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@@the_block-99 My old case for the last 3-4 years (that I just stopped using) was a Corsair 750D with extra hard drive bays I bought directly from Corsair. It can fit 24 hard drives in the tower, though not the most stable fashion. lol. It has worked well though, and never had a drive die on me due to the vibration of them all. Used a 24i HBA to connect the drives. This was a great case for the money, and kept me through all my storage expansions the past few years. I think I got the case for around $180 or something. Each drive expansion bay costs $10, and I needed 6 of them. So total around $250 for a brand new case to have 24 drives worth of space. It did seem a great deal to me, nothing else I had found came close to the number of drives for the cost. I have now replaced it with two 36 bay SuperMicro 4U chassis that I connect through a 16e HBA. These cost me $450 each, so $900 for a way to store 72 drives now. lol. Though that isn't quite true, as the fans were way too loud and I spent a good deal more on new fans, fan splitter, and PWM controller. Technically If I had gone with three Corsair 750D's it would be an even better deal for storing that many drives (72 drive space for $750), but having that many towers around wasnt ideal for me. I now have a network rack and so the two 4U chassis just mount into it and that works better space wise.
@@the_block-99 Wow. This channel has some badly set comment filters on it and deleted my very long post :( Anyway, yes corsair 750 d works very well. With extra expansion bays it stores 24 drives in 1 tower for pretty cheap. Expansion bays model is CC-8930032
Fractal Cases are great, I have a Define R6 for my primary nas server (4/11 drives populated), and an 804 for my backup server (just 1 or 10 so far). Got a good deal on the 804 for $55 including about $80+ of Noctua fans. Anti-vibration discs are great too
Another DIY case option: Antec Performance Series P101 Silent. Big and heavy, but quality and quiet for just over $100. 8x3.5" bays with toolless (but plastic) caddies, 2x2.5" SSD mounts, PLUS it has a 5.25" bay. I installed an Icy Dock 4x2.5" insert into the 5.25" drive for the additional space for SATA SSDs. This gives a lot of flexibility to add SSDs for app/VM use. It is now my main TrueNAS machine. This replaced my Cooler Master N400. The N400 is an even cheaper option for a DIY NAS (currently $75 on Amazon) but is more along the lines of cheaper, light weight metal case. The N400 now holds my 2nd backup TrueNAS system.
I had that fractal in my shopping cart 5 months ago and was so close to purchasing it. Ended up deciding to get a rack and get some enterprise gear and I’m so glad I did.
The Define series of cases are great for home NAS builds. Had an R5 Define as my main PC case for years. I built a new system a couple of years back and repurposed some old kit in the R5 to be a home NAS. Easily holds 8 HDDs with ease and (if I remember rightly) can fit more in if you get creative. Quality is solid and I also put it on wheels - well, a wheeled tray which was mainly to lift it off the carpet. Being older, they can be picked up for cheap money in the used market, but just make sure all the drive cages and trays are included. Top work Fractal.
15:00 A lot of seasoned datahoarders just kapton tape off the necessary pins on the drives to get going without power disable. I've personally had drives running for a few years like this without any issues.
I'm literally designing my 3.5" version of my 2.5" cages. but this time i'm using off the shelf caddies. The 4 bay 2.5 is available in printables for those interested :D Another cool case is the P101 Silent, I have 10x3.5 drive and 3x2.5 ssd (for now) as I've just designed a 4x2.5 cage to fit more in it!
I have the P100 and I can fit 6 3.5” HDDs stock, 9 if I use the dual 5.25” bays, but the only way I could do 10 or more is if I mount them to the ceiling where the exhaust fans would go. What’s the secret?
As a fellow UA-camr, I probably don’t comment as much on others’ content as I should, but I just want to say THANK YOU! I am only a few months into my personal self-hosting/homelab journey, but I have learned so much from your videos. There is never any clickbait, your videos are thorough, straight forward, honest, informative, and you openly discuss any issues/mistakes you run into during a project, which is INFINITELY helpful to people watching/learning from your videos. Overall just fantastic job and keep up the good work! I always look forward to your next upload.
I just build my DIY NAS in an IKEA kitchen cabinet, with 4 drawers inside. - First or top drawer is for networking - Second drawer is my Proxmox server - Third drawer is empty, for future expansion - Fourth or bottom drawer, is my DIY NAS... The cabinet costed me about 200 USD, and could easily fit a psu + motherboard + 18 drives, in each drawer... I currently have 6 x 18TB in raid 6, good for about 70 TB usable storage. Maintenance is as simple as, opening one of the drawers...
@@Slay1337pl Drilled two holes in the front of each drawer, for 120 mm fans. Instead of fully closed door, I put a grid cover on top of it for airflow. Next upgrade would be some kind of dust filter, because it's missing that currently...
@@S3N0RMANNY Will try to make a recording this or next weekend. I just need to find someone with a phone, that doesn't suffer from potato cam syndrome...
Huge props for talking about the 3.3v power issue that A LOT of renewed drives have. Half my drives have this and it took me forever to figure out a proper solution. Yours is great, I did something similar by removing the 3.3v pin from the PSU side of the SATA power cable for those drives.
The Meshify cases also have the "NAS" layout since it is the same case just with mesh front ant top panels.. It also has the solid side panels. That is what I have and gives you better breathability than the Define series. Got a 5 pack of Artic P14 140mm fans and a Noctua cooler and I almost never notice the sound of it once I tuned the case fans down a little. I set them to be essentially a static 800rpm. The drives are the only thing you really hear from it since I decided to get enterprise drives.
Instead of the "cheap" case you're probably better off hunting 2nd hand stores or asking your local SI. I have half a dozen old style monster cases that are just too dated to build a modern gaming PC in. Those giant cases of yesteryear often had ridiculous HDD mounting capacity, provisions for 200mm case fans, and are usually hanging out in someones storage collecting dust. I'd happily sell you all of mine for cheap just to clear out that closet.
agreed, local 2nd hand should be the best option, there is no $100 shipping cost, taxes and import duties, also old cases people want to get rid of usually have more hdd slots than modern ones as these are much common back in the days, I'd say $10-$30 CAD is a reasonable price or $5-20.
I got a 17 year old Thermaltake soprano dx for 5€, there are soooo many drive bays, 7x 3.5" bays 4x 5" on top of it which adapted could give even more drive space. Nevertheless you can reaaally feel the old design, top mounter PSU, no space in the back to route cables, although there's a plenty of room behind the hard drive bays for cables since they are facing the back of the case and not the side panel. I wish it was facing the panel, it would make adding and removing drives waaay easier, and I barely got space to add a GPU in. I found a GTX 970 for 35€ and I had to file a bit off the front to make it fit and it completely blocks a drive bay (maybe 1 and a half)
with enough work you can make any case a NAS when you have a 3d printer. I converted (hacked apart) a lenovo M82? all the guts were replaced. printed a custom front on it and a 8 bay 3.5mm hdd rack for it. its maybe 20mm longer due to the new front but all the drives fit in the case with a short txx psu and low profile ecc memory. keep in mind this pc is one of those super slim towers. if you have a 3d printer and want to actually design your own stuff, i can recommend it, my suggestion is to design in a modular way.
After contemplating a lot of SFF Node/Jonsbo NAS builds this video resonated with me and I ended up building my own version of your Define 7XL NAS using the same motherboard, but with used SAS storage drives in a Meshify 2 case. It's been a journey; the mobo BIOS was v1 and I had v2 CPU, the IPMI did not have default credentials, BMC controller firmware needed updating, LSI 3008 firmware needed flashing to IT, SAS drives have power disable feature. Finally got TrueNAS installed with all drives present and accounted for. Thanks for the inspiration.
