RackChoice M-ATX/Mini-ITX 2U Rackmount Depth 21.5" Server Chassis 6Gbps hotswap 12bays Support ATX PSU with 120mm Fan, Include Sliding Rail and Minisas to SATA Cables

In a nutshell; this 2U chassis has some oddities and downsides, but overall it does the job and considering the price, it's a lot cheaper than most 12 bay 2U cases.Pros:- 12 hot-swap drive bays- Comes with four 80mm fans (not quiet, but far from the loudest)- Very solid metal construction, doesn't feel flimsy- Comes with enough screws to install everything, including 12 hard drives- Comes with three 4x SATA to SFF-8087 cables- Comes with rail kitCons:- Included rail kit is hot garbage. It'll work, after fighting with it for a while.- Power button on the front was stuck, I had to permanently remove two screws from the back of the plastic cover that houses the buttons and USB port in order to let the power button operate normally- Drive caddies/sleds feel cheap. They're built alright, there's just a lot of friction when inserting/removing.- Micro ATX motherboards that have 90-degree SATA ports will be un-usable in this chassis.Build:CPU - Intel Core i7 12700KMotherboard - ASUS Pro WS W680M-ACE SERAM - Corsair Vengeance DDR5 64GBCooler - Noctua NH-L9x65PSU - EVGA 850 GTNIC - 10Gtek X540-T2 10GbE CNAThe biggest con was the SATA port issue. When installed, a micro ATX motherboard sits at about ~5mm from the metal rail where the fans attach to, not leaving enough clearance for the 90-degree SATA ports on my motherboard. It was probably my fault for not researching enough beforehand, but I solved that issue by purchasing a "180 Degree Dual SATA Male to Female Connector". In the end, I had to remove one of the four included fans anyway so that I could access the SlimSAS port on my motherboard.There is a video review of this chassis on Youtube where the reviewer notes that the front USB port does not connect to anything. This is false. The USB header is bundled with the front panel connectors, but it's a 4-pin connector so it could be easily mistaken for something else if you're not paying attention.The front panel has the following:- Green Power LED- Yellow Networking LED- Red HDD LED- Power Button- Reset Button- Single USB 2.0 PortI would have liked to see a USB 3.0 port, however its not a big deal. I also ended up connecting the networking LED to the IPMI locator LED header on my motherboard, as I do not have a network activity LED header on either my motherboard or 10Gb NIC.All in all, I don't regret this purchase. I'm using three of these as I'm building a 3-node Proxmox cluster with them. I originally intended on purchasing the 8 bay variant of this chassis, however it went out of stock when I was ready to purchase. It was only a $50 difference between the 8 bay version and this 12 bay version, so I went ahead and bought three of these. For the price, this chassis is significantly cheaper than the other 12 bay cases out there.

I have had it for a few weeks now and finally was able to install TrueNas Scale onto this with 8 drives thus far as that is all I can afford. I am a little upset I bought for $50 more than what price is now. I contacted Amazon 7 days after purchase and they would not offer me anything other than return original and purchase another at lower price. Yeah... so I kept it. I have 4x4TB and 4x8TB drives in two pools. There is NO manual on hooking anything electrical up for this case. Zero. Nada. So this neing my first NAS build in a rack form factor (using a back plane) was trial and error. Not much room in this case but that is why I bought it to get rid of my big ATX 12 year old Desktop computer used as a NAS that took up way too much space under my desk. Reliable it was though. Will mount this into my server rack along with a QNap NAS which is slow as my dog if he had no legs. Luckily he still does have all four. I have learned a lot about building NAS in the last year and this case, although overpriced at what I bough should last me 5 or so years. That is what I was looking for along with space saving rackmount.Edit: Kudos to this company refunding me the $50 after seeing this review. That means a lot to me and will probably order from them again if I need another server case. It has been working flawlessly for the last few months and is now sitting in a 15u rack. Thanks again to CICHENG INC. Updated to 4 stars from 3 as the 4 fans are loud. I changed them out to Nocturas at half the decibel level but the trade off is the original fans push much higher volume of air. I monitor the temps and so far they are fine. YMMV.

