4U Rackmount Server Case Chassis with 24 Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS Drive Bays

This is a great server case if you are new to servering (lol). The unit was $500, and it is nice to have a backplane for the hard drives instead of a wire to each individual drive, and having the hard drives protected in their ow bay. I installed all my drives and it just worked. Plenty of room to make it your own. I have had this 2 days and it has been so much fun. $500, somewhat on and investment, but I had most of the internals. Update: Running for a couple of weeks now, and it is still awesome!!

This is a high quality case, but the hard drive trays are a bit flawed: the bottom of the tray is metal, and it's not isolated. Left to its own devices it could touch the bottom of your hard drive, where it'd find the hard drive's PCB. This can be easily fixed by applying some electrical tape to the tray, but IMO, this problem should not exist from the factory - it'd be trivial for the manufacturer to ship the trays pre-isolated. Additionally, the fans are somewhat noisy, however the rear fans can be adjusted to reasonable levels through your motherboard controller. All in all, this is currently the most reasonable option if you need to run more than 14 drives. Also works with the drives "shucked" from external enclosures.

The case is about what you expect when you cheap out and try to avoid paying for what a quality case would cost which is about twice as much. With the Supermicro CSE-846 out of stock everywhere or two times as expensive as it was , there are limited options The Good - Fits 24 drives without issue, all drive slots worked out of the box as did all leds - Case fan grills were nice, as were ability to slot fans in fan wall in without screws encased in grills. - Enough room to fit cables into backplane without removing fanwall if fans and cages are removed, even with big hands that don't fit into tight spaces. - Decent Airflow - Artic P12 Fans (bought separately) are able to keep 7200rpm enterprise drives under 50C (just barely) with server 2/3s full. Drives are louder than fans The Bad - no standoffs included (Yes I searched the package thoroughly, they were not there), and they are of non standard size so not easily substituted. I was lucky in I had some extras from a Rosewill build that fit the holes, but they were too short for the pci-e cards to line up and had to be install without their brackets (with the bracket they did not fully slot) - screws were overly tightened. Result was that when removing the fan wall during install, completely stripped a screw head, and had to drill it out. Several others were similar but avoided the same fate. - fan wall bracket backplane turned PWM fans into molex, and had to be bypassed for PWM support. - no manual, no specifications on size screws and standoffs. Be Aware - did not test noise of stock fans after other reviews, just went ahead and bought Artic P12 Maxs. Overall - As a builder who had plenty of spare parts ahead of time meant lack of standoffs was not a dealbreaker, and was willing to deal with the downsides to save money and was worth it for me. - For most people the cost of 24x HHDs dwarfs the cost of a case that can hold them, and should probably pony up what it costs for something like the silverstone 24 bay hotswap or 45 drives HL15.

This is the best thing ever for price. I put a micro-ATX board in it, SAS card 4 port, 4 drives (20TB) to start, 13900-K processor with 64gb of DDR RAM. Because my setup was so small, I even mounted the water cooler fan (one fan with heat sink) in front of the 3 orange fans. I WRITE THIS SO IT CAN HELP OTHERS. I was very unsure based on some of the feedback, but the one person who posted the pictures was right a spot on. Note someone complained they didn't have the motherboard screw things. It's a small bag of 4 smaller bags that's in the box. It's not packed in the server. I could have easily thrown this way. Make sure to take open it and dump everything and should see it. When I exceed 16 drives, I'll upgrade the motherboard for another card slot (would need for the last 8).

Picked this up to run freenas. I was skeptical of the quality of the case given the price but it’s actually pretty well built - all the drives are picked up and my server motherboard, power supply and whatnot all fits. It even has a removable piece to mount another 3.5” drive (but I mounted 2 x 2.5” ssds) It took about 1 month to get here but it was worth the wait - Amazon quoted 30-45 days so it was spot on.