I’m building my own case out of wood for a really strange DIY NAS server. It needs to be custom, because I’m putting two NUCs inside it and weird PSUs. So far I’ve spent about $70 on it. So I can’t buy one because of my odd requirements, but if I wasn’t being so weird a $90 case would definitely be worth it.
You should take some time consider the overall weight and make appropriate accomodations for airflow and heat dispersal. Wood has a really nice aesthetic, but a wooden box can get pretty heavy and wood doesn't shed heat well. Even back when wooden housings were common for computers and accessories, moderately thick sheet metal was also commonly involved.
If you don't need as many drives, the Meshify 2 is basically the Fractal Design 7 (non-XL). That is what I have for my backup NAS and it regularly goes on sale for just a little over $100
Part of the mojo with a used supermicro chassis is that you get hot swap drive trays, and the backplane exposes management features (for locating drives, inlet air temp, disk activity). What you don't get is a quiet solution. At best, it's pretty loud, and if your setup is running hot, it's quite loud. Also a noctua nhd12L will fit in a 4U case, and if your memory is of reasonable height, you can squeeze in a second fan in front for some extra handling.
I just finished a nas build with the classico storage case. Me and you had made the same discoveries about the hdd cables, and which side of case to route them. I am very pleased with the case, Budget was the biggest concern for me. Thanks for making this video very much enjoyed it.
A big reason I love unRAID for home NAS - you can start with two drives (well technically one, but you won't have parity), and you can add additional drives as you need or can afford. Or you can populate the server with whatever jumble of drives you currently have, and expand by replacing small drives with larger ones over time. Yes, there's some tradeoffs in terms of performance for sure, but the flexibility is a great option for budget conscious users, or people moving from a bunch of random drives in to a NAS.
I have a plain Pro, installed a HDD cage in the 5.25" slots so the case can now take 11 3.5" drives and 4 2.5" ones. With custom cages those 2.5" holders might be able to take 3.5" drives, if space allows.
@@samiraperi467 I also have the plain pro that's been built as a CCTV server. It's the best case I've ever built in. I will be buying another to replace my main server's case (and will be enjoying the issues that come with it) at some point.
They're both great cases, I have version 1 but kind of wish I nabbed the pro 2 for dual mobo option. Still aside from the ability to house 2 motherboards without mucking about the enthoo pro still has everything I actually need and then some.
i ended up building a couple of NAS devices from old core2duo motherboards and enterprise class refurb drives in a tower case with plenty of drive slots, running truenas. super cheap and great to reuse old hardware
Have my unraid server in an Antec P101S, 8x 3.5" and 2x2.5" drive bays and a ODD bay for Blu-ray drive. Really pleased with it, hosts Plex server and a mix of old and new hard drives drives ranging from 1TB to 10TB - drives from my old laptops, computers and consoles.
I might have to migrate my optiplex nas into this as I add more drives. Most of the nas noise I get right now is case resonance from the optiplex sheet metal.
Cool video, I was dubbing whether to do this or going with a rack and ended up with a R730. I actually have the same HGST drives with the power disable pin as well. You can actually use the same tape method you referred to earlier in the video on pin number three, but since the other two besides it are reserved you can actually tape over all three pins and the drive will work. This came in handy with the backplane from the R730, no space for those molex/sata adapters.
My NAS is in a Cooler Master N400 which is great as it holds a lot of drives and even though it only came with a couple toolless HDD brackets, I also 3D printed my own and it was about 70 bucks.
Fractal 7xl is an awesome case for a NAS. A little pricey but can comfortably hold 16 3.5" drives plus an additional 6 2.5" drives. The sound dampening panels actually work at taking the edge off. I have 7 very loud enterprise hard drives in the case in my room and you can barely hear it at night when it's writing data. That's with the solid side panel though, obviously if you go with the tempered glass you won't get the same noise dampening. The only downside it they aren't hot-swappable but they are relatively easy to replace.
In my opinion the best modern-day "old-school" case is the Phanteks Enthoo Pro. You can get the non-clear side panel option for around $100USD, it comes with support for lots of 3.5" drives, supports multiple 5.25" bays (people do NOT realize just how useful those still are in 2024), supports up to a 420mm liquid cooler in the top, ATX-L PSUs, eATX motherboards, has great build quality, and in general is a case that I deeply appreciate it's existence. Personally I scored a Rosewill Thor V2 when they still had some NOS off Newegg for $150USD around 2019, and it continues to still be the very best case I have ever built in (and that is saying a lot considering the thousands of cases I have worked with over the years), but I have no come to the point where I have maxed it out and need to go bigger. I am currently eyeing the Anidees Raider XL at $310USD.
I did this with my old BitFenix Shinobi case years ago. It can fit 8 3.5" drives inside, has 4 5.25" bays in the front so technically you can put there 4x 4 2.5" drives in. You can fit an ATX board inside, so with alot of PCIe x1 to SATA Adapters and a powersupply which begs you to kill it you can do this with a case from 2011 easily.
You can still find the Fractal Design Define R5 with some resellers, though they are getting harder to find. One of the greatest cases I've ever used to build a NAS or high-capacity DAS desktop. 8x 3.5" slide-in drive trays plus two external 5.25" bays you can fit another 3x 3.5" drives via an IcyDock FatCage. Lots of room for 140mm fans, a big CPU cooler and full-size ATX motherboard. I first bought three of these cases to build dual-boot Windows/Hackintosh editing stations about 10 years ago, and have kept recycling them for Proxmox and TrueNAS servers ever since.
I've had my NAS running in the 7 XL since the case came out. Its fully loaded at this point and super heavy. I love it. If the HL15 was cheaper I'd switch in a heartbeat though.
15:00 This is a feature WD uses for its external hard drives. The issue still presents itself with newer power supplies. If the drive detects 3.3volts on pin 3 of its power port it simply disables the hard drive. The reason for this is to prevent people from “shucking”; taking the hard drive out of a MyBook external hard drive and using it as an internal drive (usually cheaper than buying a stand alone hard drive).
On the bright side when you do expand, if you got your storage in a raidz you'll be able to expand 1 drive at a time in the near future with the new openzfs changes coming!
I also had good luck with a full tower BeQuiet DarkBase series. It's in similar price range to the Fractal DF 7 XL and has at least 10 slots for hard drives.
Check out the thread on L1Techs titled: "Good high-end NAS cases don’t exist, Should the community make one?" He's making a pretty nice looking 32 drive tower.
I did my home nas with an Antec Twelvehundred case and 4 3,5" bay to 5 hdd enclosure from amazon. 20 hdds of capacity plus a couple of ssds/m2 seems like the perfect combination for me. Old case but very usefull for this kind of projects.
I've used nearly the exact same drives from several sellers on amazon, with 3-5 year warranties. No problems yet. I even have balls of steel and used a used drive from them for my unraid Parity drive. I need to change that eventually. I'm going to get this cheap case. I enjoy your videos man they are chill. Proud to be a long time sub.
If anyone is still on the fence about the Define 7 case... It's an incredible case for a NAS. I absolutely love this thing. Highest quality case I've ever used. Been thinking about building a gaming PC in on as well.
I've got a Define 7 for my main PC's case, and love it. I went with the solid side panel for extra sound dampening foam, and I barely hear the thing. Next time I go to upgrade my main rig, I'll probably convert it into a server or NAS. Or I might go crazy and buy another :D
another case that i made my nas with was, GAMEMAX silent black case..it has 8 bays and costs 109.00..what i like about it is that the drives are mounted sideways and both sides of the hdd cage are open so you an access the cables and hard drives with ease...i built mine with consumer grade hardware for around 800 bucks. i bought 8 refurbished 4 tb hard drives..its been going strong for 3 years..only just now did i have to replace a hard drive.
