Greetings!
I currently use a Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 as my server chassis. I want to keep the tower format as much as possible. I am looking for chassis options that allow me to install a bunch of Icydock hotswap bays. I have looked for the old Antec cases that had a ton of 5.25 bays but people on Ebay are nuts. $100 for the case in good condition is fine but then they want $100+ in shipping…wth?
Silverstone have a bunch of NAS towers, not really paid too much attention to them myself as I’ve only bought their 20bay rack case.
But there might be something in their tower form factor line up that might meet your needs.
https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/computer-chassis/?filter=Server_Chassis
Big and heavy is expensive to ship, and private sellers may not know of appropriate shipping services and rates. Anyway, if you’re going to fit it with “a bunch” of expensive IcyDock enclosures, $100 is a tip.
Exactly what kind of bays are you looking for, and how many of them?
(From your other thread, I suspect there may be very specific and hard to guess requirements here.)
the 5.25 to 3.5 and 5,25 to 2.5/m.2 bays for hotswap
May actually be cheaper to take a 24 bay 4U rackmount case… and put it on its side.
Voila, a tower case.
That is going seriously out of fashion, and the exercice of fitting multiple bays with IcyDock enclosures does not like it will be “affordable”. Not to mention cooling the thing…
A quick search returned some cases with 4 bays, including the Fractal Design Define XL R2, a pair of cases with 5 bays, and one champion with 8 bays, InterTech Y-5508. No airflow to the front bay area.
Looking instead for cases with many hot-swap 3.5" bays (which I assume to be the main focus), I find Sliverstone CS-386 (which looks like a bigger DS-380, and thus another drive cooker), InterTech NAS-8, and Supermicro 743TQ, 745BTQ workstation chassis (not exactly “affordable”, but these further have 3x5.25" bays if you do want to add 2.5" enclosures and, most importantly, these are the only ones I would spontaneously trust to actually cool the hard drives).
Another option, hang it vertically from a wall. The front then faces up. They make short “rack” brackets for that use case. That’s what I would have done with a SM847 or whatever. Great case, great PSU, etc. Just not right for my home. The vertical rack adapter makes it “disappear”.
I have a case like what you are describing. It was branded SP (Super Power), full ATX tower format. They were quite popular 25-30 years ago where I live. front panel, from top to bottom, has 2x5.25”(or 3?) optical bays, a FDD 3.5 bay and then 4 or 5 more 5.25” slots all the way to the floor of the case. Those bottom bays were covered with a hinged grill door. I tried finding pictures online, but had no luck, probably due to the cases age. There are 2x80mm fans on the back and I have seen more “recent” variants of the case with a single 80mm fan on the top. If you are interested, I might be able to take a few pictures and try a picture search. I would also part with that case, if you think it fits your needs.
As expressed by the comments above, I hope those icy cool enclosures have active cooling. If you go over the top with drives density, the normal case cooling might struggle. Especially of modern “gaming” cases with a zillion 120mm fans. Those are low pressure fans and they are next to useless in driving meaningful airflow through tiny passages like the ones of tightly packed drive bays.
If you can pack your project into up to 16 2.5” drives, another box in my storage would be a much better fit. Dell Power Edge T320. It has 16 hot swap drive bays, complete with the sata/sas backplane. However it is only 6Gbit sas/sata, so might defeat your purpose. If you need newer hardware, I am sure all the big brand server manufacturers have tower server cases with 16 or more hot swap bays. Those at least run high pressure fans that will cool your stuff and give you tinnitus in the same time.
I have found the icy enclosures and the like to be underwhelming. Still better than the single 80mm trying to cool 8 drives in the old MiniXL but not much.
All my drives in a 3x 3.5” in a double 5.25” bay converter ran 10-15*C warmer than adjacent drives in the Lian Li a76 case below. It’s a good way to stress test during bad block provisioning but I wouldn’t use it day to day.
So it’s a great way to cram a lot of drives but it’s pretty expensive and drive cooling isn’t great. Unfortunately, good NAS cases like the Q26 from Lian Li are no longer made.
im not only going for icydock bays. Startech has cheaper options with bigger fans. My current case is quiet which i like but the drives are not easy to replace or locate if one fails.
I started with a T320. Then moved away when it came time to upgrade. Wasn’t sure I could use non-dell motherboards with it.
I have an old Coolermaster Centurion tower that has 9x 5.25" bays. Using some 4-in-3 hotswap drive cages that have backplane for power/data plus 120mm fans.
Have you checked the JMCD 9s2 which can fit 8 SAS + 1 SATA in addition to 2 2.5" SSDs?
There is also the larger 12s4 which can fit 12 SAS + 4 2.5" SSDs.
Both are available now from Alibaba for reasonable shipping prices.
Could be an option if you factor in the icy dock price
