2U-12 bay hotswap 6GB

I bought this case as I needed a cheap way to sanitize drives. I own an MSP and we get hundreds of old servers hard drives each year to destroy. We offer shredding but many of our clients want a greener option that doesn't destroy the drive. We've done that on a one-off basis using a regular PC and some drive destruction software that offers certificates of destruction. We bought one of these instead of the eight bay Silverstone case. I would have probably gone with Silverstone except it requires a TFX power supply and I didn't find any that offered the correct number of Molex connectors required. This case accepts a regular ATX power supply which are ubiquitous and cheap. Build quality: This case has a very nice sturdy frame. The tolerances on the drive trays are tight so be prepared to work a little bit to get them back in the first time you pull them out. The trays themselves can be used tool-free as they have bumps on one side of the tray to hold a 3.5" drive in place. For long term use you should plan on using screws, but this deserves a mention for anyone using this case the way we are. The case accepts mATX or smaller motherboards and I happened to have an old one sitting around that I used in this. Backplane: The backplane is hot swap and does its job well. I used a LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i 8-port 12Gb/s SATA+SAS PCI-Express 3.0 Low Profile Host Bus Adapter and two 10Gtek Internal Mini SAS HD SFF-8643 to Mini SAS SFF-8087 cables to hook up eight of the drive bays. The motherboard I used had six SATA ports, four of which are hot swap so I was able to hook up the bottom four backplane slots using the cables that came with the case. Fans: The fans are loud and move a lot of air. This is not a big deal for us as it lives in our office workroom but if you are using this in your home it could be a concern. I tried using the system before I hooked the fans up and the drive bays got extremely hot. Once I connected the fans I was able to have 12 drives running without it overheating. Rails: They didn't fit my shallow rack so I didn't use them. Bottom line: I might buy another one of these to use a NAS down the road. To me this represents an extremely good value for a 12 bay server chassis.

The case fits mini-ITX style boards. I purchased a NAS mini-ITX board for this case and it works great. The case itself comes with all the cables needed. It has a backplane so you simply need to connect three molex to the backplane for power and use the provided cabling to setup your SATA connections. Make sure your board has 12 SATA connections or use a low profile SATA card. If you get an SATA PCI card, make sure the SATA connectors mount horizontally off the card. Straight up will hit the case top. With the motherboard I am using, the SATA connectors on the end of the card are useless as well. One big complaint is the case fans are LOUD. It will be impossible to sit next to this case on your desktop without swapping out the fans for something quieter. This is my biggest gripe with the case. It has 4 80mm fans to move air through the case and it could be a bit quieter. I'm planning to replace them with 4 Noctua 80mm fans which should hopefully quiet things down. The case is deep so if you plan to rackmount it make sure the rackmount is at least 22 inches deep. The sliding rails seem useless for the rack that I'm using and there was no other mounting options which was disappointing.

I'd been looking for a 2U 12-bay chassis for several months and came across this one. This format/size seems to be a bit rare so I thought this was a good find. More on that later... The case itself is pretty well-built. My rack doesn't have rear mounts so I can't make use of the rails. I had an easy time fitting in my mini-ITX board, HBA card, and 12 drives. I'm running TrueNAS SCALE and most things run great. I like the form factor, the finish, and the look. The main issues I have with this case are two-fold: The power button sticks out and is really easy to accidentally press if you are handling the server while it's on. I wish it were recessed or there was some sort of cover. I ended up taping a piece of cardboard around the left ear to make a shroud to make it harder to accidentally bump into the power button. The other issue is with the backplane. I don't think it's rated or designed for 12Gbps, although it does seem to function OK with my LSI 9305-16i HBA card. I'm using SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 cables to connect my HBA card to the backplane. In my Zpool I have a mix of Exos and HGST drives. The HGST drives all functioned fine, but the Exos drives have intermittent write errors. I first checked the firmware of the HBA card and my drives and made sure everything was up-to-date. I changed out the Gtek10+ cables for more expensive SuperMicro cables and no dice - I still received intermittent write errors. I ended up finding a forum post about how limiting link speeds on the HBA card to 6Gbps made the author's similar issue go away. I did the same, limiting and verifying that all the Exos drives were limited to 6Gbps and sure enough, I didn't get anymore write errors. Because I know the HBA card is good, the cables are top-quality (SuperMicro), and my drives are fine (no errors in my old system), then the only remaining link can be the backplane. I can't find any information online about it so I can only assume it is some generic or proprietary backplane made for this chassis. Due to this issue, I really wish I had just gone with a SuperMicro CSE-826BE1C4-R1K23LPB chassis instead. Anyone who knows anything would know that the chassis isn't going to give you any trouble, and you'd be able to use full 12Gbps speeds, not that it matters much unless you've got SSDs. So all-in-all, I'm not super bummed that I'm limited to 6Gbps, but at the same time I wish I'd with the SuperMicro instead. If this case were $100 cheaper I'd probably feel differently. Regardless, it still is pretty decent value, so three stars on that.

