we need to get a little creative with repurposing older stuff (just like I do at home). Yesterday I was finally able to rack a "new to us" 4U server and populate all of the drive bays. The chassis was cobbled together out of spare/discarded parts scrounged from other departments, and IT found us a couple of cases of "new old stock" HDDs in a storeroom which provided most of the disks.
Here's a pic of the drive bays (box is pulled halfway out of the rack) right after all of the drives were installed:
The front half of the enclosure has 48 hot swap bays; the rear half (not visible) contains the motherboard, disk controllers, and PSUs. Yes, fully loaded, these things are HEAVY!
A few years ago when I first saw this style of chassis, my initial reaction was "WTF, how do those drives get enough airflow? The ones in the middle will cook themselves!" Turns out if you don't care about noise level, you just keep throwing fans at the problem... 6 of them, in this case (3 pushing air in from the front and 3 pulling at mid-chassis).
As long as your datacenter cooling is adequate, the drives are fine...After some issues getting our imaging server configured correctly (we don't add physical servers to our setup that often so there were a couple of false starts on my part), the box booted right up, imaged itself to the latest version of our test branch, and detected and formatted all 48 drives (fully automatic, other than I had to manually tell it a couple of the repurposed ones were OK to overwrite, since they weren't blank). 288TB of spinning rust ready for duty!
