I purchased this case as part of my FreeNAS build. The case is a wonder; 8 standard HDD hot swap drive bays and 4 fixed SSD bays in a compact mini-ITX form factor. Because of the compact size space gets tight when building, but since this case is meant for server boards with little or no add-in cards it was fairly easy, even for a guy like me with fat butcher's fingers.
A couple of notes:
1. Be careful when removing the main hot-swap drive cage; the small screws along the top can stick, meaning they don't protrude when you unscrew them from the frame. It's crazy easy to strip them if you keep trying to unscrew them once they have released and are rotating freely. Have a needle-nose pliers ready to pull them out. I would have liked to see the case come with a few backup screws to accommodate this.
2. Be careful when pulling out the drive cage. The back of the cage has a bunch of capacitors and other semi-fragile electronics exposed (parts of the hot-swap hardware) and you can bend or break them very easily if you grip it wrong. Since the drives in this cage are not meant to be connected directly to the SATA data and power cables, and are not directly exposed from the back, this could be a game over-case destroyer.
3. Secure your cables carefully! The tight space means that unsecured cables can rub against the fans, creating noise and potentially bad things.
4. The magnetic screen on the side is irritating when picking the case up; it slides off very easily and is placed in a position where you naturally grip when lifting, causing it to slide around in your grip; I'd suggest removing it when moving and re-attaching after you set it down.
5. The manufacturers site lists their CPU water cooling as compatible. You could probably remove the front fan and install the radiator+fans there but it would be a TIGHT fit and I don't think I'd recommend it. Also, many server boards that you might buy with this form factor are SoC and have their cooling systems soldered onto the board, making it impossible to use an external cooling system: double check before buying to avoid wasting your money.
6. One weird thing I discovered: for each HDD drive bay on the hot-swap back-plane there appear to be two SATA ports. I'm not sure why, my wild guess would be for redundancy or something along those lines, but what I found was that the system did not recognize the drives unless the SATA cables were plugged into the port on the left. So for each bay, plug the cable into the left SATA port. This may very much be a YMMV situation, since I really have no idea what the second port on each bay is for.
All of this is pretty minor. For a NAS build this box is as close to perfect as I've seen. Once built this thing is a dream: small, powerful, and fairly quiet. I highly recommend it.
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
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