Hi,
Posting here because my own personal research hasn't produced much fruit, and I just had a funny experience with a rackmount Logic Case... You can skip to the end to read that story, if you are interested.
I am looking for case recommendations. I would like something that can store a large number of 3.5 inch drives, but which doesn't take up a crazy amount of space. Exact number isn't that important, and I will explain in more detail later...
It can be either a tower style case or rack mount. I am intending on putting this system in a cupboard, and so I cannot fit a full length rack mount server. In other words, if it is to be a rack mount chassis, it has to be at least a shorter depth form factor.
It can be either ATX or m-ATX, but must support at least m-ATX as I already have the motherboard to go in it.
Finally, it cannot be crazy expensive. I can't afford enterprise grade gear. I looked at some Logic Case alternatives to the failure of a case that I recently bought, but all the ones with hot-swap bays were starting at £250, which is too much. (About 300 USD for our friends in the US - yes I am in the UK btw.)
Regarding number of drives, obviously the more the better. I am looking to build a system which can fit around 12-15 drives. I currently have a case which can sort of do this, but not quite. It can fit 5x 3.5 inch drives on sledge rails at the bottom and has 3x 5.25 inch spaces above, which with the correct converter I believe I could convert into a further 5x 3.5 inch slots. This is a total of 10, which is 2 short of 12. The reason for having 12 drives is that this fits 2x 6 drive RAID 6 arrays. At the moment I can have 2x 5 disk RAID 6 arrays, but this leaves no space for boot drives. The reason for having 2 separate RAID 6 devices is so that I can leave on in my current residence, and take another to a new location with me in the future. But this is becoming a bit TLDR-y, so I won't elaborate further.
Because of the price of other rack mount stuff, I started looking at tower cases, but most modern "gaming oriented" towers contain only a few spaces for a few SSD's, and maybe 2x 3.5inch HDDs if you are lucky. Gone are the days where gamers stuffed their rigs with many 100 GB drives in order to get enough space for boot drives, raid arrays for games to stay on, plus extra drives for testing Linux systems, or whatever else...
So far I have only found the Antec NSK4100 and Antec NSK-4000B. The former claims to fit 6x 3.5 inch HDD + 3x 5.25 inch, which with a converter becomes 11x 3.5 inch HDD in total.
This isn't actually an improvement over an old CoolerMaster Storm Scout case which I have here currently holding my NAS system. This fits 5x 3.5 inch on sledges, and then a further 5x 5.25 inch bays... which means I can convert 3 of those 5.25s into 5x 3.5 inch HDD slots, plus put some other adapter in the remaining 5.25 inch bays. For your interest, the current NAS houses 4x 2.5 inch SSDs in 2x 3.5 inch spaces for 2x 1TB Raid 1 SSD arrays. These store things which are critical to my work, plus a load of music / important personal files. There are then a further 3x 1TB HDDs which I use as scratch space. None of the scratch drives are full, and I don't care that much if they fail, but it would be better if the data was on a Raid 6 array.
--- The Logic Case Story ---
The case I bought was a Logic Case SC-34390 which claimed to fit 8x 3.5 inch drives. Short version: It doesn't. Not unless you have a very low profile CPU cooler and don't want to plug anything into the motherboard. The mounts for the drives overhang the motherboard area when a drive is inserted by about 5cm. They are arranged as 2 racks of 4 drives. With the low profile-ish passive cooler I have in there now I can get 1 drive in the top slot of each rack, and that's all. Drives in lower slots closer to the motherboard interfere with the cooler. With an even smaller cooler I might get 4 drives in, but any more start to interfere with the top of the RAM on the left side.
TLDR; don't buy this case, it may be cheap-ish but it doesn't fit the drives in which it claims to. Perhaps it would work with an ITX board but I doubt it.
--- TL;DR ---
Looking for NAS case, should be
> cheap-ish (under £100 / $150)
> store lots of 3.5 inch drives
> m-ATX compatible
> rack or tower (don't care) but not 650 mm long because it won't fit in my cupboard (550mm is probably about the max length I can fit leaving space for cables)
Posting here because my own personal research hasn't produced much fruit, and I just had a funny experience with a rackmount Logic Case... You can skip to the end to read that story, if you are interested.
