I’m having a hard time figuring out what case I want to get. Part of me thinks hot swap bays would be nice (I’ve had a drive failure and figuring out which one would have been 10x easier with hot swap). Of course in the future I’ll have labels with S/N on the drives so it’s easier to find the drive.
So provide me any case recommendations with 8+ drive bays if internal, and 6+ if hot swap. (I have a 5 drive pool now, but want to be semi future-proof).
My home server’s case is the Fractal Design Meshify 2 and it has 14 3.5”/2.5” slots in the “Storage” configuration. It supports 6 in the default case configuration. There are also a couple 2.5” slots. I recommend the case and I’m considering getting another for my gaming PC, since I want it to support more HDDs than its current case can handle.
There are a couple variants of the Meshify 2. The RGB seems identical storage capacity-wise. The XL variant has 4 more 3.5”/2.5” slots when in the Storage configuration (18 total). The smaller variants don’t have enough slots for your needs.
In the Storage configuration, the slots in the storage bay (8 for regular, 12 for XL) are individually accessible and a single one can be pulled at a time if you just pull out the cables and unscrew a single screw - not quite a hot swap, but for me close enough. For an occasional troubleshooting or expansion of storage, this is more than convenient enough.
That all said, this is a traditional form factor tower, not something that would fit in a server rack.
Well you sold me! Lol. Yeah, I can’t imagine I’ll be troubleshooting too often, but being able to pull it out a little should help.
I got the case put together and the parts transferred over (my old case was probably close to 20 years old and definitely needed retirement). That is one versatile case! It’s not easy to tell from the photos, but it converts over to a server with only a small effort. The HD tray design is definitely interesting, but should make it easier to swap in/out.
Thanks for the recommendation!
That’s awesome, glad to hear it - I hope it continues to treat you well!
I actually had to swap a drive out yesterday and was happy to have this case again. It was a bit more work than just pulling a single drive, since I hadn’t labeled the drives on the front (I’ve changed that now), but if you take that small step it makes it super easy.
I also had screwed in some of the drive bays on the back and then forgotten, so taking them out was a pain, but unless the tower is mobile the bays seem stable enough without those screws.