I have a different (probably minority) opinion on this matter. IMO, SM build quality is significantly better. More on this below...
SM fans are standard 92mm, at least on the 846 and 836 chassis I've worked with. They could be swapped for lower speed/quieter 92mm fans. I do think SM has a bad rep for noise though. However, if you use a SM motherboard, then the fans are intelligently controlled. My 836 chassis is loud as a jet engine when all fans are running at full speed, but that only happens at boot time. The rest of the time, my system is mostly idle, and while not "quiet", the system is on par with my old Norco 4220 system w/120mm 1200 RPM fans. Granted, if my house was particularly hot, or I ran my system at full load, the fans would ramp up. But in that case, I'd need high airflow (i.e. loud) fans in a Norco just the same.
Back to my SM quality argument. These things may or may not matter to you, but here are some considerations when looking at Norco versus SM:
- With SM, rails are included. And they are really nice, high-quality, tool-less ball-bearing rails. I don't know what these would cost to purchase separately, but Dell charges about $150 for similar rails on their servers. I think most people who rack their home servers are probably using the el-cheapo $50 rail kits, but...
- Last I checked, there are no decent rails that actually work with the Norco 422x chassis! I have the previous-gen Norco 4020 chassis that can be racked with the cheaper rail kits. But with my old 4220, the case was too wide to be used with commonly available rails. The only kit I found that fit was the one sold on Norco's retail site (ipcdirect), and those weren't ball-bearing (metal-on-metal), and only allowed the case to slide out about 2/3 the way---which kind of defeats the purpose of rails in the first place (how do you change a PCI card without completely unracking the case?).
- The power button on my 4220 broke. First it was extremely flaky (i.e. only worked every 1 in 10 pushes), then the plastic on the case actually poked through, which in turn completely broke the switch. Even for a cheap case, I think the power button is something you should expect to just work and last for the life of the case.
- If you swap the Norco's central fan mounting plate from the stock 4x92mm to 3x120mm one, and you replace all the fans (including the two rear 92mm (or is it 80mm) fans) with ones that are of equal quality to the ones Supermicro uses (Sanyo-Denki), you're going to spend at least another $100.
- The Supermicro chassis offer several options: you can have "integrated breakout" style like the Norco 422x series (SM's "A" series), or you can have one-to-one SATA cables like Norco's older 402x series (SM's "TQ" line), or you can have an integrated expander via SM's "E" series. For the typical home server, the integrated expander may be ideal, since you can get away with only one SAS card (e.g. m1015), and cable management is simplified (only one cable between the controller and chassis backplane).
- Redundant power supplies are probably not needed in a home server, but they are standard in most (all?) storage-oriented SM chassis. And the newer ones are gold-level efficiency.
- On my 4020, I went to remove a SATA cable from the backplane, and the whole SATA receptacle came out with the cable.
- It's a small detail, but quite high on the annoyance list: the HDD screws that come with Norco products are made from metal that is way too soft. I have to make sure I screw them in semi-loosely, since they seem to auto-tighten on their own over time (from vibration?). And then when I go to unscrew them, there is an extremely high likelihood that the screwdriver will actually deform the "+", and make it virtually impossible to actually remove the screw. I haven't had to drill out a screw yet, but I've come extremely close. The Norco HDD screws are good for about one use, and they're done.
- I have no personal experience with this, but it's not too hard to find anecdotal experience of other quality-control issues with the Norco chassis. At a minimum, you'll probably have to re-align the "backplane" boards so they actually line up with your drives; at worst, you may have to RMA a board or two.
Do all those features added up justify the 3x difference in price between Norco and Supermicro? For me, yes, but I certainly can't argue that everyone has these requirements. Really, for me, it all boiled down to the rack mounting issue. If you don't plan to rack your chassis, it's a moot point. To be honest, when I purchased my 836, I initially felt like I went overboard just to fix the racking issue. But when I actually received the case and started working with it, I realized how much more I actually got for the money.
Another big issue for me was time: the SM chassis (particularly when paired with a SM board) "just works". With a 60-hour/week job and a 14-month old, I don't have time to continue my search for rails that fit, broken power buttons, ruined SATA receptacles, fan swaps, and other potential issues.
Just for fun: say you buy the Norco 4224 for $400. Now add $100 for the fan swap, $150 for a high current, gold-level PSU, $150 for a premium rail kit. Now the Norco's price is $800, and is more closely matched to the SC846A-R1200B, which can be had at Wiredzone.com for $1100. So now it's only a $300 difference. That could be eaten up quite quickly in terms of your time (and frustration) if you have any QA problems and/or incur shipping costs due to returns. And it still doesn't solve the racking problem.
Now consider all the costs associated with a home server that are chassis-neutral. Say you use a board like the X9SCL-F+, and an E3 CPU, plus 8 GB of ECC RAM. That's another $450. You boot from a USB drive you already had, so that's free. Now you fill up all 24 bays with 2 TB 5400 RPM drives. Using pre-flood sales prices, that's $80/drive or $1920. Grand total of $2370 for the chassis-independent stuff. Add in the chassis (with accessories, as above), and it's $3170 for the Norco route or $3470 for the SM route. Still a $300 difference, but in the context of spending over 10x that on the entire system, it doesn't seem like so much.
Additionally... using a chassis with an integrated expander opens up some other savings potential. You can now get away with only one SAS card, so you can now use a much cheaper consumer motherboard. I used to promote the Biostar A760G-M2+ because it was one of the few consumer boards you could buy that: (1) actually allowed you to take advantage of AMD's ECC support, (2) is quite energy-efficient, and (3) lets you use stuff other than video cards in the PCIe x16 slot. (Of course, if you used this board in a SM chassis, you'll be faced with the jet-engine fan problem.)
I am happy with my SM chassis, and don't regret buying it. But I will admit that it's overkill for most home-use scenarios. But I admit that only by standing by the opinion that the Norco chassis are too cheap. I'd like to see Norco come out with a "gen-3" or "premium" series that fills the middle-ground between their current offerings and pro-grade stuff like SM. If that line addressed all my above issues, then I'd convert back.
Sorry if that came across as a rant, it wasn't my intent! My point was just to say that there is a legitimate case for the Supermico chassis in the home, in the right circumstances. I was just trying to highlight some features that I feel might be over-shadowed by the SM's price tag.
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