Case that will hold a lot of 3.5" spinning rust drives

House

House

House

Soldato
Joined
16 Jun 2005
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Back in the UK
I currently run my old PC as a work daily driver and plex server, but its full of HDDs
4 3.5"" old school HDDs plus a nvme boot drive and a M2 2.5" scratch drive.

As an alternative to getting a dedicated NAS, i was considering chucking another couple or HD i that PC but im out of room.

Any cheap options to keep this monstrosity going? would need space for a 240 AIO as well and a 1080 for that does my trascoding.
 
I have a fairly large collection of drives for my Plex setup (10 in all). I used to have a large case with them all in, but wanted something smaller, so built a normal PC which holds two of the drives and put the other 8 drives into 2 x N54Ls (I paid like £50 each for them). Stuck a little 60gb ssd in for boot and then windows share the drives to my main PC. This means I can have the two N54Ls in the attic out of the way and my main PC can look cool again.
 
To run that many drives you need a server surely. That’s a lot of SATA drives. But I guess you can also put in a PCIE to SATA adapter.

Maybe at one of those old sell servers that has 16 slots for drives that comes with a raid card and back pane for the drives.
 
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House said:
I currently run my old PC as a work daily driver and plex server, but its full of HDDs
4 3.5"" old school HDDs plus a nvme boot drive and a M2 2.5" scratch drive.

As an alternative to getting a dedicated NAS, i was considering chucking another couple or HD i that PC but im out of room.

Any cheap options to keep this monstrosity going? would need space for a 240 AIO as well and a 1080 for that does my trascoding.
Click to expand...

May be worth looking for an old case in classifieds that is all 5.25” bays on the front, and get some drive bay adapters to fit the HDDs. Can go for basic 4in3 style adapters for now and switch to hot swap caddies down the line if you wanted to.
 
Fractal Design for me. Many of their cases can hold lots of HDDs. Personally, I'd pick the Define 7. Not sure it qualifies as "cheap", but it has everything you really need, so you probably wouldn't need to look at upgrading again for quite some time.
 
I have the Meshify 2 XL case with 10 x 3.5 drives, a 3090 GPU and a Cooler Master masterLiquid Atmos 360 AIO. Awesome case if you want that kind of storage.
 
Antec p101, it holds x8 3.5 drives. Plenty of room for full atx mobo, psu, decent size gpu etc.

I use it for my main rig, which is also my plex server etc.
 
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