Those who are self hosting at home, what case are you using? (Looking for recommendations)

TLDR: If you were building a NAS for 8 HDDs and 1 SSD today, what case would you use?

I’m going to be rebuilding my system soon (currently using an old PowerEdge T610) using one of my other older (R5 1600) systems and I’ve basically hit a road block on picking a case.

I’ve got 8 HDDs that need to fit in the system after it’s rebuilt (plus at least one SSD) so I’m kinda limited in that regard.

The rest of the system is planned out (mostly because I’m reusing old parts) it’s just the case I’m stuck on.

I’m wanting to avoid rack mounting currently mostly due to space (and wanting to keep it under $200)

I was thinking maybe the Fractal Design Define R5, the Fractal Design Node 804, or the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 but I’m open to suggestions.

EDIT: And for those that want to know why I want to move away from the PowerEdge T610, it’s primarily due to repairability. Primarily the PSU, I don’t want to have to buy used PSUs in case mine dies again.

Gooey0210,

Lenovo thinkcentre m710q 🫡

Codilingus,

I know you said you’re against rack mounting, but JUST in case:

I love the look and tidiness of a nice rack mount system. So I got a Chenbro 4U case. It’s perfect for reusing my old components, and it has a standard size area on the front to install a hot swap HDD cage.

blazeknave,

804

colin, (edited )

Just because it’s a bit different to what you asked, and no one else has said it, I’ve found great results with the Terramaster D5-300 and D4-300. Make sure you get the USB 3.1 type Cs, but I’ve been fine with the plain rather than ones loaded with RAID.

For every USB 3.1 socket on the back I get 5 drives, I can increase capacity incrementally, and for spinning rust they are faster than they could transfer anyway.

I’ve replaced my machine with a Dell USFF box now and it all works great.

Completely understand if it’s not your thing but you can add a drive box to your existing system without replacing anything. I’m currently up to 16 drives.

charles,

Highly recommend cases by Fractal.

For self hosting I’d recommend either one of the Meshify 2 or Define 7, depending on local price and your specific needs. I personally went with the Meshify 2 XL and was blown away by the quality of the case. It’s built well and allows for a variety of configurations. It also makes maintenance very easy as the filters and side panels can all be removed without any tool to handle dust build up.

NicestDicerest, (edited )

+1 for Fractal Define R5 - Absolute Beast

terminhell,

I’m using an old HP z420 box. It supports up to 128gigs of ecc ram (which I have), has tons of drive and SATA options.

It could be possible to repurpose the chassis for custom builds too.

NarrativeBear,

Fractal Design Define 7 XL

You can fit 18 HDDs into it plus 5 SSDs at the same time without custom mount points.

Though you do need to buy the extra brackets and trays.

Not my build exactly but a example.

…unraid.net/…/97612-fractal-design-define-7-build…

Gormadt,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

18 HDDs into it plus 5 SSDs

Sweating intensifies

That’s a lot of drives, I’ll have to look into that one for sure

NarrativeBear,

I run TrueNAS myself in this case. I have two v-devs of 8 drives each in raid 2.

Both v-devs have a extra spare each. 4 SSDs are used for quick read and write and the 5th SSD for os boot.

JGrffn, (edited )

How’s performance on that setup? I own the case and am looking to do the exact same vdev setup this next year, but am wondering if the wider vdevs negatively impact performance in any noticeable way. Also wondering if 128gb of ram is too little for that kind of setup with 20tb drives, I feel like I might have to find out the hard way…

NarrativeBear,

Performance is great IMO, I store all my Plex media on this setup as a network share and never have any issues or slowdowns. I only use the setup as a strict NAS nothing else.

I started with 9 drives at 12tb first, about 3 years later (mid this year) i added the second vdev to my main pool. 9 drives 20tb each.

V-devs do not require to be the same size between v-devs, but they do require to have the same amount of drives in each.

I have unraid and proxmox setups on other machines running independently. Plex and other software for example all access my TrueNAS over the network.

For the TrueNAS system IMO you don’t need much “horsepower”. I run it on a 12 year old motherboard, 12gb ram and a 60gb SSD to boot. Nothing special at all. Unraid and proxmox on the other hand is where I spend the money on ram and processing power.

My Network is gigabit and I get full speed on network transfers, looking to do 10gb in the future, but that would require 10gb NIC’s in all my PC’s and new network switches. Don’t see it effecting my TrueNAS sytem setup. Besides your network transfer is only as fast as the read/write of the drives.

hperrin,

I’m using a Fractal Meshify 2. It’s big, but I highly recommend it. It can hold 11 HDDs. I’ve only got 6 in mine, and it’s quite roomy.

Sup3rlativ3,

So I recently went through all of this headache. I started really wanting hotswap that didn’t look like it was from the 90’s. I also needed like 8 drives capacity which rules a lot of the popular cases out.

I thought about it for a while and I don’t really touch the drives at all on any of my previous Nas builds so that meant I didn’t need hotswap.

Eventually I decided that rather than try to hide the case away I would make it a feature of my living room and I went with the tower 500 and I really love it and everyone that has gone over has mentioned how cool it looks

phrogpilot73,
@phrogpilot73@lemmy.world avatar

That looks an awful lot like what I have. I’m using the Lian Li PC-D600. I think I’ve managed to get my hands on one of the last ones in the wild. They aren’t even available used on eBay anymore.

What I like most about it (and the Tower 500 that you linked) is that the motherboard is on one side, and the drives are on the other. Keeping the drives cool is easy, I just upgraded the fans on my SATA backplanes and the case, and even under load the drives run very cool.

You can have this case when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

sxt,

I went with this www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/…/cs382/. It’s pretty decent but you are putting a hard cap on expansion. Also the fans it comes with are pretty loud so I’d replace them.

patchexempt,

I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.

Lem453,

Used to have a node 304. Very happy I got a hot swap Roswell 4u case

JustEnoughDucks,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Have a node 304. Extremely happy with it. Literally unbeatable hard drive and CPU cooler compatibility for its size.

That being said, it only fits 6 drives.

rambos, (edited )

For 9 disks I would need to print a bigger case, but this one suits me well for now 😉

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I really like the Node 804 even though the design is quite old - probably close to ten years old now. Fractal Design are still manufacturing it, which is rare for case designs that old.

I recently built a NAS using an 804. I had to fit mine into my server closet which isn’t deep enough to fit a regular PC case, so the 804 fit my use case well.

I’ve only got three drives in it (2 x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 for data and 1 x 14TB WD Purple Pro for security cameras) but I wanted the ability to expand in the future, and I wanted to use a Micro ATX motherboard rather than a smaller one.

A Noctua NH-D15 fits fine, even though the spec sheet says it won’t fit.

000,

I’m currently using one of the Rosewill rackmount chassis (www.rosewill.com/…/9SIA072GJ92847), fits well in my half rack along with my Unifi gear and HP ProLiant. I probably would’ve gone with something else if I had to buy it though- this was sorta a hand-me-down from a former roommate who didn’t want to take it with him when he left.

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