I am going to rebuild my NAS as well as piece together a media server in the not so distant future, and I am looking for suitable cases.
My current NAS is in an old Acer Veriton case and while it works, it has basically no airflow over the hard drives.
Specific case requirements for NAS:
Must be able to fit MATX motherboard
Must have at least 2 hot swap 3.5" SAS/SATA hard drive bays
Must have at least 2 internal 2.5" mount points (for boot drives)
As compact and quite as possible
Specific case requirements for media server
Must be able to fit full ATX motherboard
Must be able to fit at least 1 double slot full height GPU
Preferrably half height to save space but if not then as compact as possible
Important: These are 2 different physical boxes with different requirements
General requirements that apply to both:
Good acoustic performance (in other words, quiet)
Nice looking but not “Gaming” themed
Good airflow and cooling (especially over the drives for the NAS)
No Tempered glass side panels, I don’t want to be cleaning up glass shards
At least one of them should be able to hold 2 5.25" bays (if possible, for 2 optical drives I plan to use for ripping discs)
Must be available in the Taiwan market or Taobao.com (I will tell you if it is not available in Taiwan as I don’t expect most people to be able to read Chinese from Taiwanese retail sites)
EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:
2 5.25" Bays for optical drives are required on top of however many that have been used by a 5.25" hot swap enclosure
I don’t have an exact answer for you, but I was planning on using Fractal Design’s Pop Air Mini for my NAS since it comes with 2x5.25" bays. Which that’s relevant to building a NAS because then … I can get one of those Icy Dock enclosures that turn 2x5.25" bays into 3x3.5" hot swappable bays ( link ). Also, those 3.5" bays can also hold a 2.5" drive as well. Even though it’s in a hot swappable port, that means you’d only need 1 slot inside the case for a 2.5" drive. Just food for thought.
However, with your requirements that Pop Air Mini, might not be as compact as you are wanting, but hopefully this just gives you more flexibility when looking at cases.
I got a silverstone cs350. They got a bunch of nas chassis maybe you find something there. Found it hard to find a rack mountable, hotswapbay having case I can buy standalone. This was one of the few I could find back when I was looking for one.
Why the 2.5" slots? These days you can get two cheap 256GB NVMe for $20 each. If you do not yet have a mATX board with 2+ NVMe start looking into either expansion cards or a new core build.
Apart from this, you are looking at $150-$300 for what you want. I would personally go with peppys suggestion:
I have quite a few SATA SSDs lying around and would like to reuse 2 of them as a pair of mirrored boot drive for Truenas. The motherboard can hold 1 M.2 (ASUS B450M-A)
While these cases would be nice they are all sold out. They would also take a very long time to arrive once they are in stock. Would like to see some alternatives from mainstream manufacturers. They also lack 5.25" bays which if I decide to use an ICY Dock hot swap sled in my NAS’s 2 bays then I would have nowhere to stick optical drives other than using USB external ones.
I am surprised that no one has yet discovered the IN WIN IW-PE689.U3, which has an impressive set of features. With five 3.5" drive bays and four 5.25" front bays, this case provides ample space for customization. By adding an IcyDock 5-to-3 hotswap cage and a 6-to-1 2.5" cage, you can further expand its capabilities, ultimately supporting up to 10 3.5" drives and a total of seven 2.5" drives. For only 100$ it has alot to offer in my option. I just ordered one today for a ryzen Proxmox node am putting together .
Thanks for the recommendation, would definitely take this one into consideration as well. However it doesn’t look as nice and I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to get it given that the only seller I could find in Taiwan is on a marketplace type website.
I’m one of the ppl who overlooked In Win for business cases. This one and the rest in the series look very interesting. I would prefer In Win to use 1mm steel sheet for all cases like the most heavy duty one in the series. 0.8mm is not bad. So a minor thing.
It looks like a suit which all look like about the same to me. IMO, it looks better than Fractal Design (and they use flimsy steel sheet)
In Win is a Taiwanese brand, headquartered in Taiwan. I believe it still has a tiny production line in Taiwan (majority production in China). How funny it’s that their products aren’t generally available in the homeland.
It’s about like that for many brands actually. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Acer are all Taiwanese brands yet they often have models that aren’t available in Taiwan, such as when I was shopping for a laptop I couldn’t find the RTX2060 with 120hz screen option for the zephyrus G14 locally
I’ve also seen Seasonic and FSP (both Taiwanese brands) have special models for the Chinese market
Asrock, which is another Taiwanese brand, doesn’t sell their Arc A380 cards in Taiwan, forcing me to go with an A750 for my media server plans
Framework (the one that makes laptops), despite having a subsidiary in Taiwan, making their laptops in Taiwan, and ships their laptops from Taiwan, doesn’t even ship to the Taiwan market
We’re used to it, it’s just how things are a lot of the time