Fractal Design Define R5 (10+2) and the Antec P101 Silent (10+1) are two cases that regularly dip under 100. The antec i've seen as low as 75 on sale some months back.
4-Pin Molex to SATA power adapters also bypasses the Power Disable feature in refurbished enterprise drives, since there is no 3.3v rail; just 5v and 12v, and can reuse the 4-pin molex most PSUs still have stuck on at least one cable line.
If you can get a case with front-facing 5.25 bays, you can put in an icydock and fit 4-6 2.5 drives in the bay, giving you access to your NAS drives without having open the case at all. (Have good airflow because that density runs warm.)
Thanks for pointing out the sata power spillter. I'm going to buy one asap. I was not aware that molex to sata are a fire hazard, those are the ones im using right now. I needed a splitter cable because i ran out of sata power ports
good builds Personally i went for the Antec P101 silent - kind of fits between these two cases (price of the dark rock but build quality of the fractal) Been really happy with it and the sound deadening is useful given it lives in the living room
i absolutely love the define 7 cases, my server is in a define 7 XL and my main pc is is a define 7. define 7 xl running with a dual socket with big coolers and every drivespot filled and still not feel crammed. main one runs 360mm rad and a 13900k rtx4090 system and also perform like a dream
Very cool video! Would love to see the same thing around ITX with a pico psu. Something smaller of course, maybe along the lines of 4x hdds that are high capacity?
@HardwareHaven at 20:48 , there is a loose header pin on the front panel IO. IDK if you had any issues with that but it looks to be half on just wanted to let you know! Love the Fractal Define R7 case. My Server is currently in an R5 because I had that as my old Gaming PC and its working great too albeit not as many drives to store. Love the channel!
The Define r6 is great too. Can take 8 x 3.5 drives total, comes with 6 trays, and is cheaper. Even more so when you consider not having to buy the extra drive sleds.
I built my own NAS, managed to get an Antec P101 Silent case from ebay for £90 back in January, i got a ASUS Prime B550M-K, Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and 32gb RAM. with an M.2 SATA adapter to add the additional SATA ports and i filled it with 8x 4TB drives and an M.2 for loader. using TRUNAS Scale and its been perfect since i built it. total cost was approx £550 (add additional cost for the drives but we dont count them as cost haha)
The Rosewill thor v2 was a good one to buy when it was still available. I got one new a couple years back. They aren’t in stock anymore, but boy do they hold a whole lot of drives.
I love my define 7xl. Glad it's working well for you too. I've always labeled my drives by their lot but watching you label them based on the serial (I think) made me completely rethink that. Thanks! It will be much easier to figure out which one is which. Such a simple thing, guess I'm complicating my builds more than necessary :P
I use the Define 7 as my daily driver w/ a solid side panel and the vented top (with a fan). It was one of the few that supported an optical drive and didn't "care" about RGB. I skipped the internal fan controller though since my motherboard had enough fan headers. It also supports a storage configuration, but not nearly as many drives. It wasn't as much as you quoted here, so that could be a good compromise.
I use the Fractal Design R5 for my NAS. Its a smaller version of the 7 XL, but still has 8 hard drive bays and with some adapters you can fit more in the 5 inch bays. It is also only around $125 with the same great build quality and cable management of the 7 XL.
Loved the video. I'm waiting for the day when I get to see you release a video of you taking the 3D printer and printing your own case as well as Dell like HDD caddy's to run your own 3D printed DIY NAS with let's say a ITX/micro ITX/mini ITX motherboard. You would need to print everything ABS filament due to the heat generated from the drives but I think it would be a fun project!
You can 3D print with nylon and fiber-reinforced nylon filaments as well, nylon has a melting point of 300-330C (depending on the nylon variant) not to mention how strong it is, especially carbon fiber or glass fiber reinforced filament.
I just got an used Define S for about $30, I will to try to fit 3 of those 3x5.25->5x3.5 cages ($18 each from Ali) on the front fan mounts, possibly more later. The real jank comes from the hardware that will be running it - TopTon N5105 miniPC with a m.2 to 6xSATA adapter for now, I intend to get a m.2 to PCIe riser and put a real HBA (choking on PCIe 3.0x1) in there when I run out of spaces for drives.
I have a Fractal Define 6 XL that has been sitting around since I swapped cases recently. I have been thinking it would be a great server case, so I decided to not get rid of it. I have a server rack, but the noise and heating issues of having a server in it have been keeping me from doing that. I'm glad to see someone else using these cases for a server.
If someone wants to do a cheap nas even cheaper then these then grab an older Dell server T320, T420, R730XD, R520 most of those can be had for under $200 used without drives. It will have idrac at that point also (ipmi) and the hardware raid cards (perc controller) can be reflashed with a "IT mode" firmware and it will allow the hard drives to be passed through to your system.
I first bought r520 and fill it up with all 14 drives. But during time i get it is little loud (fan goes between 2600-3200rpm and sometime during big cpu usage goes to 4800). And its little big :) But then i found my perfect one. T420 i best combo if you ask me. Its old but cheap. I get mine for 250 eur with 16gb ram and dual cpu but single power supply and no dedicated idrac card. You can upgrade it to 128gb+ ram and can get 2x10c/20t cpu @3.5ghz and have support for full length double video cards (2x8pin). Down side is it ony have 8 bays for hdd but 3x5.25" bay cage with 5 more will work fine
@iceserbia so I got a T320 for free. Then I was like I want two cpu's then bought a T420 motherboard in the T320 case, then since I work In the IT field I was able to get used "failing" hard drives from customers 2 TB SATAs, so after that I built a 16TB raw nas raid 6 so I could have 2 failing drives. But after a while found out that TrueNas doesn't like Raid cards it wants to touch the drives so hince the "IT Mode" firmware, after doing that mod I stopped having corrupted raid arrays then I had a customer retire a lot of systems and they gave me the ram cause they just had to have the system so right now I have T420 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2470 cpu's with 200gb of ram, and 16TB raw storage or a little under 12tb with Z2 raid (zfs version of raid 6) put a 2.5 gb nic in it to get faster transfer times and we good.
Running with two FD Define 7 for both nas. Love it and both were lot cheaper than that XL version of yours. About 100e for new and 30e used one at couple years ago.
The Antec cases are great. I have the 900, and installed 4 5.25" 3-bay hot-swap drive bays. 12 drives easily accessible from the front. I don't know any other cases that are that easy to use. They make more-dense drive sled units, but then you get almost no airflow.
@HardwareHaven Love the video! yeah I had the same issue, wanted a nice NAS Case that looked good, decided on the Fractal North, however 2 drive bays was so limiting, ended up 3D Designing and printing some 140mm sleads to mount 4-6 drives per 140MM fan, currently have 8 Drives in a fractal North.
I built my NAS in a Meshify 2, it didn't come with all the needed drive trays but it can hold like 20 3.5 inch drives (even though it doesn't say that on their site)
Dude...respect on 3D printing those wheels! Just remember! When the girlfriend is around the ONLY thing coming out of your mouth should be, "I can do this all day! ALL DAY!" as you "effortlessly" toss it around like a twig. Then when she is gone, just grab your ice pack and your wheels and then whisper "I can barely pick this thing up." 😂🤣
O man, adding the labels on the drives was pretty smart! Is this how you are able to tell which drive has issues if any, if the software tells you.? Label maker, pretty cool :) It's good to find there are some cheap options for cases, I was disappointed to see the prices of high capacity cases too haha
I built my own NAS a few months ago using the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Server Edition, which costs $160. It can hold 10 HDDs plus another two 2.5" drives. It only comes with trays for 4 HDDs though, but you can get additional trays (2 trays for $17). The case also has really good support for multiple GPUs, if you want to run a plex server that needs a lot of transcoding power.
