Not that this hasn’t been asked before, but what are your favorite NAS cases on 2023?
I started with an old antec p180 case back 20 years ago.
Currently using a rosewell rsv-l4500 4u.
Really wish I could get my hands on a 45drivres style case like the q30 or something - just without the insane price tag. 😂
For the casual selfhoster, The Node 304 is hard to beat. Great cooling potential (U14S) with a 140mm exhaust, ATX power supply, 6 3.5" + 2 SSDs, and GPU all in <20L. I can literally sneak my server in anywhere!
That is a really nice small form factor case. I was recently looking at Fractal’s Define 7 XL because it can hold an amazing 18 3.5" + SSDs.
Yeah that is quite a few drives! But then you are reaching datahoarder levels.
I have been selfhosting for 3 years now and I am still on my first mirrored 4TB drive set 😅 I will get an 8 or 10 next and probably be set for like 10 years with 4 drives. If I pass that, I will need to saxrifice my M.2 boot drive for an M.2 sata controller. iTX problems.
Node 804 has something cool, 10 drives in a complete seperate chamber with separate cooling than the “normal” parts, plus micro ATX for a PCIe SATA controller.
Time is merely a perspective. I’ve been doing this for 20 years.
Perhaps it is overblown, but one of the reasons I have 8 drives is because I wanted to run raidz2 for the extra redundancy. I’ve had multiple drives die before and so as disk sizes have gone up more redundancy has been important (at least I thought so).
So when my first ZFS NAS (4 disks) developed hardware failure, I decided to get more serious about it. Hence larger rack device with a proper Xeon with ECC memory and an HBA for 8 disks + 2 SSDs and the old drives that survived as a play space. I’ve also used this server now for 9 years.