The overall build quality is extremely cheap, even cheaper than you'd expect given the price. The metal is extremely thin, and actually arrived slightly bent, despite the foam packing in the box. The PCIe covers are break-outs. The rails are horrible. They don't fit a standard depth rack. Fortunately, my rack is adjustable so I was able to decrease the depth a bit for the rails to fit, but they're also not really the right width either. I had to loosen the bolts on my rack to get just enough clearance for the rails to slide properly, and even then it takes some jostling to get it to come out all the way. Sliding it back in is worse. The cables for the front IO are routed externally for some reason, and there's a piece of metal covering them. The problem is this piece of metal doesn't have clearance for the rail, so the grind against each other as the rail moves. I thought about removing it, but that friction is the only thing actually retaining the server. With the guard removed, the server is free to slide out at any time if your rack is even slightly off-level. I have to imagine that problem would only be worse if the drive bays were all full. Speaking of the drive bays, my backplane seems dead on arrival. I've tried testing disks in different bays, tried different SAS ports, even tried using an HBA card instead of connecting the backplane to the motherboard SATA. The disks are powered, but they're not recognized by the OS. If I connect the disks directly to the motherboard, without the backplane, they're detected just fine, so the problem clearly isn't the disks or the motherboard. Oh, and like someone else mentioned, the power button is in a terrible place. There are no handles to grab onto, so if you want to slide the server for any reason, it's extremely easy to hit the power button by accident, which is obviously undesirable Honestly the only reason I went for this chassis over something else is because I really wanted something that supported an ATX power supply, instead of server power supplies. But after spending how many hours troubleshooting this backplane, I can definitely say it wasn't worth the hassle. Probably going to try and return it, even though repacking everything seems like another massive hassle.

I've been looking for a Server Chassis that can fit the depth of my Rack and I came across this one which fits my needs. I swap my TrueNAS Server from an old Tower Chassis to this one and with the help of support after an issue popped up I was up and running.

I have had it for a few weeks now and finally was able to install TrueNas Scale onto this with 8 drives thus far as that is all I can afford. I am a little upset I bought for $50 more than what price is now. I contacted Amazon 7 days after purchase and they would not offer me anything other than return original and purchase another at lower price. Yeah... so I kept it. I have 4x4TB and 4x8TB drives in two pools. There is NO manual on hooking anything electrical up for this case. Zero. Nada. So this neing my first NAS build in a rack form factor (using a back plane) was trial and error. Not much room in this case but that is why I bought it to get rid of my big ATX 12 year old Desktop computer used as a NAS that took up way too much space under my desk. Reliable it was though. Will mount this into my server rack along with a QNap NAS which is slow as my dog if he had no legs. Luckily he still does have all four. I have learned a lot about building NAS in the last year and this case, although overpriced at what I bough should last me 5 or so years. That is what I was looking for along with space saving rackmount. Edit: Kudos to this company refunding me the $50 after seeing this review. That means a lot to me and will probably order from them again if I need another server case. It has been working flawlessly for the last few months and is now sitting in a 15u rack. Thanks again to CICHENG INC. Updated to 4 stars from 3 as the 4 fans are loud. I changed them out to Nocturas at half the decibel level but the trade off is the original fans push much higher volume of air. I monitor the temps and so far they are fine. YMMV.

To start, I was using this as a NAS build using hardware that I already had, just putting it in a new case with hotswap bays and room for more drives. I chose this case as it seemed to be a great value and still checked all of the boxes for me. While overall the build quality is great, there seems to be a few parts that were not entirely thought about. The first issue is the rail on the left side of the chassis interferes with the guard tray for the front IO cables (video attached). Another thing is the PCI slot SSD tray, which will never fit in the case if there is a motherboard under it, so you would need an ITX board to use that (photo attached). Also, it was not mentioned in the listing, but these rails are not compatible with a full-size rack and can only extend to a maximum of 28 inches, albeit with VERY little metal contact on the rear adjustment slide, but it shouldn't need much support in the back unless something else is weighing it down. I would also like to mention that the motherboard standoffs are not installed, and a tool is not included. Despite all of this, I still think this case is decent buy. I have not broken anything yet and all it needs to do is sit in a rack and not fall apart on its own. After all, you build in it, set it up, and hardly ever touch it again.

Read all the other reviews before you buy this, there are many issues with the case but ultimately it's one of the cheapest hotswap 12 bay cases you can find. I wish I could get the backplane board in a 4U case so I could fit 120mm fans and full sized PCIe cards. Here are some other notes if you buy this: * The rack rails are too wide to fit a standard width rack. Even if they fit though, the rails are a terrible design. You should be able to remove the case from the rails vertically without a screwdriver. *Airflow around the 12 bay HDD's is pretty terrible. I only have 6 drivers installed and I've noticed a 5C increase from my old case even with all of them on max RPM. *Modular PSU is very helpful for this build (you can do without, but you'll probably need to remove an 80mm fan).