My truenas runs on 2,5 inch drives in an ordary case. Got some sata bays that hold 6 drives per 5.25 bay for cheap locally. I dont need very large storage pools, so it works well with the laptop drives
I am currently using my 21 year old Yeong Yang YY-0221 cube case as my NAS/Plex Server. I installed a couple of ICYDock 5 in 3 drive bays, they look cool and allows for 12 drives in front vs just 8. Case can hold 20 drives now. Currently has 13 drives and an SSD and I am not sure how heavy it is, haven't had to move. Back when it was my main PC with 8 drives in it, it was almost 60lbs. This case is just a little bigger than a Fractal Node 804 but can hold an ATX motherboard and a GPU up to 14" (can take full length PCI cards)
You should check the 3d-printable MASS case on printables. which is modular. I have a made a 3 module one which can support up to 15 3.5" or 30 2.5" drives. And the best part is that it its fully 3d printable and doesnt need anything fancy like insertts only 3d-printable materials and m3 screws.
Kind of glad I held off on that case you teased a couple of videos ago! I'm in an old Antec case from the early 2000s (with essentially the same hardware setup as your back up server), and while my storage needs aren't anything near what yours are, I think I'm better off adding another 3 drive cage in my spare pair of 5.25" bays. It's a bit of a cable management mess with the old school top mounted PSU, but it doesn't look like that Dark Rock case would be much of an improvement.
I own the Define R5. It came back round to me after my youngest got an upgrade. 8 Bays. Sleds I upgraded my current 2 core plex machine to the 8 core i7 9 series. Installed proxmox. Got all 8 bays fully loaded. And this thing is SILENT. It has noise deadening material on the inside of the panels. You literally can NOT hear a thing from it. Awesome
I do have Define R4 as daily PC's case + Define XL R2 as NAS' case for over 10+ years now (12?) and those are monsters! I installed 3x 5.25" -> 5x 3.5" adaptor and now can fit 18 drives there (R2 XL).
I bought an old Cougar Challenger Case from FB market for around 20 USD. It has a quick release x7 3.5" HDD slot and 3x 5.25" slots which I can turn into 4-5x 3.5" slots by using those Cage racks you can buy online. Good for my NAS needs
My unraid setup has been in a Define xl R2 with the none glass side for about 3 years now, solid case and a great case and not crazy exspensive in the UK (£130)
After just watching your new video about the Anidees AI Raider XL, I decided to have a look at what is available here in Germany, and turns out, the Darkrock Classico Storage Master is also available as the Aerocool Cipher, different exterior, same interior, so probably the same problems!
I got lucky a couple of years ago when i got a 24-bay rack case, basically a standard like case in the back, but with 3x 120mm mounts in the middle and then a SAS backplane that leads to SATA connectors for the drives. It was only 200€, included an older HP SAS card for all the SAS ports, cables and high pressure fans from noctua. Still rocking the case, but atm unused because of the move.
21:29 it's not a QC issue, on fan daisy chain cables, they cut the rpm sense pin on purpose because otherwise you will have errors on your MB or controller. You can't read two or more different speeds in one port...
@@HardwareHaven i see, well good cables are hard to come by, even when you pay extra. It's like the old molex pin problem... Nothing you cant solve, but it's a pain.
You can find a used 7 XL non tempered glass for around $120 to $150 for a tempered glass one. $100 if you can find local pick up. There is also some new ones at times around $180 to $185 non tempered glass version.
Very, very enjoyable video. I watched and enjoyed every minute of it. Yes, I know what you mean about buying a better case. It costs more upfront, but it pays off in the long-term. Happy that you really upgraded everything, and I am impressed with your systems now. Quite a big improvement over what you had before. It will be worth every penny you put into it.
Cooler Master N400. 8x 3.5", 2x 2.5", 2x 5.25" (I used for 12x 2.5" SSDs), 8x 120cm case fan spots (including one on the side panel for the expansion cards), 4x front USB (2x USB2.0, 2x USB 3.0), 240mm AIO support. Cheap/inexpensive case. Good cooling, but not easy to remove the hard drives. Currently $74.99 on Amazon and newegg.
Just bought a Fractal Design R5 for $75 on amazon, has 8 drive capacity with hdd cages for quick removal, and can be re-oriented, is overal very quiet due to the padding, has 2 5.5inch slots, plent of space for fans, and dust filters. Could probably find some used for cheaper as well.
![The Zima Cube is... GOOD now? [ft. Zima Cube Pro]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7KKhgzVjtX8/mqdefault.jpg)
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idk if it is a dedicated nas case,but i think the corsair obsidian 750 d might work quite well if you buy multiple so you can get more drive bays
Thermaltake V71 would work great as well
@@the_block-99 My old case for the last 3-4 years (that I just stopped using) was a Corsair 750D with extra hard drive bays I bought directly from Corsair. It can fit 24 hard drives in the tower, though not the most stable fashion. lol. It has worked well though, and never had a drive die on me due to the vibration of them all. Used a 24i HBA to connect the drives. This was a great case for the money, and kept me through all my storage expansions the past few years. I think I got the case for around $180 or something. Each drive expansion bay costs $10, and I needed 6 of them. So total around $250 for a brand new case to have 24 drives worth of space. It did seem a great deal to me, nothing else I had found came close to the number of drives for the cost.
I have now replaced it with two 36 bay SuperMicro 4U chassis that I connect through a 16e HBA. These cost me $450 each, so $900 for a way to store 72 drives now. lol. Though that isn't quite true, as the fans were way too loud and I spent a good deal more on new fans, fan splitter, and PWM controller. Technically If I had gone with three Corsair 750D's it would be an even better deal for storing that many drives (72 drive space for $750), but having that many towers around wasnt ideal for me. I now have a network rack and so the two 4U chassis just mount into it and that works better space wise.
@@the_block-99 Wow. This channel has some badly set comment filters on it and deleted my very long post :(
Anyway, yes corsair 750 d works very well. With extra expansion bays it stores 24 drives in 1 tower for pretty cheap. Expansion bays model is CC-8930032
My family has a Fractal Node 804 NAS build, and it holds 8 drives (we only populated 4 bays so far), pretty sufficient for the average family I'd say.
Fractal Cases are great, I have a Define R6 for my primary nas server (4/11 drives populated), and an 804 for my backup server (just 1 or 10 so far). Got a good deal on the 804 for $55 including about $80+ of Noctua fans. Anti-vibration discs are great too
I have the same case, it is awesome for a NAS!
I built my big "everything"-server in a Node 804. Great case!
Yup, 804 and 304 can't be beat. Good price and plenty of space. I would like to try the jonsbo n4 though.
I have the same setup, they are becoming hard to fine but they are basically the perfect home server case
Another DIY case option: Antec Performance Series P101 Silent. Big and heavy, but quality and quiet for just over $100. 8x3.5" bays with toolless (but plastic) caddies, 2x2.5" SSD mounts, PLUS it has a 5.25" bay. I installed an Icy Dock 4x2.5" insert into the 5.25" drive for the additional space for SATA SSDs. This gives a lot of flexibility to add SSDs for app/VM use. It is now my main TrueNAS machine. This replaced my Cooler Master N400. The N400 is an even cheaper option for a DIY NAS (currently $75 on Amazon) but is more along the lines of cheaper, light weight metal case. The N400 now holds my 2nd backup TrueNAS system.
