smeep2k4

I have the Norco 4224. It's a decent case. The video that you have in your post shows redundant power for the drive backplanes. That's not available any more. The case is damn heavy. The drive caddies feel a bit cheap, but they're solid enough. Make sure your CPU fan isn't taller than 92mm, or it won't fit in the case. The complaints I have about the case: 1) there's no instructions with it. It's fairly straightforward, but there are 6 pins on the fan array that aren't labelled. I'm assuming they're fan header pins, but without docs, it's hard to say. 2) the fans in the thing are loud. Consider swapping them with Noctua's. 3) There are led's for LAN1 and LAN2, but there's no connector for LAN2 coming out of the front panel. Having said that, I'm pretty happy with the case.

Yeah, if you use both m.2 slots, then you will lose that PCIeX4 slot. The other two slots can be configured as either 1 PCIeX16 or 2 PCIeX8 slots. The second m.2 slot will turn off the U.2 slot, which you may or may not care about. If you have plans to have 2 SATA controller cards, then you might want to look at the Gigabyte C246-WU4 instead. It has more PCIe slots available. However, if you use both m.2 slots, you will lose one SATA port on the Gigabyte mobo. Since it has 10 SATA ports on the mobo, this probably won't be that big of an issue.

I have this case, but there are absolutely no instructions provided, so I can't give you a definitive answer. My guess is that they're fan control header pins. Since there's 6, there would be 2 per fan that you'd connect to the motherboard.

I'm in the middle of a 4224 build myself. Unfortunately, I haven't completed the build, so I can't specify (yet) on how it would fit your task. I'm still waiting for the final SSD to be deliverd. I'll just speak on the parts I went with: SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SCA-F-O ATX C246 Motherboard Intel Core i7-8700 Coffee Lake CPU Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR4 2666 MT/s (PC4-21300) Noctua NH-D9L CPU Cooler SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA / SAS 8-Port Controller Card NORCO RPC-4224 Case EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G1+ Power Supply 2 x WD Gold 10TB Hard Drives for Parity Drives 3 x WD Red 10TB Hard Drives for Data Drives 2 x SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 for Cache Drives 2 x Norco Reverse SAS-SATA breakout cable 4 x J&D Internal Mini-SAS to Internal Mini-SAS Cable NORCO RL-26 Heavy-Duty Slide Ball Bearing Rail 7 x 15-Pin SATA to 4-Pin Molex Connector 27U 4 Post 19" Open Frame Network Data Server Rack Cost: Just over $6000 CAD (I wish the Canadian rupies exchange rate didn't suck so bad) I picked the Supermicro board because I needed 2 PCIeX8 slots for the controller cards. The downside of this board is that if I use both M.2 slots, I lose a PCIeX4 slot and the U.2 connector. I don't care about the U.2 connector, but that X4 slot loss hurts for network upgrades, if I want to move to 10GigE or Infiniband down the road. After I purchased it, I found the Gigabyte C246-WU4 board that might have been a better choice. You lose a 4x slot and one of the SATA connectors on that board. The difference is there's 2 PCIeX4 slots and 2 PCIeX8 slots on the Gigabyte. But then again, I'd be limited to 23 drives instead of 24. There's always tradeoffs because there's just not enough PCIe lanes available for everything. The CPU: My options were limited here. I was worried about price, and since I could only pick up CPU's from either NewEgg or Amazon (my options for places to buy from in Canada sucks), and I knew Xeon's were more expensive, I went with the Core i7 instead. Not a K either, because I have no intention of overclocking this setup. Later, I found some E series Xeon's that could have fit in my price range, but they weren't available when I started spec'ing out the build. The RAM is generic desktop RAM because ECC isn't an option for Core i7 chips. What I found was that the unbuffered ECC RAM that this motherboard supports is generally close to 2x the cost of desktop RAM. If you live in the US, maybe your options are better. Also, this mobo doesn't (currently) support "Gen 9" processors. The Noctua cooler is important here. I originally bought a Cooler Master cooler, but I found it was too tall for the case. Another member on this site recommended a specific Noctua cooler, but that one was for a different chip/socket layout. The most important thing to remember on this one is that you need to keep the cooler to the 92mm or less range. 4U seems big, but it's not big enough for a 110mm fan. The elephant in the room: SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 controller cards (each card handles 8 drives, and the mobo handles another 8, giving 24 total drives). I chose this because I had already picked out the Supermicro board, and I figured Supermicro products should work well together. But you'll find many people on this site advocate against this controller because its Marvell chipset can be problematic with Linux and Unraid. I have no experience with these controllers. If I had done just a bit more research, I would have chosen LSI 9211's set to IT mode instead. I may end up having to buy those controllers anyway, if I encounter the issues other people have. I would recommend going with the LSI 9211's instead, just to save yourself the heartache if you happen to be one of those people that are affected by the issues with Marvell chipsets. Other random thoughts: the power supply is probably overkill for this build. My old 15-drive build had a 650, though, so I figured I'd need a little more to handle the 24 drives. I haven't done the power consumption calculations, but everything I've read on this site specifies that I could get away with less. But, I figure it's better to have too much available than not enough. The 15 pin SATA to 4-pin Molex connectors are something I never knew I needed on this build. For whatever reason, the Norco's backplanes use the old 4-pin molex connector for power. Also, the internal fans require 1 4-pin molex connection for power. Finally, I would have rather built a closed rack system, but I was having difficulties finding a closed rack for cheap that was deep enough for this case. The 600mm cheap closed racks are too small for the Norco case. You will need something closer to 800mm-900mm depth. And a closed versiono of those would have been at least 2x or 3x as much as the open frame rack I bought. It's a cheap rack with horrible build instructions, but once I put it together for the 3rd time (did I mention the instructions were bad?), it feels solid enough for my needs. Now, I'm not into the transcoding side of things, since I only use Plex on my internal network via network shares. I can't speak too much on that, but this build should be good enough for 4k to 1080p transcodes, 1080p to 720p transcodes, etc.

Thank you! Much appreciated!

I picked up a Norco 4224 for my next Unraid server. For the build, I also picked up a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. It looks like it will, somehow, be too high for this case. No idea how that's possible. For an i7-8700, does anyone have any suggestions on another option for cooling that doesn't involve liquids, and will fit this 4U case?

This was incredibly useful information. I'm building a 20-bay server with this mobo, and I wasn't sure which lanes the m.2's used. I don't need the 4x PCIe slot, so losing that is no biggie. Same with the U.2 connector.

For me, I won't buy another Green drive ever again. I've gone through 8 in about 2 years. In my environment, I keep my file server on 24/7/365. The Greens aren't rated to handle that. Greens are desktop level drives, whereas, according to WD Marketing, Red are rated for RAID and are supposed to handle 24/7/365. If you plan on having your file server operate like that, then I'd recommend staying away from the Greens. (There's other Marketing fluff about how Reds are specially built for RAID situations and therefore won't take down a complete RAID array, but, I can't comment on that. Besides.. this is UnRAID!). Now, I haven't had my Reds for 2 years yet, so I may change my opinion of them, but my opinion of the Greens won't change. I won't buy another one.