Server Chassis

Chassis

We need a case that will hold up to 9 hard drives, a DVD-R, and a floppy drive. It is not enough that the case hold 9 hard drives, but it should help to organize them in groups of 4. This will help with cabling between the master and slave drives, in our parallel ATA config. I prefer cases that have dedicated bays for hard drives vs 5.25” drives because it reduces the need to buy extra brackets and is a more efficient use of space. Tower cases that have 14 or so 5.25” drives are not that useful if you are just going to use hard drives. You can get special bay modules that convert three 5.25” horizontal bays into five 3.5” hard drive bays, but these modules are not cheap.

A case is responsible for holding all your components together, protecting them, and also for keeping them cool. In our storage server, we need to keep our storage drives cool. It is well recognized that the lifetime of hard drives drops with increases in temperature. We went through almost every single case design on the market and finally found one that we liked, the Evercase 5000LX.

The Evercase 5000LX

The guts of the case

Evercase is listed among the approved case suppliers for AMD and Intel, but we don’t see many of their products on the market. This case has eight 3.5” drive bays, three 5.25” drive bays and space for a floppy drive. The key feature that sold me was that the eight 3.5” drive bays are organized in a pair of HD cages that hold four drives each. With some hard drive cages, the hard drives are stacked on top of each other, so there is no airflow between the drives. The 5000LX leaves some room between the drives for airflow; it just makes good engineering sense. By organizing the drive in sets of four, it matches the topology of an ATA config. It’s like it was designed with our server specifications in mind. These HD cages are also well cooled with 2 80mm fans blowing through one, and a 80mm fan sucking air through another. We didn’t like this second approach, but more on this later. It has a single 92mm exhaust fan in the back. We would have preferred a 120mm fan, but a 92mm is still better than a 80mm fan.

Drive cage

The case's exhaust fan

Our storage drives can go in the 8 3.5” drive bays, the system drive in a vented 5.25” bay, and a DVD-R in the other bay, which leaves room for a 5.25” accessory.

Case modification

So we didn’t like having the second set of hard drives cooled by a 80mm sucking air through the drives. For one, the area of airflow is severely limited by the hard drive cage, and this setup will pull warm air from inside the case through the drives as well. Looking at the 5000LX, we saw room for another front intake fan, but with the additional drive cage this was obscured. This was a simple fix. We just shifted the second drive cage about 1 inch. This gave us ample clearance for a front 92mm or 120mm fan. We needed to drill additional holes in the drive cage, which were matched with already present holes on the case. The holes in the case were not threaded, so we had to secure the hard drive cage with machine screws and bolts.

“Stock design”

Drive cage configuration stock

Drive cage up close before mod

“After mod”

After mod, more room for cooling now

We like this new design much better in that it pulls cold air from outside the case through the hard drives. The compromise that we had to make was that the case now becomes very tight if you were to use an extended ATX 12”x13” motherboard. This was not a problem for us. The Maxlines are now kept at just above ambient temperature and lower than the system temperature, thanks to this cooling mod. By keeping the drives as cool as possible, this case design adds to the reliability of our system.

This case is very well built with thick steel. Even though this was not the shiny polished steel, it was very strong as it easily dulled many Dremel bits. The other modification that we made was to adapt the case to have front USB ports. This is a simple mod that has been previously described. Basically, you need to extend the length of the motherboard USB header and drill some openings in your case. One caution is that some USB 2.0 ports are very sensitive to cable quality and extending your ports too much will cause the USB ports to stop functioning.

After working with this case, we aren’t sure why more people aren’t using it. It looks cleaner from the front than some of the more ubiquitous cases. It supports a rear 92mm and a front 120mm fan in addition to its standard 2 x 80mm fans, and it organizes the hard drive bays intelligently. The best part is that this case is competitively priced at about $80.

There were a few things we didn’t like though, for one, it didn’t include any front USB, firewire, or audio ports. These ports really do improve a usability of a system especially when the back of the case is hard to reach. In addition, we would have preferred a standard 3.5” bay for the floppy drive instead of a slot, this way we could have put in a media card reader in that top bay.

For a server, a case is one of the most crucial components. It needs to be big enough for your needs and it needs to keep your components cool. We all know that computer components last longer when they are kept cool, this is one responsibility of the case and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Cost $80