I have that one, it's really good
I agree, I came straight to the comments to mention the Antec P101 Silent.
Or using an old but venerable Antec 900 🤔
Same here. Excellent case for the money
That the same case I have for my nas. The only downside is that is has only 8 HDD spots
10:17 - here we see a man who has clearly built a NAS before and learned the hard way - "umm which drive is JFH882-NX2023?"
if you're amish, how are you posting this comment
@@obvious_humor barn raisings and watching YT videos - that's how I roll
well there might have been a very logical numbering system b3en in place here seen that in enterprises already
I had that fractal in my shopping cart 5 months ago and was so close to purchasing it. Ended up deciding to get a rack and get some enterprise gear and I’m so glad I did.
The Define series of cases are great for home NAS builds. Had an R5 Define as my main PC case for years. I built a new system a couple of years back and repurposed some old kit in the R5 to be a home NAS. Easily holds 8 HDDs with ease and (if I remember rightly) can fit more in if you get creative. Quality is solid and I also put it on wheels - well, a wheeled tray which was mainly to lift it off the carpet. Being older, they can be picked up for cheap money in the used market, but just make sure all the drive cages and trays are included. Top work Fractal.
15:00 A lot of seasoned datahoarders just kapton tape off the necessary pins on the drives to get going without power disable. I've personally had drives running for a few years like this without any issues.
I'm literally designing my 3.5" version of my 2.5" cages. but this time i'm using off the shelf caddies.
The 4 bay 2.5 is available in printables for those interested :D
Another cool case is the P101 Silent, I have 10x3.5 drive and 3x2.5 ssd (for now) as I've just designed a 4x2.5 cage to fit more in it!
Absolutely a recommendation for the P101. It is fantastic for most uses, and the cost is perfect.
@@ickyendeavors4179 Yep, they also give you 4 fans for the price! Something that push you forward if you are on a budget.
I have the P100 and I can fit 6 3.5” HDDs stock, 9 if I use the dual 5.25” bays, but the only way I could do 10 or more is if I mount them to the ceiling where the exhaust fans would go.
What’s the secret?
@@zeroturn7091 Ask Antecsupport to buys extra cage :D
You can fit another one by removing the 5.25" bay.
As a fellow UA-camr, I probably don’t comment as much on others’ content as I should, but I just want to say THANK YOU! I am only a few months into my personal self-hosting/homelab journey, but I have learned so much from your videos. There is never any clickbait, your videos are thorough, straight forward, honest, informative, and you openly discuss any issues/mistakes you run into during a project, which is INFINITELY helpful to people watching/learning from your videos. Overall just fantastic job and keep up the good work! I always look forward to your next upload.
I just build my DIY NAS in an IKEA kitchen cabinet, with 4 drawers inside.
- First or top drawer is for networking
- Second drawer is my Proxmox server
- Third drawer is empty, for future expansion
- Fourth or bottom drawer, is my DIY NAS...
The cabinet costed me about 200 USD, and could easily fit a psu + motherboard + 18 drives, in each drawer...
I currently have 6 x 18TB in raid 6, good for about 70 TB usable storage. Maintenance is as simple as, opening one of the drawers...
I would like to see pictures and maybe a high level overview on how you accomplished this.
@@S3N0RMANNY I concur, pictures would be cool
How did you solve the cooling?
@@Slay1337pl Drilled two holes in the front of each drawer, for 120 mm fans.
Instead of fully closed door, I put a grid cover on top of it for airflow.
Next upgrade would be some kind of dust filter, because it's missing that currently...
@@S3N0RMANNY Will try to make a recording this or next weekend.
I just need to find someone with a phone, that doesn't suffer from potato cam syndrome...
Huge props for talking about the 3.3v power issue that A LOT of renewed drives have. Half my drives have this and it took me forever to figure out a proper solution. Yours is great, I did something similar by removing the 3.3v pin from the PSU side of the SATA power cable for those drives.
The Meshify cases also have the "NAS" layout since it is the same case just with mesh front ant top panels.. It also has the solid side panels. That is what I have and gives you better breathability than the Define series. Got a 5 pack of Artic P14 140mm fans and a Noctua cooler and I almost never notice the sound of it once I tuned the case fans down a little. I set them to be essentially a static 800rpm. The drives are the only thing you really hear from it since I decided to get enterprise drives.
Instead of the "cheap" case you're probably better off hunting 2nd hand stores or asking your local SI. I have half a dozen old style monster cases that are just too dated to build a modern gaming PC in. Those giant cases of yesteryear often had ridiculous HDD mounting capacity, provisions for 200mm case fans, and are usually hanging out in someones storage collecting dust. I'd happily sell you all of mine for cheap just to clear out that closet.
I might be interested
agreed, local 2nd hand should be the best option, there is no $100 shipping cost, taxes and import duties, also old cases people want to get rid of usually have more hdd slots than modern ones as these are much common back in the days, I'd say $10-$30 CAD is a reasonable price or $5-20.
I have one of those, I need to get around to clearing out the old hardware and repurpose it
it even has WHEELS! That's a $400 value!!!! /s
I got a 17 year old Thermaltake soprano dx for 5€, there are soooo many drive bays, 7x 3.5" bays 4x 5" on top of it which adapted could give even more drive space.
Nevertheless you can reaaally feel the old design, top mounter PSU, no space in the back to route cables, although there's a plenty of room behind the hard drive bays for cables since they are facing the back of the case and not the side panel.
I wish it was facing the panel, it would make adding and removing drives waaay easier, and I barely got space to add a GPU in. I found a GTX 970 for 35€ and I had to file a bit off the front to make it fit and it completely blocks a drive bay (maybe 1 and a half)
@@thenono1 - The design of the older huge cases can be a pain to build in for sure but for a NAS it just doesn't matter much.
with enough work you can make any case a NAS when you have a 3d printer. I converted (hacked apart) a lenovo M82? all the guts were replaced. printed a custom front on it and a 8 bay 3.5mm hdd rack for it. its maybe 20mm longer due to the new front but all the drives fit in the case with a short txx psu and low profile ecc memory. keep in mind this pc is one of those super slim towers.
if you have a 3d printer and want to actually design your own stuff, i can recommend it, my suggestion is to design in a modular way.
After contemplating a lot of SFF Node/Jonsbo NAS builds this video resonated with me and I ended up building my own version of your Define 7XL NAS using the same motherboard, but with used SAS storage drives in a Meshify 2 case.
It's been a journey; the mobo BIOS was v1 and I had v2 CPU, the IPMI did not have default credentials, BMC controller firmware needed updating, LSI 3008 firmware needed flashing to IT, SAS drives have power disable feature. Finally got TrueNAS installed with all drives present and accounted for. Thanks for the inspiration.
I’m building my own case out of wood for a really strange DIY NAS server. It needs to be custom, because I’m putting two NUCs inside it and weird PSUs. So far I’ve spent about $70 on it. So I can’t buy one because of my odd requirements, but if I wasn’t being so weird a $90 case would definitely be worth it.
This sounds cool. Building in a bought case is fine but I love hearing about people just building a case. I wish I had the skills!
You should take some time consider the overall weight and make appropriate accomodations for airflow and heat dispersal.
Wood has a really nice aesthetic, but a wooden box can get pretty heavy and wood doesn't shed heat well.
Even back when wooden housings were common for computers and accessories, moderately thick sheet metal was also commonly involved.
I'd recommend getting some drive cages anyway, and mounting them in your wood case.
