iStarUSA D-410-B10SA-RED Red Zinc-Coated Steel 4U Rackmount Server Case

Pros: Enclosure was sturdily made. Panels were pleasant to look at. Hot-swap panels on front simple to manage, yet kept in place while the enclosure was transported.

Cons: Inside of case very clunky.
Difficult to manage wires with a KGPE-D16 mobo. This should not be the case, with the cost of this unit!
Hot-swap panels are right against support beams. These had to be removed for me to provide power and data lines to the hot-swap bays.
Had to remove one of the case fans to use a KGPE-D16 mobo.

Other Thoughts: If you wish to use this enclosure, be sure to use a MOBO that has all connections towards the inside of the board instead of towards the sides. The fans on the enclosure WILL get in the way of using them.

Pros: For what you pay, this is a nice case. It comes with two SATA backplanes with 5 carriers each and room for FOUR standard 5-1/4" drives on top of it. This allows a configuration with 10 RAID swappable drives, 2 in carriers that are removable for backup, a DVD drive for boot and maintenance and one spare. Not bad, not bad. It will fit EATX and ATX boards with reasonable comfort. The included pair of fans are IMHO configured incorrectly as "crossflow" - reset them to both blow outward as there is an intake grate at the rear of the cabinet and you get better heat evacuation, plus the RAID backplanes exhaust into the case. Move the grommets behind the fans so as to eliminate the "leakage" around the fan periphery as well. Will mount a standard ATX power supply or most "server-style" redundant units as well (beware noise if you do the latter!)

Cons: Tough to get to the cabling points for the RAID backplanes. A case of this cost and size should have cable tiepoints and/or some sort of wire management - it doesn't, it's just bare inside. As noted above fan configuration is IMHO wrong from the factory but easily corrected in 10 minutes with a screwdriver. Fit on the RAID backplanes is a bit questionable (small gaps around the periphery) and the backplanes themselves are somewhat cheap - identical to other iSTAR units in this line, they're not the prettiest things I've seen but they do work well - I've yet to have a problem with them in operation and I've got two of an earlier series here with more than a year in-service. I2C and/or SAS would be nice as then the "identify" function would work, but that appears to be asking too much at this price-point.

Other Thoughts: I like it. Overall there's not much to gripe about although the minor nits above would be a significant improvement in the unit while not adding much if anything to the price. This is a relatively LARGE rack server case that will hold a fairly large number of disks and it provides enough cooling capacity for most configurations you can cram in there; I've got a dual Quad-core Xeon board in there with a full case of drives and it runs cool and clean.

For what it is, recommended. 4 eggs instead of 5 due to lack of cable management, difficult access to the backplane cable connection points and no I2C/SAS connectivity at those backplanes.