I bought this case as I needed a cheap way to sanitize drives. I own an MSP and we get hundreds of old servers hard drives each year to destroy. We offer shredding but many of our clients want a greener option that doesn't destroy the drive. We've done that on a one-off basis using a regular PC and some drive destruction software that offers certificates of destruction.We bought one of these instead of the eight bay Silverstone case. I would have probably gone with Silverstone except it requires a TFX power supply and I didn't find any that offered the correct number of Molex connectors required. This case accepts a regular ATX power supply which are ubiquitous and cheap.Build quality:This case has a very nice sturdy frame. The tolerances on the drive trays are tight so be prepared to work a little bit to get them back in the first time you pull them out. The trays themselves can be used tool-free as they have bumps on one side of the tray to hold a 3.5" drive in place. For long term use you should plan on using screws, but this deserves a mention for anyone using this case the way we are. The case accepts mATX or smaller motherboards and I happened to have an old one sitting around that I used in this.Backplane:The backplane is hot swap and does its job well. I used a LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i 8-port 12Gb/s SATA+SAS PCI-Express 3.0 Low Profile Host Bus Adapter and two 10Gtek Internal Mini SAS HD SFF-8643 to Mini SAS SFF-8087 cables to hook up eight of the drive bays. The motherboard I used had six SATA ports, four of which are hot swap so I was able to hook up the bottom four backplane slots using the cables that came with the case.Fans:The fans are loud and move a lot of air. This is not a big deal for us as it lives in our office workroom but if you are using this in your home it could be a concern. I tried using the system before I hooked the fans up and the drive bays got extremely hot. Once I connected the fans I was able to have 12 drives running without it overheating.Rails:They didn't fit my shallow rack so I didn't use them.Bottom line:I might buy another one of these to use a NAS down the road. To me this represents an extremely good value for a 12 bay server chassis.

To start, I was using this as a NAS build using hardware that I already had, just putting it in a new case with hotswap bays and room for more drives. I chose this case as it seemed to be a great value and still checked all of the boxes for me. While overall the build quality is great, there seems to be a few parts that were not entirely thought about.The first issue is the rail on the left side of the chassis interferes with the guard tray for the front IO cables (video attached). Another thing is the PCI slot SSD tray, which will never fit in the case if there is a motherboard under it, so you would need an ITX board to use that (photo attached).Also, it was not mentioned in the listing, but these rails are not compatible with a full-size rack and can only extend to a maximum of 28 inches, albeit with VERY little metal contact on the rear adjustment slide, but it shouldn't need much support in the back unless something else is weighing it down. I would also like to mention that the motherboard standoffs are not installed, and a tool is not included.Despite all of this, I still think this case is decent buy. I have not broken anything yet and all it needs to do is sit in a rack and not fall apart on its own. After all, you build in it, set it up, and hardly ever touch it again.

The overall build quality is extremely cheap, even cheaper than you'd expect given the price. The metal is extremely thin, and actually arrived slightly bent, despite the foam packing in the box. The PCIe covers are break-outs. The rails are horrible. They don't fit a standard depth rack. Fortunately, my rack is adjustable so I was able to decrease the depth a bit for the rails to fit, but they're also not really the right width either. I had to loosen the bolts on my rack to get just enough clearance for the rails to slide properly, and even then it takes some jostling to get it to come out all the way. Sliding it back in is worse. The cables for the front IO are routed externally for some reason, and there's a piece of metal covering them. The problem is this piece of metal doesn't have clearance for the rail, so the grind against each other as the rail moves. I thought about removing it, but that friction is the only thing actually retaining the server. With the guard removed, the server is free to slide out at any time if your rack is even slightly off-level. I have to imagine that problem would only be worse if the drive bays were all full.Speaking of the drive bays, my backplane seems dead on arrival. I've tried testing disks in different bays, tried different SAS ports, even tried using an HBA card instead of connecting the backplane to the motherboard SATA. The disks are powered, but they're not recognized by the OS. If I connect the disks directly to the motherboard, without the backplane, they're detected just fine, so the problem clearly isn't the disks or the motherboard.Oh, and like someone else mentioned, the power button is in a terrible place. There are no handles to grab onto, so if you want to slide the server for any reason, it's extremely easy to hit the power button by accident, which is obviously undesirableHonestly the only reason I went for this chassis over something else is because I really wanted something that supported an ATX power supply, instead of server power supplies. But after spending how many hours troubleshooting this backplane, I can definitely say it wasn't worth the hassle. Probably going to try and return it, even though repacking everything seems like another massive hassle.