If you don't need as many drives, the Meshify 2 is basically the Fractal Design 7 (non-XL). That is what I have for my backup NAS and it regularly goes on sale for just a little over $100
I just sold my 4 bay qnap and build a home server in my old define r6. In the server layout I can easily fit 10x3.5 hard drives and 4x2.5.
Part of the mojo with a used supermicro chassis is that you get hot swap drive trays, and the backplane exposes management features (for locating drives, inlet air temp, disk activity).
What you don't get is a quiet solution. At best, it's pretty loud, and if your setup is running hot, it's quite loud.
Also a noctua nhd12L will fit in a 4U case, and if your memory is of reasonable height, you can squeeze in a second fan in front for some extra handling.
I just finished a nas build with the classico storage case. Me and you had made the same discoveries about the hdd cables, and which side of case to route them. I am very pleased with the case, Budget was the biggest concern for me. Thanks for making this video very much enjoyed it.
A big reason I love unRAID for home NAS - you can start with two drives (well technically one, but you won't have parity), and you can add additional drives as you need or can afford. Or you can populate the server with whatever jumble of drives you currently have, and expand by replacing small drives with larger ones over time. Yes, there's some tradeoffs in terms of performance for sure, but the flexibility is a great option for budget conscious users, or people moving from a bunch of random drives in to a NAS.
Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 is also another cavernous PC case that's great for a giant NAS build, currently runs $150 or so.
I have a plain Pro, installed a HDD cage in the 5.25" slots so the case can now take 11 3.5" drives and 4 2.5" ones. With custom cages those 2.5" holders might be able to take 3.5" drives, if space allows.
@@samiraperi467 I also have the plain pro that's been built as a CCTV server. It's the best case I've ever built in. I will be buying another to replace my main server's case (and will be enjoying the issues that come with it) at some point.
@@samiraperi467 You can fit at least 18 3.5" drives in the Pro 2 using just Phanteks' stackable 3.5" bays
They're both great cases, I have version 1 but kind of wish I nabbed the pro 2 for dual mobo option. Still aside from the ability to house 2 motherboards without mucking about the enthoo pro still has everything I actually need and then some.
There is even a Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Server Edition (no glass panel version) verry good!
i ended up building a couple of NAS devices from old core2duo motherboards and enterprise class refurb drives in a tower case with plenty of drive slots, running truenas. super cheap and great to reuse old hardware
Have my unraid server in an Antec P101S, 8x 3.5" and 2x2.5" drive bays and a ODD bay for Blu-ray drive. Really pleased with it, hosts Plex server and a mix of old and new hard drives drives ranging from 1TB to 10TB - drives from my old laptops, computers and consoles.
I might have to migrate my optiplex nas into this as I add more drives. Most of the nas noise I get right now is case resonance from the optiplex sheet metal.
I have 3 SDD in that chassi, As I have created a 3d model for a third mount next the other 2!
I moved from the Darkrock to this case. Much better serviceability. $100 on Newegg atm
Cool video, I was dubbing whether to do this or going with a rack and ended up with a R730. I actually have the same HGST drives with the power disable pin as well. You can actually use the same tape method you referred to earlier in the video on pin number three, but since the other two besides it are reserved you can actually tape over all three pins and the drive will work. This came in handy with the backplane from the R730, no space for those molex/sata adapters.
Would love to see a power consumption comparison of the two systems. Great video!
My NAS is in a Cooler Master N400 which is great as it holds a lot of drives and even though it only came with a couple toolless HDD brackets, I also 3D printed my own and it was about 70 bucks.
Fractal 7xl is an awesome case for a NAS. A little pricey but can comfortably hold 16 3.5" drives plus an additional 6 2.5" drives. The sound dampening panels actually work at taking the edge off. I have 7 very loud enterprise hard drives in the case in my room and you can barely hear it at night when it's writing data. That's with the solid side panel though, obviously if you go with the tempered glass you won't get the same noise dampening. The only downside it they aren't hot-swappable but they are relatively easy to replace.
That was pretty cool man, thanks for sharing your builds and process. It's helpful. I'm looking to build my first NAS too.
In my opinion the best modern-day "old-school" case is the Phanteks Enthoo Pro. You can get the non-clear side panel option for around $100USD, it comes with support for lots of 3.5" drives, supports multiple 5.25" bays (people do NOT realize just how useful those still are in 2024), supports up to a 420mm liquid cooler in the top, ATX-L PSUs, eATX motherboards, has great build quality, and in general is a case that I deeply appreciate it's existence.
Personally I scored a Rosewill Thor V2 when they still had some NOS off Newegg for $150USD around 2019, and it continues to still be the very best case I have ever built in (and that is saying a lot considering the thousands of cases I have worked with over the years), but I have no come to the point where I have maxed it out and need to go bigger. I am currently eyeing the Anidees Raider XL at $310USD.
11:46 I swear I thought you were going to say "3D print a new knee" 🤣
I did this with my old BitFenix Shinobi case years ago. It can fit 8 3.5" drives inside, has 4 5.25" bays in the front so technically you can put there 4x 4 2.5" drives in.
You can fit an ATX board inside, so with alot of PCIe x1 to SATA Adapters and a powersupply which begs you to kill it you can do this with a case from 2011 easily.
You can still find the Fractal Design Define R5 with some resellers, though they are getting harder to find. One of the greatest cases I've ever used to build a NAS or high-capacity DAS desktop. 8x 3.5" slide-in drive trays plus two external 5.25" bays you can fit another 3x 3.5" drives via an IcyDock FatCage. Lots of room for 140mm fans, a big CPU cooler and full-size ATX motherboard. I first bought three of these cases to build dual-boot Windows/Hackintosh editing stations about 10 years ago, and have kept recycling them for Proxmox and TrueNAS servers ever since.
I've had my NAS running in the 7 XL since the case came out. Its fully loaded at this point and super heavy. I love it. If the HL15 was cheaper I'd switch in a heartbeat though.
15:00 This is a feature WD uses for its external hard drives. The issue still presents itself with newer power supplies. If the drive detects 3.3volts on pin 3 of its power port it simply disables the hard drive. The reason for this is to prevent people from “shucking”; taking the hard drive out of a MyBook external hard drive and using it as an internal drive (usually cheaper than buying a stand alone hard drive).
On the bright side when you do expand, if you got your storage in a raidz you'll be able to expand 1 drive at a time in the near future with the new openzfs changes coming!
Those WD/HGST renewed drives are an excellent value. Running the SAS version of them.
For the EU folks, the AeroCool Cipher interior is the same as the Dark Rock Classico Storage Master, it also is dirt cheap.
I also had good luck with a full tower BeQuiet DarkBase series. It's in similar price range to the Fractal DF 7 XL and has at least 10 slots for hard drives.
For the dust on the top cover, you could get some of that air-conditioner air filter material and just sandwich it under the cover.
I believe the case has a dust filter there it’s just that he doesn’t have any top mount exhaust fans so dust will tend to sit in that location.
Check out the thread on L1Techs titled: "Good high-end NAS cases don’t exist, Should the community make one?"
He's making a pretty nice looking 32 drive tower.
I did my home nas with an Antec Twelvehundred case and 4 3,5" bay to 5 hdd enclosure from amazon. 20 hdds of capacity plus a couple of ssds/m2 seems like the perfect combination for me. Old case but very usefull for this kind of projects.
I've used nearly the exact same drives from several sellers on amazon, with 3-5 year warranties. No problems yet. I even have balls of steel and used a used drive from them for my unraid Parity drive. I need to change that eventually. I'm going to get this cheap case. I enjoy your videos man they are chill. Proud to be a long time sub.
I built mine in a Fractal Define 7 XL as well. Love this case.
