Great 9.75 Terabyte JBOD Server Chassis - built like a tank!

Author's Rating:

Pros: VERY HEAVY well made unit, easy to access, good, tight fit on all parts.

Cons: EXTREMELY LOUD (Six 5000RPM fans SCREAM) but 2 can die and drives remain cool!

The Bottom Line: 
You can't find a stronger, better made, well designed unit, drive array/data server - PERIOD. If you need a STRONG 15 drive supercooled rackmount chassis, this is it.

We have purchased 10 of these units (9 at NewEgg.com & 1 at Camera World) over the last 3 years and they are truly awesome. Very well built, easy to maintain. A lot of thought went into the engineering and overall chassis design. Well worth the money!

No Floppy, and no Optical (CD/DVD) mount either - make sure your OS will install from USB-2.0 or Firewire portable drive. This is specifically a CPU/data storage chassis made for the rack.

FP signals come in on a 15 conductor ribbon w/header connector, but they provide a breakout connector with pins for all MOBOs. If you are not going to use the SuperMicro Motherboards, make VERY sure all of your cables will reach the various board connectors (e.g, lights, fans, controllers, Front Panel [FP] header.

We have Nine (9) 750GB Segates and six (6) 500GB Western Digital SATA-II drives on three (3) 4x PCI-E SATA controllers (plus 4 SATA on MOBO), all in a JBOD config except two of the 500s are RAID 0 for the OS (plus some data). We use two whole identical server units as "soft mirrors" for fairly static bulk data - This way, there is NO single point of failure.

The triple redundant PS is a far superior design than the double PS units because you can really run on two of the three modules for quite a while, whereas the dual PS units are at 110% with only one running so you MUST change ASAP before it smokes! But with 3 units and 2 running... ahh, time to get some coffee on the way in!

The 1" drive trays are a decent design, but are a bit flimsy until you get the drive mounted in them (screwed in).

The unit is 105 lbs fully loaded. Get help putting it in the rack (and make sure your racks can hold them).