Any affordable cases that can hold 14 HDDs and 3 SSDs?
My unRAID server has 12 data drives, 2 parity drives, and 3 SSD cache pools. Plus dual Xeons on a SuperMicro ATX board.
I currently have the Deep Silence 5 case by Nanoxia. But things are cramped. I've filled all the standard drive bays, plus put in a 4-bay 5.25 enclosure. But I still have one of the SSDs just floating around.
What would a better case to put all this stuff in?
17 replies
Fair question, difficult to answer.
I bought the Deep Silence around $180. So maybe $250 or so/less? Flexible. Definitely not Storinator prices (though I wish they sold the chassis separate).
Did you have something else in mind?
Ah yeah, that's not bad. I do get that this is a fairly niche idea so paying extra was expected. $400 isn't outside the realm of idea. Thanks! Its the big, $1k+ server case costs that was worrying me.
I have a 12 drive setup in a define 7 (not xl) and it's working fine. As long as I keep the filters decently clean from dust the temps are fine.
Around 40C
You need to obtain the drive bays separately though.
fractal design meshify 2 xl
Have you looked at PCPartPicker with it's filters? There's only a few full atx cases with that many drive slots.
The problem that I find is that most cases only say they support x drives, but with some additional (official) drive cages can support more, but stuff like PC Part Picker doesn't show that, so hard to search that way.
I would put that in your original post next time. It's hard to know what kind of things to recommend if we don't know what you have already looked at. Knowing that there are standard ways of increasing drive count (such as the 4x drive pay you are using now). You can search by internal drive count and reduce your search significantly.
That said I think the fractal design 7 xl looks good.
I got an old atx case off craigslist with 9 5.25” hotswap bays and put in 3x 5bay hotswap cages in the front. plenty of room for the smaller SSDs inside
Came with a free i5 system and a 1050ti I use for transcoding.
Can you get bigger drives instead? So you have to use fewer of them?
all casez can fit that if you try hard enough
This was my thought as well. Most cases could fit 14 hdds and 3 ssds if you don't put anything else in them and don't actually mount the drives to racks/bays.
And nobody in their right minds would set up such a system.
This looks like a good(?) way to have lots of drives connected to one machine: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/wiki/Real-World-Deployments I don't have any experience like this, I have the CS380 with standard loadout... just thought it was a funny way to add lots more drives.