I have a Fractal Design R7 XL. I can’t comment on rack mount, never used it.
The setup and cable management was trivial, when using a Corsair RMx Shift series PSU the power cables were a doddle compared to every other tower case I’ve used. But if you want fans mounted on the topand front you will be limited to only 16 HDD, 12 in the main stack and 4 in the bottom cages. You might be able to fit another cage in. However, you will also be able to fit another 3 SSD on top of that.
I don’t doubt that it is not the most efficient for cooling, but I’ve found it’s relatively quiet with noctua fans, and in some respects aesthetics can matter: I don’t know about where you are going to put it though, but I can say this: my spouse would not have accepted a 3U or 4U (or any rackmount) case whatsoever, but she is fine with the Define R7 XL case.
Keep in mind, most of the 5x3 hot-swap arrays our there also specialize in baking HDDs to a creamy consistency. There is simply too little room between HDDs and too little resultant airflow with the included fans to not unleash a little heat goblin once a resilver or scrub strikes. I remember my HDDs clocking in at 45*C+.
I’ve got iStarUSA 5-in-3 from many years ago, and the 80mm fan at the back isn’t up to the job of pulling air over the drives. Because they need room for connectors (which are directly connected to the backplane), that’s the largest fan that these units can hold.
Somebody needs to design one of these units with a 120mm fan right behind the drives, and a void behind that where only about 10% of the space is blocked for the connectors, with cables from the connectors to the backplane that route on either side of the fans.
And, the fan needs to be connected to power via a standard 3-pin fan connector, not somethng oddball, so the user can replace it easily.
I have 2 choices as far as I can see and that’s a Supermicro 3-4U chassis or the R7 XL chassis.
I am thinking of the following build in terms of components.
Xeon CPU of some kind
X10-X11 Supermicro motherboard
LSI HBA probably a 16 or 24i flashed to it mode
x6 SSD and an Optane 900P for a slog
x12 20TB Seagate ironwolf pro drives
Chelsio T520 CR 10G card
I think cooling should be fine as i allready have cooling in the room.
My goal with this build is to get as good VM storage performance as possible with the SSDs over NFS to proxmox.
I have initiallty looked at Intel DC S6310, you guys have any good opinions?, the plan is obviously to migrate to SCALe
I just learned about this case from this thread today. Currently running an Antec 1200 V3 w/ 4 Coolmaster 4-in-3 cage. The drives stay under 40C as long as its not toasty hot in the room. How well does the Fractal do with keeping the drives cool? My concerns is the front intake fan’s wouldn’t get good fresh air to feed them with the “front door” present.
I just upgraded my build, and now have the three fractal design fans that come with the case in the front and then a further three noctua fans in the rear. I have not run it hard yet as still seeing how it handles, but the room gets really warm in summer.
The bigger problem is the fans keep on trying to drop the RPM below the critical level when it’s just idling along. When I pinned them to 50% max rpm and ran a jellyfin stream with no encoding everything was fine, didn’t even approach 40c. This was with space for a HDD left empty between each populated HDD tray. Previously I ran them minimum distance and this was a bigger problem.
Tl;Dr the case isn’t the problem, the fans, ambient temperature and HDD population need the attention first.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve done so far (only started the rebuild on Friday, only reloaded the Scale configuration on Sunday, and fixed the VM starting issue yesterday). But I’m wary that I have both a passively cooled GT 1030 in a riser and a 4070 super in that case, so I will be testing where the limits are.
My gut feeling is that the case is good enough from a sound perspective that minimum fan rpm of 50% will work for both air flow and sound in most instances but if the ambient temperature goes over 30c all bets are off. Just keeping an open mind right now.
If it was a cold room then I’d be certain it’d be fine, but it’s south facing and gets full sun in summer.
