July 28, 20241 yr Hello, Been running unRaid for many years, first in a large heavy tower, now in a 2U Dell rack mount server. I need to expand to a 3U or 4U to accommodate more drives and possible a GPU. I realize that I will need new internal components - mobo, cpu, etc. Looking for recommendations on suitable chassis that supports hotswap capability and at least 10 drive bays (minimum 8x 3.5" and 2x 2.5"). Thank you!
July 28, 20241 yr I really like the Rosewill 4u I have. Solid case, lots of room. I opted for no hot swap bays to let me run 120mm fans pushing across the drives; I made a custom mount to run 3x140mm in the second fan row. I had hot swap before and never used it - I realized I will likely always power down to do maintenance. There are 3 cages easily removed to actually work on drives, whichever case variant. I have 10 drives - 5x16tb 3.5", 5x SSD (2.5") and room for 5 more. Drives max out around 35°C, nvme gets a bit hotter. My goal was to manage temps hoping to prolong disk life. Lots of variations available on this case including 12 hot swap bays. Edited July 28, 20241 yr by _cjd_
July 28, 20241 yr Author 6 minutes ago, _cjd_ said: I really like the Rosewill 4u I have. Solid case, lots of room. I opted for no hot swap bays to let me run 120mm fans pushing across the drives; I made a custom mount to run 3x140mm in the second fan row. I had hot swap before and never used it - I realized I will likely always power down to do maintenance. There are 3 cages easily removed to actually work on drives, whichever case variant. I have 10 drives - 5x16tb 3.5", 5x SSD (2.5") and room for 5 more. Drives max out around 35°C, nvme gets a bit hotter. My goal was to manage temps hoping to prolong disk life. Lots of variations available on this case including 12 hot swap bays. Thanks for the detailed reply. What’s the model #? Most of the Rosewill case reviews are fairly critical of the build quality/materials.
July 28, 20241 yr I got the RSV-L4500U The stock 2nd row fan mount has sharp edges and adds gobs of noise... I didn't care since I replaced it to fit the larger fans. The case itself is decent thickness steel, no complaints. I've seen consumer pc cases from them and they're not as nice... but also much cheaper. On par with all the other rack mount cases I've used (which isn't many, to be fair.) I have mine mounted "tower" orientation to a wall with a support at the back. I did also test and verify the 2 IcyDock 3x2 I have lined up vertically (5.25" top to bottom) making me think you might be able to use other hot swap cages and do more of a mix and match arrangement. I can't recall if I could have easily used the 6x2.5" hot swap I have. I can't vouch for the Rosewill hot swap bays. My IcyDock cages are an older model with a full enclosure at the 5.25" width. The 2.5" is a current model. I would have 47°C temps on the SSDs with this when doing backups (10gbe so it saturated drive write speed) thus the decision to not use it.
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