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Please keep in mind that while the cases below may support many hard drives, your motherboard must have enough SATA ports to actually use that many hard drives. Please consider purchasing a PCIe SATA/SAS Controller Card if you need additional SATA ports. As you have previously seen the Node 804 comes down and can be stripped to pretty much just its frame. You can remove the front, top and both side panels and it also has 4x dust filters which are all individually removable for easy cleaning. Building a NAS inside the Fractal Design Node 804 is just like putting together a PC in any other chassis. It’s not some special server form factor. You can install a motherboard up to a Micro ATX size, and Fractal Design includes pretty much everything you’ll need to install everything. I used this case to build a NAS earlier this year and found that it’s not up to the normal Fractal design standard. Having built my last computer in a Define R5, the Node 804 seems to have some badly thought out features.
I'm trying to find experiences of people filling a Node804 with 8 3.5" drives. Has anyone done this? Having the hard drives and power supplies in the secondary chamber is a great plus in my mind, it makes it easier to get everything installed and just gives it a more overall clean look once finished. As this is designed for smaller motherboards there can be a bit of a learning curve if you have not installed an m-ITX or m-ATX board before but these are not so much down to the case as it is learning where things are on the motherboard and remembering that when it comes time to build with it. The biggest downside of this case is the ITX motherboard that’s required (as they’re generally limited compared to ATX/mATX options), but if you want a small form factor case that actually looks like a traditional prebuilt NAS, this is the one. Cases for NAS devices are generally smaller form factor, meaning they’re either designed to be extremely small (in the case of ITX-only cases) or look more like a cube so they can maximize hard drive space.The Fractal Design 804 is actually a fairly old PC case at this point, but I'm reviewing it more as a NAS or server chassis than a PC, though you can absolutely set up a gaming PC using this thing. In fact, after removing the HDD cages, you could even go all out with some custom water-cooling, should you be feeling particularly adventurous. If you’re going to build a NAS, you might as well plan for the future, and that’s where the JONSBO D500 fits in well – don’t build a NAS thinking you need six hard drives and actually need ten – get the room for those hard drives up front! That’s where this case fits in. On the main side of the Node 804 is a nice big plexiglass window so users can easily show off all of the goodies they put inside the case. As this is a dual-chambered case it will offer even novices a chance to have a clean, well-put-together-looking build and will, of course, result in it is worthy of being shown off. Stripping the case down to it’s skeleton form and we can see most of the options the case has to offer. Plenty of space for fans, radiators and hard drives galore if that is your thing! If not, Fractal Design have made it easy to use the Node 804 for more of a simplistic build if you desire.
There is an access hole in the inner case frame which makes bringing in the 8 pin 12v EPS cable to the top of the motherboard much easier. Nice touch, Fractal. Looking at the old Fractal Arc Mini R2 (which i used to built my NAS, but which is not produced anymore, unfortunately), it is near perfect for a cheap cost-concious home NAS build where hot-plug capabilities and 99.99999…% uptime are not a crucial requirement. While it is a different shape (a mini tower) than the Node 804 (a cube), it is only insignificantly bigger at 41.16 liters total volume compared to the Node 804’s 41.08 liters. But then again, that case is from an era where local PC storage was dominated by spinning rust… Reply The top plays host to four fan mounts as well as a filter cover while the rear of the Node 804 is a similar PC case affair with five horizontal PCI slots and two fan mounts. Being a cube design, you can get away with additional airflow through the rear panel whilst having room for an ATX power supply to be fitted.
They’re also going to be the most expensive overall devices you can build since small form factors (case, motherboard, PSU, etc) cost more. I like this case a lot, and I think that if you’re set on an extremely small form factor, this case, or the JONSBO N2 shown below are your best options. Jun 10:43:00 - [warn] [node-red-bluemix-nodes/tcp] ‘tcp request’ already registered by module node-red Rear: 1 - 120mm fan slots (included is 1 hydraulic bearing 120mm Silent Series R2 fan, 1000 RPM speed) Important note, on the noise measurement is that they were taken at what I considered closest possible seating position (36″) so they are not really comparable in any sense to other noise measurements. The case fan noise in the chart should illustrate a few things: The flexibility of this case really gives the users the possibility to create their optimal system build. Dimensions
Unique hard drive mounting system, fitting up to 8 x 3.5?, 4 x 2.5" or up to 10 x 3.5", 2 x 2.5? drives HDD/SSD Unfortunately, Fractal doesn’t make cases like they used to anymore. Which, admittedly, is understandable since a bunch of HDDs in an “ordinary” PCs is a thing of yesteryear, with the overall DIY market strongly moving towards nvme. We used the ASUS TUF Gaming B550M-Plus Wi-Fi for a NAS build using TrueNAS SCALE. For the processor, we’re going all-out with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, the best of the 5000 AMD Ryzen processors, which should test the case thermals. 32GB of DDR4 RAM is used for maximum performance.
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When you get all of that out of the way, the Define 7 XL can be viewed as potentially the best case on this list, mainly because more hard drives for a NAS means more redundancy, storage pools, etc.
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