I have 3 silverstone cs351 cases for a ceph cluster and I love them. On the expensive side but cheaper than the 200 dollar case
I don't really care about the 100th Define R7 NAS build. I want to see something like a Silverstone CS382 - a proper DIY NAS case.
@@khyoyeon554 I have the silver stone CS380 I like the easy swap of the drives. The case does require a shorter video card
I just commented that Silverstone has always had a ton of NAS cases...where has this guy been
the $200 case gives you more than twice the drives than the cs351
@@possiblyanowlnot really if you use 2.5 inch drives. You can put 7 3.5 inch and 8 2.5 inch drives
If anyone is still on the fence about the Define 7 case... It's an incredible case for a NAS. I absolutely love this thing. Highest quality case I've ever used. Been thinking about building a gaming PC in on as well.
I've got a Define 7 for my main PC's case, and love it. I went with the solid side panel for extra sound dampening foam, and I barely hear the thing. Next time I go to upgrade my main rig, I'll probably convert it into a server or NAS. Or I might go crazy and buy another :D
another case that i made my nas with was, GAMEMAX silent black case..it has 8 bays and costs 109.00..what i like about it is that the drives are mounted sideways and both sides of the hdd cage are open so you an access the cables and hard drives with ease...i built mine with consumer grade hardware for around 800 bucks. i bought 8 refurbished 4 tb hard drives..its been going strong for 3 years..only just now did i have to replace a hard drive.
Noctua 40mm zip tied to the hba cooler is my go to! Jank is a way of life.
The Fractal Meshify 2 and 2 XL have storage layout also. Good cases overall.
Fractal Design Define R5 (10+2) and the Antec P101 Silent (10+1) are two cases that regularly dip under 100. The antec i've seen as low as 75 on sale some months back.
4-Pin Molex to SATA power adapters also bypasses the Power Disable feature in refurbished enterprise drives, since there is no 3.3v rail; just 5v and 12v, and can reuse the 4-pin molex most PSUs still have stuck on at least one cable line.
If you can get a case with front-facing 5.25 bays, you can put in an icydock and fit 4-6 2.5 drives in the bay, giving you access to your NAS drives without having open the case at all. (Have good airflow because that density runs warm.)
Thanks for pointing out the sata power spillter. I'm going to buy one asap. I was not aware that molex to sata are a fire hazard, those are the ones im using right now. I needed a splitter cable because i ran out of sata power ports
good builds
Personally i went for the Antec P101 silent - kind of fits between these two cases (price of the dark rock but build quality of the fractal)
Been really happy with it and the sound deadening is useful given it lives in the living room
This is a useful video, there are surprisingly few good choices for a home NAS case.
I bought the Fractal last summer and I am very happy with it. One of the best build experiences I’ve had with a case.
got the Fractal Design Define R5 and I'm happy with it.
Nice! I probably should've mentioned that one as well
i missed the $75 sale that happened so im going rack mount instead
I got two Define's and am always looking for people to sell them locally so I can have more.
and you can 3d print the SATA backplane plastic one, use sas to sata connector to connect the power and sata.
i absolutely love the define 7 cases, my server is in a define 7 XL and my main pc is is a define 7. define 7 xl running with a dual socket with big coolers and every drivespot filled and still not feel crammed. main one runs 360mm rad and a 13900k rtx4090 system and also perform like a dream
Loved this build! Followed the first one myself loving the supermicro motherboard. Even got the ipmi working so free ipkvm!!
Very cool video! Would love to see the same thing around ITX with a pico psu. Something smaller of course, maybe along the lines of 4x hdds that are high capacity?
@HardwareHaven at 20:48 , there is a loose header pin on the front panel IO. IDK if you had any issues with that but it looks to be half on just wanted to let you know! Love the Fractal Define R7 case. My Server is currently in an R5 because I had that as my old Gaming PC and its working great too albeit not as many drives to store. Love the channel!
Good catch! I would guess either I caught it or it still works somehow haha. Next time I open it I’ll check
The Define r6 is great too. Can take 8 x 3.5 drives total, comes with 6 trays, and is cheaper. Even more so when you consider not having to buy the extra drive sleds.
I built my own NAS, managed to get an Antec P101 Silent case from ebay for £90 back in January, i got a ASUS Prime B550M-K, Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and 32gb RAM. with an M.2 SATA adapter to add the additional SATA ports and i filled it with 8x 4TB drives and an M.2 for loader. using TRUNAS Scale and its been perfect since i built it. total cost was approx £550 (add additional cost for the drives but we dont count them as cost haha)
The Rosewill thor v2 was a good one to buy when it was still available. I got one new a couple years back. They aren’t in stock anymore, but boy do they hold a whole lot of drives.
I love my define 7xl. Glad it's working well for you too. I've always labeled my drives by their lot but watching you label them based on the serial (I think) made me completely rethink that. Thanks! It will be much easier to figure out which one is which. Such a simple thing, guess I'm complicating my builds more than necessary :P
I have a Coolermaster MC500P with a bunch of extra bay modules installed. It works great and wasn't that expensive when I got it
I use the Define 7 as my daily driver w/ a solid side panel and the vented top (with a fan). It was one of the few that supported an optical drive and didn't "care" about RGB. I skipped the internal fan controller though since my motherboard had enough fan headers. It also supports a storage configuration, but not nearly as many drives. It wasn't as much as you quoted here, so that could be a good compromise.
I use the Fractal Design R5 for my NAS. Its a smaller version of the 7 XL, but still has 8 hard drive bays and with some adapters you can fit more in the 5 inch bays. It is also only around $125 with the same great build quality and cable management of the 7 XL.
bro that shot of the case rolling down the hallway is killing me
Loved the video. I'm waiting for the day when I get to see you release a video of you taking the 3D printer and printing your own case as well as Dell like HDD caddy's to run your own 3D printed DIY NAS with let's say a ITX/micro ITX/mini ITX motherboard. You would need to print everything ABS filament due to the heat generated from the drives but I think it would be a fun project!
You can 3D print with nylon and fiber-reinforced nylon filaments as well, nylon has a melting point of 300-330C (depending on the nylon variant) not to mention how strong it is, especially carbon fiber or glass fiber reinforced filament.
I just got an used Define S for about $30, I will to try to fit 3 of those 3x5.25->5x3.5 cages ($18 each from Ali) on the front fan mounts, possibly more later.
The real jank comes from the hardware that will be running it - TopTon N5105 miniPC with a m.2 to 6xSATA adapter for now, I intend to get a m.2 to PCIe riser and put a real HBA (choking on PCIe 3.0x1) in there when I run out of spaces for drives.
I have a Fractal Define 6 XL that has been sitting around since I swapped cases recently. I have been thinking it would be a great server case, so I decided to not get rid of it. I have a server rack, but the noise and heating issues of having a server in it have been keeping me from doing that. I'm glad to see someone else using these cases for a server.
I have that 7XL for my NAS. You mention needing wheels. Ikea have one for $35 called UPPSPEL. It's great.
I love your channel, the way you present information and never hide the problems you run into.
Question for you what is that label maker?
It appears to be a Brady M210.
If someone wants to do a cheap nas even cheaper then these then grab an older Dell server T320, T420, R730XD, R520 most of those can be had for under $200 used without drives. It will have idrac at that point also (ipmi) and the hardware raid cards (perc controller) can be reflashed with a "IT mode" firmware and it will allow the hard drives to be passed through to your system.
