Very interesting.
I've ordered the cheapest one with the SFF-8087 (6 Gbps) non-expander backplane. The delivery window is December 26 to January 17th which strongly suggests it will ship from China. That makes me wonder how they are able to offer a significantly lower price on Amazon US than on Aliexpress.
It looks like these ZhenLoong units have affected the price of the extremely comparable 24 bay
RROYJJ chassis which has been on Amazon for a couple years (in fact ZhenLoong's product photos are literally comparing against the chassis currently sold under the RROYJJ name). It is nice to see some more competition in this space.
I have built storage servers before in:
* A variety of desktop PC cases.
*
Rosewill RSV-L4500U (4U 15 bay non-hot-swap) - good price, but it is awful to swap HDDs or fans
*
Rosewill RSV-L4412U (4U 12 bay hot swap) - good, quiet, but I feel it is overpriced for just 12 bays
*
SilverStone RM43-320-RS (4U 20 bay hot swap) - good but significantly louder than Rosewill cases
Based on pictures and specs I am expecting the ZhenLoong to be very similar in features and performance to the SilverStone, but with the obvious advantage of being half the price and having 4 more drive bays in the same rack height. And it looks like I'll have to find sliding rails for it. So a bit more than half price.
ZhenLoong Chassis Review
I've had the case for about a week. It is the cheapest model with the SFF-8087 (6 Gbps) non-expander backplane.
It is not great but it gets the job done.
Quality Issues
Similar to what user
randalldeflagg said about his in a post below, I had some issues with hot swappable components not aligning well.
One of the hot swap fans would not slot back in properly due to its power connector not quite lining up with the pins on the PCB it slots onto. Just mashing the fan down into its slot would cause at least one of the power or speed control pins to bend out of the way. I had to file down some of the plastic on the fan's power connector to make it fit better.
Here's the part I had to file off. This picture is from a generic stock photo I found online, but the fans in the case used the same connector.
This seems to be a case of sloppy part selection on ZhenLoong's end. The socket on the PCB that this slotted into had a plastic fin sticking up that tried to occupy the same space as this plastic guide. I'm not really sure why this wasn't an issue on the other two fans. Anyway, it was fairly easy to fix.
The other issue was with the backplane alignment. The backplane is split into two independent and seemingly identical sections (each connecting 12 drives). The top backplane was fine. The bottom backplane was slightly misaligned making it very difficult to seat all the hard drives in properly. My fix was basically the same as
randalldeflagg's fix; install some drives in the corners and then loosen all the screws of the backplane to allow it to align properly to the correct position, then tighten the screws again. It is tight working in there with the fan mounting bracket so you either need to remove that or use a very short phillips screwdriver. I ended up using a phillips bit with a socket wrench.
As a minor gripe, the lid of the chassis mounts with 4 screws. A toolless design this is not.
Fan Noise
The noise level is very low, easily drowned out by the SilverStone RM43-320-RS chassis I have below it. These seem to be very quiet fans and I have not heard them ramp up (but they do spin at least).
HDD Temperatures
Due to the dense packing of hard drives and quiet fans, the HDD temperatures are a little higher than I'm used to seeing. All 24 of my hard drives are WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA 6G 3.5" 7200RPM Enterprise HDD - WUH721414ALE604. All installed so there are no empty bays. Running more or less idle in TrueNAS, and all spinning 24/7. The temperatures range from
41°C to
48°C, averaging
45.6°C. This is in a basement room at decently cool room temperature. 5°C to 60°C is the rated temperature range for these drives so I am not really worried and I am sure I could figure out a way to increase airflow if I was worried.
For comparison, another chassis in the same rack, a Rosewill RSV-L4412U (4U 12 bays, fully utilized with 6TB drives) also running TrueNAS with drives spinning 24/7, is averaging 36°C with similar low noise levels. That is nearly 10°C cooler. This is understandable as the Rosewill chassis only fits half as many drives in the same space, and the drives are also different with lower RPMs and lower capacity. I'd expect lower temperatures.
For another point of comparison, the SilverStone RM43-320-RS chassis also in the same rack (4U 20 bays, only half populated with a mix of 8-14 TB disks), is much louder and has an average disk temperature of 33.6C running unraid with the disks spinning.
HDD Trays
It came with 25 HDD trays (one spare) and none arrived broken. However they are all made of conductive metal. I really don't want any drives shorting out so when I install drives in metal trays I cover the drive's PCB with kapton tape. I did that here.
Rackmounting Rails
The seller was unable to advise about sliding rails, but the package included a set of non-sliding rails which I did not use. I had a Rosewill RSV-R28LX sliding rail kit (at least I think that was the model number; it was one of Rosewill's kits for sure) available and it fit well enough. It does not quite let the case extend completely out of my rack and there's about a 1cm gap keeping the case from sliding all the way into my rack, but it was the best I could do with this kit and it is "close enough". Since I don't have another chassis immediately above this one, I can still get the lid off and swap PCIe cards and whatnot.
Final Thoughts
It isn't a perfect case, but it is priced well and I would buy it again, at least until something better comes along.
