NAS Case 8-Bay

This is a great case and not just "for the price." There's a lot to like here. The case takes both mATX and Mini-ITX motherboards. The drive trays can be a bit finicky to get clipped into place, but what plastic drives trays aren't, and how often are you really going to be removing/adding hard drives? Don't force the tray in and you won't break anything. The drive trays have mounting holes for both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. Drive trays have a blue light for power and a green light for activity. The 2-compartment design keeps the heat from the hard drives from washing over your motherboard and ensures the air pulled over the drives has a straight shot out of the case. I have 8, 7200-rpm drives and after 48 straight hours of file copying, temps were all b/t 47C and 51C. They idle at around 44C. Those are not bad temps at all for eight, 7200-prm disks crammed together in a quiet case. The fans the case comes with are not horrible. They are completely acceptable for stock fans. In fact, I bought 80mm Noctua Redux and 60mm Redux fans to replace all of them. The stock 80mms are actually not as noisy. The Redux fans have a bit of a high-pitched whine to them, which is more annoying to me than the hum of the stock fans. The 60mm Noctua is quieter and moves the same air as the stock 60mm fan, so that got swapped out. Due to the small upper compartment, and the good exhaust ventilation design, a single, quiet 60mm fan is sufficient to keep the CPU reasonably cool. If you don't mind fan noise, put a high-speed fan in there and you could keep a higher-wattage CPU fairly cool. I have a SuperMicro A2SDi-8C+ motherboard (Atom C3758 CPU) in this case and the CPU idles at 45C and never breaks 50C even under load. That's with the tiny 40mm fan that comes stock on the MB CPU HSF. You could fit approximately a 1U-height or other low-profile CPU HSF in here, so you might be able to keep a more powerful CPU reasonably cool (but noisy). I wouldn't put a 150W+ CPU in this case though. The case is SUPER-EASY to build in. The PSU (Flex format) lives in the lower compartment, so there's nothing in the MB area but the 60mm fan. There are some small gotchas that you need to be aware of. Most Flex PSUs don't have really long cables. You will need an ATX 24-pin, and CPU 12v 8-pin extension cables b/c most ATX/12V MB sockets are the side of the MB opposite of where the PSU mounts in the bottom compartment. I'd like to see these extensions included with the case, even if they upped the price by $10. It's likely that 90%+ of users will need these extensions and it can be a real bummer finishing up your new build only to realize you have to wait another few days for the cables you didn't know you needed to arrive b/c your PSU cables are 2" too short. There are no SSD mounting locations in the MB tray, but there is space along the sides of the compartment to mount SSDs with double-sided tape, which is what I have done. It's not likely you'll be moving this case around, so double-sided tape on SSDs that weigh like 1 ounce works just fine. I have 2 SSDs mounted and could fit in a third without too much hassle. Using 20TB hard drives, you could have 160TB of storage in a case the size of a large shoebox. That's just nuts. FANTASTIC CASE and highly recommended.

the case is a little tight to work in it's quality is ok only one hdd tray not lighting up ,tried switching trays but nothing works checked that tray everything seams ok but when i put it back in case still not lighting up so i think the led problem is on hdd back plane size of this case is perfect for the space i have it in it has almost enough room in motherboard part to add 2 -2.5 sata ssd but mounts for only 1 so i 3d printed a mount that holds 2 price point it should actually be $30 less product support is almost non existent. it came with no setup guide and has a ton of screws don't know which is which so no i will not be recommending this nas case to anyone

I have three U-NAS 810a cases that are similar in design to this one. They are better build quality and noticeably heaver. The cooling is much better. The PSU mount is better. The included fans are better. Unfortunately, I haven't seen them in stock for over 6 months and don't expect them to return. I was excited that these were available and bought three for $180 each. Here are my thoughts: PROS - Hot-swappable 8-bay. There aren't many options. - Relatively low price compared to the few similar options - Decent-enough aesthetically. CONS - The fans are not good. While performing a scrub on my ZFS pool, I received an alert about drives being over temp. I looked and all of them were around 60C. This is bad! You can barely feel any air coming out the back. I immediately canceled the scrub, and the drives idle around 45-50c. For comparison, the U-NAS 810a with included fans the same drives idle around 30-35c and never reach 40c even during a scrub. This case -- same drives, same use -- 15-20c higher temps. The U-NAS 810a has 2 x 120mm Gelid fans instead of this with 2 x 90mm ??? fans. I am using these as an external enclosure (as I do with the U-NAS) and so do not have a motherboard installed, but can't imagine how hot it would get if I did. I will install a blank plate in the io-shield spot and hopefully direct more air over the drives, a fan controller to increase the RPM, and if that doesn't work I'll finally try new fans. I don't think this case has any right to advertise 'great cooling.' - I bought and set up 3 of these. When I powered on one of them for the first time, blue flashed from inside, the home's circuit tripped, and the outlet fried. I've built countless systems over the years and never, ever experienced a short. To reiterate, these are set up as an external jbod and only have the backplane and SAS expander connected to the PSU, so there's little room for error. After taking it apart, my theory is that the pins from the molex connector through the backplane was a little too long and shorted with the hard-drive casing. I have no way to validate this, but after putting a small piece of electrical tape over the molex power pins facing the hard drive, this didn't happen again. The manufacturer could either ensure the pins are not excessively long, or put some sort of non-conductive shielding between the drives and backplane. - The edges are sharp! They do include some basic gloves, which I thought was a nice touch, but it would be even nicer if the case never tried to cut you in the first place. This is not a unique issue, and not a deal-breaker, but be careful! - The PSU mounting bracket is terrible. I had to manually trim it because it covered the switch on the Silverstone 350w Flex PSU. It's a very flimsy metal that bends under the weight of the PSU. It would be much nicer if the PSU just mounted directly to the case, or if a stronger metal is used that doesn't interfere with the switch. If the U-NAS 810a is ever in stock -- buy that instead. The build quality is better (though it may still cut you), the power supply mount is stronger, the cooling is MUCH better, and it was only $20 more. If the U-NAS 810s continues to be out of stock -- this will do. It was a fair value at $180, but I see the seller has increased the price to $200. Comparing this at $200 to the U-NAS at $220, I could not recommend this. However, since there aren't really alternatives, this will do the job...