I first bought r520 and fill it up with all 14 drives. But during time i get it is little loud (fan goes between 2600-3200rpm and sometime during big cpu usage goes to 4800). And its little big :) But then i found my perfect one. T420 i best combo if you ask me. Its old but cheap. I get mine for 250 eur with 16gb ram and dual cpu but single power supply and no dedicated idrac card. You can upgrade it to 128gb+ ram and can get 2x10c/20t cpu @3.5ghz and have support for full length double video cards (2x8pin). Down side is it ony have 8 bays for hdd but 3x5.25" bay cage with 5 more will work fine
@iceserbia so I got a T320 for free. Then I was like I want two cpu's then bought a T420 motherboard in the T320 case, then since I work In the IT field I was able to get used "failing" hard drives from customers 2 TB SATAs, so after that I built a 16TB raw nas raid 6 so I could have 2 failing drives. But after a while found out that TrueNas doesn't like Raid cards it wants to touch the drives so hince the "IT Mode" firmware, after doing that mod I stopped having corrupted raid arrays then I had a customer retire a lot of systems and they gave me the ram cause they just had to have the system so right now I have T420 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2470 cpu's with 200gb of ram, and 16TB raw storage or a little under 12tb with Z2 raid (zfs version of raid 6) put a 2.5 gb nic in it to get faster transfer times and we good.
Running with two FD Define 7 for both nas. Love it and both were lot cheaper than that XL version of yours.
About 100e for new and 30e used one at couple years ago.
The Antec cases are great. I have the 900, and installed 4 5.25" 3-bay hot-swap drive bays. 12 drives easily accessible from the front. I don't know any other cases that are that easy to use. They make more-dense drive sled units, but then you get almost no airflow.
@HardwareHaven Love the video! yeah I had the same issue, wanted a nice NAS Case that looked good, decided on the Fractal North, however 2 drive bays was so limiting, ended up 3D Designing and printing some 140mm sleads to mount 4-6 drives per 140MM fan, currently have 8 Drives in a fractal North.
I built my NAS in a Meshify 2, it didn't come with all the needed drive trays but it can hold like 20 3.5 inch drives (even though it doesn't say that on their site)
Dude...respect on 3D printing those wheels! Just remember! When the girlfriend is around the ONLY thing coming out of your mouth should be, "I can do this all day! ALL DAY!" as you "effortlessly" toss it around like a twig. Then when she is gone, just grab your ice pack and your wheels and then whisper "I can barely pick this thing up." 😂🤣
O man, adding the labels on the drives was pretty smart! Is this how you are able to tell which drive has issues if any, if the software tells you.? Label maker, pretty cool :) It's good to find there are some cheap options for cases, I was disappointed to see the prices of high capacity cases too haha
I built my own NAS a few months ago using the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Server Edition, which costs $160. It can hold 10 HDDs plus another two 2.5" drives. It only comes with trays for 4 HDDs though, but you can get additional trays (2 trays for $17). The case also has really good support for multiple GPUs, if you want to run a plex server that needs a lot of transcoding power.
My truenas runs on 2,5 inch drives in an ordary case. Got some sata bays that hold 6 drives per 5.25 bay for cheap locally. I dont need very large storage pools, so it works well with the laptop drives
I am currently using my 21 year old Yeong Yang YY-0221 cube case as my NAS/Plex Server.
I installed a couple of ICYDock 5 in 3 drive bays, they look cool and allows for 12 drives in front vs just 8. Case can hold 20 drives now.
Currently has 13 drives and an SSD and I am not sure how heavy it is, haven't had to move.
Back when it was my main PC with 8 drives in it, it was almost 60lbs.
This case is just a little bigger than a Fractal Node 804 but can hold an ATX motherboard and a GPU up to 14" (can take full length PCI cards)
You should check the 3d-printable MASS case on printables. which is modular. I have a made a 3 module one which can support up to 15 3.5" or 30 2.5" drives. And the best part is that it its fully 3d printable and doesnt need anything fancy like insertts only 3d-printable materials and m3 screws.
Have a link? Having troubles finding it.
Kind of glad I held off on that case you teased a couple of videos ago! I'm in an old Antec case from the early 2000s (with essentially the same hardware setup as your back up server), and while my storage needs aren't anything near what yours are, I think I'm better off adding another 3 drive cage in my spare pair of 5.25" bays. It's a bit of a cable management mess with the old school top mounted PSU, but it doesn't look like that Dark Rock case would be much of an improvement.
I own the Define R5.
It came back round to me after my youngest got an upgrade.
8 Bays. Sleds
I upgraded my current 2 core plex machine to the 8 core i7 9 series. Installed proxmox. Got all 8 bays fully loaded.
And this thing is SILENT. It has noise deadening material on the inside of the panels.
You literally can NOT hear a thing from it.
Awesome
I do have Define R4 as daily PC's case + Define XL R2 as NAS' case for over 10+ years now (12?) and those are monsters!
I installed 3x 5.25" -> 5x 3.5" adaptor and now can fit 18 drives there (R2 XL).
Great video!. What about 3d printing some long thin spacer blocks to allow you to move the side panel out a little so you don't squish the cables.
I bought an old Cougar Challenger Case from FB market for around 20 USD. It has a quick release x7 3.5" HDD slot and 3x 5.25" slots which I can turn into 4-5x 3.5" slots by using those Cage racks you can buy online.
Good for my NAS needs
Cool builds dude, good watch, thank you!
My unraid setup has been in a Define xl R2 with the none glass side for about 3 years now, solid case and a great case and not crazy exspensive in the UK (£130)
After just watching your new video about the Anidees AI Raider XL, I decided to have a look at what is available here in Germany, and turns out, the Darkrock Classico Storage Master is also available as the Aerocool Cipher, different exterior, same interior, so probably the same problems!
For a diy Nas - is it better to buy 8x2TB drives or 1x16Tb drives? I am not talking about price, but the principle and performance :)?
I'm still rocking a Thermaltake Chaser MK-I. Lots of space and even has a top loading SATA bay and eSATA port.
I got lucky a couple of years ago when i got a 24-bay rack case, basically a standard like case in the back, but with 3x 120mm mounts in the middle and then a SAS backplane that leads to SATA connectors for the drives. It was only 200€, included an older HP SAS card for all the SAS ports, cables and high pressure fans from noctua.
Still rocking the case, but atm unused because of the move.
21:29 it's not a QC issue, on fan daisy chain cables, they cut the rpm sense pin on purpose because otherwise you will have errors on your MB or controller. You can't read two or more different speeds in one port...
The issue wasn’t the missing pin, it was the pin next to it that was too short because it had slipped back into the socket
@@HardwareHaven i see, well good cables are hard to come by, even when you pay extra. It's like the old molex pin problem... Nothing you cant solve, but it's a pain.
You can find a used 7 XL non tempered glass for around $120 to $150 for a tempered glass one. $100 if you can find local pick up. There is also some new ones at times around $180 to $185 non tempered glass version.
Very, very enjoyable video. I watched and enjoyed every minute of it. Yes, I know what you mean about buying a better case. It costs more upfront, but it pays off in the long-term.
Happy that you really upgraded everything, and I am impressed with your systems now. Quite a big improvement over what you had before. It will be worth every penny you put into it.
Cooler Master N400. 8x 3.5", 2x 2.5", 2x 5.25" (I used for 12x 2.5" SSDs), 8x 120cm case fan spots (including one on the side panel for the expansion cards), 4x front USB (2x USB2.0, 2x USB 3.0), 240mm AIO support. Cheap/inexpensive case. Good cooling, but not easy to remove the hard drives. Currently $74.99 on Amazon and newegg.
Just bought a Fractal Design R5 for $75 on amazon, has 8 drive capacity with hdd cages for quick removal, and can be re-oriented, is overal very quiet due to the padding, has 2 5.5inch slots, plent of space for fans, and dust filters. Could probably find some used for cheaper as well.