All About Storage

programster · December 22, 2014

The Problem

I love watching Linus's case reviews, but one thing sticks out like a sore thumb to me. The hard drive mount's seem to be a complete afterthought. The hard drive bays seem to be getting more "flimsy" over time. Often the only thing we hear about the mountings is that they either aren't there or should be removed for cable management or the installation of a graphics card. When I first saw the Fractal Node 804, I thought "Finally, a beautiful small case that I can put a lot of drives in", but then I saw the flimsy bays in a silly vertical position along the top of the case, as seen here.

What Cases I Use/Recommend

I have been "getting by" with the original Antec 1100 v1 which has served me very well. I especially love the strong steel bays that my drives slide into. The drives make a reasuringly loud "ka-chunk" sound when they get into position. If the 6 x 3.5 inch bays are not enough, there are 3 x 5.25inch bays which for the Icy Box IB-555SSK Dual Channel Backplane, so that one can expand to 11 HDDs. However, if I were to restart from scratch, I would try out the Sharkoon T9 ATX Midi Case, paired with 2-3 of those Icy Box's. The case is much smaller and cheaper than the antec, with the ability to host 15 drives. You will be spending more than the difference of the cases on those Icy Box bays instead. The advantage is that you can keep those Icy Boxes between cases. They make it very easy to hot-swap a drive, as well as identify which ones are active from th front LED's. This makes them ideal for swapping out failed drives in your RAID array.

My Point

Am I right in thinking that case manufacturers are purely focusing on the gamer market and forgetting about those of us who use computers for other things? Does anybody have any case recommendations which feature hot-swap drive support? I would love it if slightly more focus could be given to the drive mounting possibilities in case reviews. It seems to me that those of us who are not gamers are very dependent on the success of the gaming market since server components are very expensive for the "casual" user.