The case is great for a NAS or SAN (what I used it for). The back-plane will accommodate not only SATA, but also SAS drives. The drive bays work great. Wish there was a connector on the back-plane for drive locator LED connectors. Stock noise level is very acceptable. With the stock fans and 8 SAS drives, the case runs cool, but the drives are hot as there is nearly no air flow around the drives. There's a lot of wasted space in the lower chamber where the drives are to accommodate the front power button and USB connectors, but those could have been moved to the top and the drives spread out a bit to help in ventilation. I played around with different fan configurations for a week until I built a solution which causes the drive temperatures to not budge at all under activity. You'll find it if you search for Audheid on Thingiverse. All in all, I'd recommend the case.

Build quality is ok, there are sharp edges internally just be mindful when poking around in side. Case comes with front end mounting plates for a flex PSU and a 1u server PSU also rear end plate for flex PSU plus a bag of screws for hard drive mounting to caddies. The case also came with 8 X straight through sata cables at approx 50cm length they are quite stiff and might be tricky to use in some builds depending on the sata socket position and orientation on the motherboard. Speaking of which if you are going matx I would recommend getting a board with the sata ports facing up and not forward otherwise you will not have enough clearance to bend the data cable round unless you get a bunch of dual stacked sata port 180°/90° adaptors or slim/flexible sata cables. I would recommend getting a flex PSU for this machine as if you stuff in a server 1u PSU you are going to have more difficulty cabling. I used an enhanced enp 7660p as a PSU completely stock, with this flex power supply I needed a 24pin and 8 pin extension cable to reach the motherboard. This is a rebadged case made by Toploong, comes with a sata backplane that is powered by two 4 pin molex connectors. You can find replacement backplanes on AliExpress under Innovision brand. I replaced all the case fans with noctua NF series fans 1 X 60mm X 25mm pwm and 2 X 90mm X 25mm pwm. The existing 90mm fans were 3 pin fans that were glued into the backplane 4pin fan headers (thanks a bunch) but I managed to get them out without damaging the fan header. Hope this helps.

Nice, compact, sturdy case with pretty much anything you can ask for, but there are a few design choices that I question: 1) Use of molex connectors on the SATA backplane instead of SATA connectors -- had to buy adapters. 2) Choosing to go with a Flex/1U PSU for a chassis with capacity for 8x 3.5" Hard Disks: not many FLEX PSU's can output enough power for so many drives, let alone all the case fans, plus the motherboard and peripherals (RAID controller), and ones that do often cost as much as this case! Don't use anything less than at least 500w! 3) Placement of PSU on left side of the case can make it a dicey proposition for Flex processor cables to reach the top, back, right corner of the case where ATX-M CPU-power connectors are typically found. 4) Despite having to work with limited power from typically-smaller capacity PSU's, the two large chassis fans draw off the already loaded-down SATA backplane. I ended up sourcing a PCIe-6 to 3-pin fan splitter and driving them off the PCIe rail instead (since my NAS doesn't need a performance gfx card leaving that rail otherwise unused). 4) The 60mm fan that ventilates the upper (motherboard) compartment weirdly comes with a molex connector for its power, instead of a 3 or 4 pin motherboard-power connector. Adapters from molex to 3-pin are common and easy to source, while the reverse are not and I ended up having to replace the fan itself si I could power it from a Motherboard connector and not the overloaded SATA rail (the only PSU line with a molex connector). 5) As far as I can tell, the backplane does not support SAS; given that high-performance disk access is likely to be a priority for this case, that seems like a glaring oversight.