Toolless cases?

[Quartz]

Why haven't consumer cases gone toolless yet? Or at least made great advances that way? We still have to screw in fans and motherboards and so on but if you look at enterprise PCs, it's all as toolless as possible. Installing an ATX motherboard still requires umpteen screws yet over a decade ago I remember using onoly one screw in an entire PC.Yet consumer cases have just about managed drive caddies.

So why hasn't it happened?

 

[Nemesis379]

Price & Mass Production would be my guess.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

Going to guess that the various parts available to obtain these days makes it harder to do so as well.

Fans? Use Screws (for fast fans going full tilt always) or the Rubber Mounts (for silence as it won't even get to 50%)?
PCI Card? Use Screw or locking mechanism? (Which may or may not fit future card sizes, like GPU's etc, or heavy and need more than one screw to hold down more easily)
etc

 

[andy_mk3]

Consumer hardware is designed to be put together once and that's it. A repair is not going to be too mindful about downtime where enterprise hardware downtime is a huge consideration. So pulling a server out a rack, swapping a PSU or fan while it's running is pretty much a requirement. But the same thing on consumer hardware is totally not necessary.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Consumer hardware is designed to be put together once and that's it. A repair is not going to be too mindful about downtime where enterprise hardware downtime is a huge consideration. So pulling a server out a rack, swapping a PSU or fan while it's running is pretty much a requirement. But the same thing on consumer hardware is totally not necessary.

Yes and no. You could argue that these days, with cloud, high availability, virtualisation and enterprise level kit would have resilient redundancies such that if you needed to repair a server, you could comfortably move resource to another host and do what you need. Most environments like this would simply swap out the server.