ATX case for home storage

Hello,

I’m looking for nice ATX case which would fit in AIO cooler and have some hot swapable capabilities .

Any suggestions ?

Silverstone CS380 and CS350 come to mind.

Not sure on AIO support (wich I would not recommend for systems running 24/7 anyway).

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The Fractal Design Node 804 “Black Widow” is a nice as well. Room for 8+2 drives. AIOs can definitely be problematic long term, where something like a dual fan Noctua cooler would keep things cool, 24/7, for a very long time, and would have you covered even if one of the fans failed.

The Node 804 is mATX unfortunately, it won’t fit an ATX motherboard.

Really nice case though.

D’oh!! My bad…

I have a couple Corsair Carbide 300Rs that I like and they’re pretty easy to open up and work on…

Wendell has a nice review of the Antec P70 which is similar in layout

You could always throw in a few of these bad boys bays :wink: into the front area where optical drives would normally be for some easy access hot swappable drives.

Otherwise you kinda resign yourself to opening up the case and doing any sort of drive maintenance.

Any case with drive bays that face out are :ok_hand:

I think the entire old Silencio lineup from Cooler Master have a lot of bays and a hot swap at the top or front…

It doesn’t have hot swap, but the Fractal Design R6 can hold 10 hdds + ssd’s.
And the front fans will keep the hdds nice and cool.
And it can also support an aio cooler, but an aio for a storage server is odd, in my opinion.
But why do you need hot swap?

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I’ve actually selected the Define R6 for my new storage server because it’s also going to be a docker based transcoding media server, with several VM’s with GPU pass through on two of them. A 1700x will also be crunching video encoding tasks via a drop folder. I figure it will be getting toasty warm in there so cooling options were a concern in my decisions.

I wouldn’t recommend AIO cooling for anything 24/7. Get a Noctua cooler for the CPU and some Noctua fans for the case.

Get a case with dust filters and ample space for your needs, look at Fractal Design or Corsair. At least those two are my go-to brands for cases. Used to be Lian-Li but that was way back…

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Define R5. Quiet, can support quite a few drives and still fit an AIO.

Curious why you’re asking for an ATX case. If I am reading this correctly, you want to take an old motherboard and put it in a new ATX case to turn it into a file server or similar? Going to assume this is the case.

If you add in the cost of a new case, PSU, raid controller card and fans, you won’t be getting much cheaper than a prebuilt NAS product, such as this one (not affiliated, it was simply the first one I found with decent specs):

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS1817+

Perhaps you could shave 10-15% off the price by going custom-built, but then the NAS would not suffer nearly the same performance issues as your custom solution probably will.

If I have misread or misinterpreted this, feel free to ignore this. :slight_smile:

Before considering a synology NAS solution, it may be a good idea to go check out Gamer’s Nexus’s experiences with them. It wasn’t great and use of proprietary hardware means there’s no fixing it yourself with spare parts on hand and you will have downtime waiting for their service department to fix or replace it.

Cooler Master Storm Trooper with 3x I-StarUSA Hotswap 4 Bay 3 x .5.25


This particular brand might not be the best buy, this is true, my point was - why not simply buy a NAS with hot-swap capabilities on-the-fly, instead of trying to replicate one yourself, which will probably be an inferior solution (assuming you do not take great care in choosing server components) and/or save you only around 10% best case even if it isn’t?

Sometimes DiY is not the best solution, simple as that. Other times it can be just what you need though. :slight_smile:

Yes i already have a ATX case which i want to use and rest of the components.
I don’t want to go with a dedicated NAS, altough I have been using one since 5 years now. I see it’s end coming soon hence i badly need to build.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=709&area=en

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Cases/Carbide-Series™-300R-Compact-PC-Gaming-Case/p/CC-9011014-WW

Are good picks BUT this is the one I would recommend. Why pay more for similar features or features you dont use

http://store.antec.com/performance-series/p70.html

As owner of a 300R, I would not recommend that case to anyone.

Can you elaborate?

Have you seen the reviews of that garbage? Pfff…

It’s just a cheap case. Same quality as other cheap cases. But since it branded, it’s more expensive… Otherwise it’s basically the same garbage as other dirt cheap cases…

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