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Curious, why no quiet storage cases?

S

sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
Messages
1,191
I've been looking for a non-rackmount storage case for "serious" storage. You know, 18-odd bays, a small MB, a focus on through-the-drives ventilation as opposed to the traditional send-the-air-to-the-CPU-and-GPU approach. And reasonably quiet and nice looking--a design targeted at well-heeled enthusiast home users.

Now I surely don't expect dozens of these cases to be out there. But I did think there would be a few here and there. After all, it's easy to lose count of the number of cases designed around handling three GTX580s. It's easy to lose count of the number of cases designed around multi-radiator water cooling. There surely aren't hundreds of thousands of people who need such setups, but the case makers make it a priority to have something for those folks in their product lineups.

Whereas storage-dense cases of similar caliber are pretty much absent. The only choices are to get a 4U rack unit then start swapping to make it quiet while finding a place to hide it because it's of its handsome third-rate-data-center looks, or get a mega "EATX plus quad-SLI" tower, and start adding 4-in-3s and ignoring all that other empty space.

Question is, why aren't there storage-dense "home" cases out there?
 
Short answer is that it's a small market. Besides [H] not going to see a lot of demand for this type of product, especially when there are so many competing alternatives from Norco and the like.
 
Something like a cube from Mountainmods.com would work. I know a few manufacturers make these "cube" cases in different styles/colors.

They can be a bit expensive, but being custom designed to what you want, it pays for itself many times over. Plus you can get all the fans you will ever need.
 
I've seen a few "casual" twins, Two cases joined the sides between removed, can be crude or elegant.
Besides the purpose built.
 
CaseLabs cases can handle many HD's, the smallest case they do (M8) can handle 24 and the biggest (TX10) is over 100. You can make it as quiet as you want really, all the HD's can have 120mm fans mounted in front, so then it just depends how fast you want to run the fans at. It's still a pretty big case though (M8 is essentially a double wide mid tower), so if the hardware driving the drives is small, then yes maybe it's still not as elegant a solution as you want.
 
there was one complete silent case: Zalman TNN500AF for about $1k
tnn-500af.jpg


but now all cases are very loud, and only way to go silent is to do a proper water cooling.
 
A Lian LI PC-343B (if you can find one) with the Lian Li 4-in-3 HDD Racks might be what you're looking for.
 
These are two options I am familiar with. That said, the Zalman I think does not have particularly impressive internal disk storage capacity. As to the PC-343B, it's been a default "I could fall back on that" option, but the required investment in drive cages is concerning, and more than one authority has describd the case as one that represents common design practices from five years ago but not necessarily today.

The CaseLabs option is very, very intriguing.
 
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