I am looking for case recommendations. I would like something that can store a large number of 3.5 inch drives, but which doesn't take up a crazy amount of space. Exact number isn't that important, and I will explain in more detail later...
It can be either a tower style case or rack mount. I am intending on putting this system in a cupboard, and so I cannot fit a full length rack mount server. In other words, if it is to be a rack mount chassis, it has to be at least a shorter depth form factor.
It can be either ATX or m-ATX, but must support at least m-ATX as I already have the motherboard to go in it.
Finally, it cannot be crazy expensive. I can't afford enterprise grade gear. I looked at some Logic Case alternatives to the failure of a case that I recently bought, but all the ones with hot-swap bays were starting at £250, which is too much. (About 300 USD for our friends in the US - yes I am in the UK btw.)
Regarding number of drives, obviously the more the better. I am looking to build a system which can fit around 12-15 drives. I currently have a case which can sort of do this, but not quite. It can fit 5x 3.5 inch drives on sledge rails at the bottom and has 3x 5.25 inch spaces above, which with the correct converter I believe I could convert into a further 5x 3.5 inch slots. This is a total of 10, which is 2 short of 12. The reason for having 12 drives is that this fits 2x 6 drive RAID 6 arrays. At the moment I can have 2x 5 disk RAID 6 arrays, but this leaves no space for boot drives. The reason for having 2 separate RAID 6 devices is so that I can leave on in my current residence, and take another to a new location with me in the future. But this is becoming a bit TLDR-y, so I won't elaborate further.
Because of the price of other rack mount stuff, I started looking at tower cases, but most modern "gaming oriented" towers contain only a few spaces for a few SSD's, and maybe 2x 3.5inch HDDs if you are lucky. Gone are the days where gamers stuffed their rigs with many 100 GB drives in order to get enough space for boot drives, raid arrays for games to stay on, plus extra drives for testing Linux systems, or whatever else...
So far I have only found the Antec NSK4100 and Antec NSK-4000B. The former claims to fit 6x 3.5 inch HDD + 3x 5.25 inch, which with a converter becomes 11x 3.5 inch HDD in total.
This isn't actually an improvement over an old CoolerMaster Storm Scout case which I have here currently holding my NAS system. This fits 5x 3.5 inch on sledges, and then a further 5x 5.25 inch bays... which means I can convert 3 of those 5.25s into 5x 3.5 inch HDD slots, plus put some other adapter in the remaining 5.25 inch bays. For your interest, the current NAS houses 4x 2.5 inch SSDs in 2x 3.5 inch spaces for 2x 1TB Raid 1 SSD arrays. These store things which are critical to my work, plus a load of music / important personal files. There are then a further 3x 1TB HDDs which I use as scratch space. None of the scratch drives are full, and I don't care that much if they fail, but it would be better if the data was on a Raid 6 array.
--- The Logic Case Story ---
The case I bought was a Logic Case SC-34390 which claimed to fit 8x 3.5 inch drives. Short version: It doesn't. Not unless you have a very low profile CPU cooler and don't want to plug anything into the motherboard. The mounts for the drives overhang the motherboard area when a drive is inserted by about 5cm. They are arranged as 2 racks of 4 drives. With the low profile-ish passive cooler I have in there now I can get 1 drive in the top slot of each rack, and that's all. Drives in lower slots closer to the motherboard interfere with the cooler. With an even smaller cooler I might get 4 drives in, but any more start to interfere with the top of the RAM on the left side.
TLDR; don't buy this case, it may be cheap-ish but it doesn't fit the drives in which it claims to. Perhaps it would work with an ITX board but I doubt it.
--- TL;DR ---
Looking for NAS case, should be
> cheap-ish (under £100 / $150)
> store lots of 3.5 inch drives
> m-ATX compatible
> rack or tower (don't care) but not 650 mm long because it won't fit in my cupboard (550mm is probably about the max length I can fit leaving space for cables)