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Need a new Home Server Case

J

Justintoxicated

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 10, 2002
Messages
14,522
I have an Antec P180 Mini and I love the case entire system cooled by one large fan, nice flat black interior, sound deadening and good quality.

Anything like that exist today only larger?

Or at least something of decent quality with hard drives being easy to access? I don't think I will ever go beyond 12 Hard drives, but I have 9 stuffed into my mini with one resting inside that isn't mounted.

The newer antecs looks kinda cheap to me.

How is the quality on the Fractal designs compared to my antec P180B mini?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352029
 
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I bought that Fractal case 2 weeks ago. It‘s very quiet due to the silent fans and panels. It can hold only 8 hard drives unless you buy a 5.25" converter and only 1 PSU. On the plus side it can hold an E-ATX motherboard and has 9 card slots. Build quality is very high - very well made, no QA issues at all with mine.
 
rtangwai said:
I bought that Fractal case 2 weeks ago. It‘s very quiet due to the silent fans and panels. It can hold only 8 hard drives unless you buy a 5.25" converter and only 1 PSU. On the plus side it can hold an E-ATX motherboard and has 9 card slots. Build quality is very high - very well made, no QA issues at all with mine.
Click to expand...

Converters are expected :) Would something like a 4 in 3 work? My goal is 12 drives since that is an easy number to achieve without expensive raid cards.
Now off to google E-ATX :)
Oh yea and how and why would you need 2 PSU's seems to be all the rage these days. Multiple video cards?
 
Plenty of room for a 4-in-3 - the case dimensions are deceptive in pictures, it's quite big.

E-ATX is a motherboard format, basically a bigger version of ATX. Since you plan on using it as a server it is wise to be able to handle big motherboards in case you go all-in with a manufacturer like SuperMicro.

Dual PSUs are for redundancy, although I have also used two PSU's for my Crossfire setup.
 
Lian-Li PC-D8000. HPTX, dual PSU, 11 expansion slots, 20 3.5" HD, not quite a supercube but cooling was thought out.
 
rtangwai said:
Lian-Li PC-D8000. HPTX, dual PSU, 11 expansion slots, 20 3.5" HD, not quite a supercube but cooling was thought out.
Click to expand...

Wow that thing is huge, I don't think I will ever need something that big.

I went to Frys and looked at all their cases and wow they all seemed like junk. The Coolermaster Cosmos and Corsair seemed best but both seemed kinda cheaply built, I was especially disappointed in the corsair 800D since I was just about to buy the 900D and I'm not sure the quality will meet my expectations for the price. My Old antec P180 mini black blows them away in terms of build quality WTF. I saw a new antec P280 and it was built cheap too, nothing like my P180 mini.

Sooo disappointed. I'm considering just keeping my Motherboard, upgrading the CPU Memory and replacing a couple 1TB hard drives with 4TB drives and calling the upgrade finished...I both love and hate the case I have now. If I could somehow cram in 2 more hard drives it would be perfect, but I can't.

THey did not have any Fractal cases, will it be better quality than the Corsair?
 
You said you wanted to build a server, that's a server case.

I've owned Coolermaster, Corsair and Fractal cases and I haven't ever had quality issues with either manufacturer but I tend to buy the higher-end cases so YMMV. The Coolermaster ones tend to feel flimsy to me but that may be because I always buy HAF cases and they have so many holes there isn't a lot of metal left.

I'm very happy with the build quality of my Fractal R2 XL, no complaints other than the optical drive mounting is not tool-less and frankly I don't change the optical drive often enough for that to be an issue.
 
I just bought a Zalman MS800 for my home server rebuild. It's got 10 x 5.25" bays for you to customize any which way and they're all externally accessible. It's a bit big for a mid-tower, but so far I love it. I wanted something with a ton of drive space but really good airflow between them.
 
Droogie128 said:
Have you looked at the P280? It's the direct upgrade from the P180.
Click to expand...

It looked more like a direct downgrade to me, everything on it was cheap and flimsy. :(

Looking at this case now but I have a feeling it will be similar or worse than the new antecs?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352020

This computer will not have any optical drives, or sound etc.

I'm on the fence with mid or full size tower. I'd prefer a tower but the mid sized case above will work well enough that it's hard to justify the 50% increase for the full tower version. Honestly I love the size of the P180 mini black it is miro atx though, I'm highly considering leaving the microATX MB in there, and just upgrading the drives to 4TB drives so that I won't need as many Bays, as I haven't found anything to impress. The fractal above looks similar but the cost is probably too cheap to be anywhere in the same ballpark of quality, the layout is great though.

The interior design of the new cases for cable management is much better though, I just find the materials to be lacking in quality. Like I said all panels on my metalic finished P180 black make a nice thud if you knock on them. Newer cases seem to use thin panels and with thin light weight foam stuck to them if your lucky. I believe the new antecs I looked at all had painted steel metal side panels, vs the amazing panels on the older antecs that are a combination of metalic fisnish with heavy rubberized-like plastic.

here is a link to the case I have now, but it's really hard to explain the nice double wall panels from the pictures. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129041

I haven't found another case quite like it, no fans needed int he front because the 240mm quite fan on top set to low creates all the airflow the hard drives need.
 
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