Rackmount chassis with reduced depth

[jgreco]

You'd probably be better off trying to fit in some other kind of power supply rather than a standard ATX, possibly a flex-ATX PSU, unless the amount of "metalwork" was minimal.

 

[rogerh]

You'd probably be better off trying to fit in some other kind of power supply rather than a standard ATX, possibly a flex-ATX PSU, unless the amount of "metalwork" was minimal.

I can find an ATX power supply with a good reputation for reliability, reasonably quiet and reasonably priced. More specialised form factor power supplies seem to be either cheap unknown quantities or very expensive and/or very noisy ones from a server manufacturer. So using, say, a Seasonic ATX one is an attractive proposition if one can't afford a Supermicro server case in the first place.

 

[AMiGAmann]

Well, I give up... the problem seems to be too exotic. Many HDs in a rack with short depth (although I thought that it's quite big for a rack at home) seems to be unusual...

 

[jgreco]

Manufacturers don't really give a darn about how big you think your home rack is. They're building kit for the data center or server room, where rack depths have grown at least a foot or more in the last two decades. There's very little profit to be had in building gear for geeks-at-home for a narrow use case and who aren't interested in paying top dollar. Sorry, it may sound harsh, but that there is the approximate reality.

What you COULD do, if you wanted, would be to head on over to eMachineShop or some other suitable manufacturer and see if you can build a simple 4U chassis that would accept three 5-in-3 modules and an ATX power supply with some blanks on the back. I have no idea what the cost would end up being, but if you did that in combination with some standard slides, you could end up with the perfect product for your needs.

 

[jgreco]

Or there's services that may be able to meet you halfway, for example

http://www.protocase.com/design/template-generator.php#

 

[mjws00]

A lian li pc-q26 should be really easy to mount in a shallow rack. But would be ~ 4.5u. Flip it on it's side add some rails. ~16 inches deep. 18" wide. Not much more than 2 x 2u. Or just set it on a nice shelf somewhere cause it's already small and pretty.

 

[redbull666]

Sorry for digging up this topic, but I am facing this exact same issue. I have a 60cm deep rack, currently using an Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4408.

I am looking to replace this not-so-great case, but it's very difficult to find a case with hot-swapping slots, under 550mm deep. Actually the case mentioned in an earlier post here seems to be exactly what I need!

http://www.fantec.de/produkte/serve...dukt/details/artikel/1702_fantec_src_3160x07/

But it's EOL and I can't find it for sale anywhere in Europe, kinda killing me!

 

[jgreco]

Sadly this still seems relevant three and a half years later:

Manufacturers don't really give a darn about how big you think your home rack is. They're building kit for the data center or server room, where rack depths have grown at least a foot or more in the last two decades. There's very little profit to be had in building gear for geeks-at-home for a narrow use case and who aren't interested in paying top dollar. Sorry, it may sound harsh, but that there is the approximate reality.

What you COULD do, if you wanted, would be to head on over to eMachineShop or some other suitable manufacturer and see if you can build a simple 4U chassis that would accept three 5-in-3 modules and an ATX power supply with some blanks on the back. I have no idea what the cost would end up being, but if you did that in combination with some standard slides, you could end up with the perfect product for your needs.

 

[Exhorder]

Actually the case mentioned in an earlier post here seems to be exactly what I need!

http://www.fantec.de/produkte/serve...dukt/details/artikel/1702_fantec_src_3160x07/

But it's EOL and I can't find it for sale anywhere in Europe, kinda killing me!

Hi,
there still is a 12 drive version: http://www.fantec.de/produkte/serve...dukt/details/artikel/2161_fantec_src_2012x07/

 

[Constantin]

A lian li pc-q26 should be really easy to mount in a shallow rack. But would be ~ 4.5u. Flip it on it's side add some rails. ~16 inches deep. 18" wide. Not much more than 2 x 2u. Or just set it on a nice shelf somewhere cause it's already small and pretty.

The Lian Li Q26 is a great case for up to ten 3.5" drives plus one 2.5", plus a standard ATX power supply. Note that it can only hold a mini ITX motherboard, however. I'm a fan of the Lian Li "hot swap" SATA backplanes since it makes swapping a HDD a lot easier. I say hot swap in quotation marks since I expect a lot of systems to freak out if you tried it (electrical transients might make several HDD go offline, potentially corrupting your pool). Thus,I would always power the system down before swapping a drive. Real SATA backplanes feature extensive capacitor banks for all the power rails. Some cable suppliers have cables with built-in caps also.

In theory, the Lian Li SATA backplanes can be easily retrofit with capacitors (SMD as well as through-hole) because the holes, SMD pads, etc. exist and are accessible. However, the process is laborious since Lian Li's supplier applied solder paste to all of them, sealing most through-holes shut. That in turn means you have to remove the extant solder before fitting capacitors. FWIW, I used a combination of ceramic caps for high-frequency noise as well as the biggest electrolytic caps I could find to still fit the hole spacing on the backplane.

At some point, I figure I might run an experiment with a "play pool" to see if the caps make the difference one needs to assure that the pool doesn't consistently get corrupted if a drive is hot-swapped. However, the scientific value of that kind of a test might be pretty marginal.

Coming back to the Q26, I tried fitting my flex-ATX motherboard and while I could make it work length-wise (as long as you use a SFX power supply and use a ATX/SFX adapter-bracket), the depth simply won't work without significant customization / cutting. There is all sorts of metal stuff in there related to drive cages and case structure that likely interferes with the motherboard and would hence lead to shorts if one tried.

For a NAS application, I greatly prefer the Q26 over the A76, just wish I could make it work with my current board. The advantage of the A76 is simply one of size - the thing is huge and as such it is trivial to add fans and other stuff to make cooling happen. I reckon I might even be able to put in a 4x drive tray to allow up to 16 HDDs to run in there. But the case is a beast and not fun to manhandle. The Q26 is much more compact and hence easier to carry, place, and so on.

Whatever you do, avoid the Norco RPC 431 - see my build report.