ARK 4U-500-CA Black 4U Rackmount Case 3 External 5.25" Drive Bays

Pros: Looks really cool, no cheesy logos or branding anywhere. Heavy duty. Modular pieces allow you to make a decent rig. Fits the standard ATX size motherboards.

Cons: Less space than a normal ATX case, you can't fit many fans, fans can only go in front and back. However it still runs cool.

Other Thoughts: BUILD WITH THIS CASE:

- Core i7 3770k
- H80i Water Cooler
- EVGA GTX 670 FTW
- SSD and HDD

It all fit!

Pros: Sturdy case. Well-designed. Will hold up to 11 or more hard drives or more if you use 2x3 (Vantec) or other drive cages. Serviceable. Easy to pull 5.25" drive cage and 3.5" hard drive mounting brace to mount drives and reinstall in case.

Cons: none really, for the money it's a great case. It's designed to install components and leave them there though. Reconfiguration of hard drives or other components may take time. If you want a case with hot-swap bays look elsewhere.

Other Thoughts: This case is not very deep, so make sure your components will fit. Works well with iStar IS-26 rails if you want to rackmount it. Recommend replacing the case fans with Item#: N82E16835706036 Delta 120mm PWM case fan or equivalent and an 80mm PWM case fan or equivalent, for example: Item#: N82E16835426010 GELID 80mm PWM case fan

Pros: Uniform 4U space. Sturdy. Strong front handles. Fits standard PSU's, ATX mobos. Reminds me of a Lian Li type case, only with rack rails.

Cons: Sharp edges and metal burrs in various locations. You may shed some blood when installing. 5.25 Drive bay is difficult to remove when you have installed everything. I had to change out a floopy drive, and it took some persuasion to get it in and out as it is so close to the PSU modual plugs.
Turn key lock loose with simple keys. Will only detur someone who has no intent. But easy to pick if you have the intention.

Other Thoughts: Comes with 1 x 80mm and 1 x 120mm Fan. These fans have molex connectors on them. Good for general airflow. But you can not hook to your mobo for speed control. (Like the 3 wire fans. Red/Black/Yellow). Does have an additional 80mm fan space next to the rear 80mm. So you can install a second to help exhaust.

Pros: Very solid construction, 1.2mm steel FTW. As someone else said, it will outlast whatever electronics you put in it. It was easy to build an ATX system in this. The foam filter on the front is a plus. LEDs and 2x USB on the front are convenient. Appearance is understated too in case you care about that. Plenty of ventilation.

Cons: I could not find rails or anything about them on the manufacturer site or Newegg. Maybe a generic kit will work.

Other Thoughts: * If you build a desktop system in this, the set of front panel items supported on the board may not fully match the indicators.
* Maintaining spacing between HDs for cooling will reduce the number installed. A big CPU cooler also may block one or more in the middle crossbar.
* The shape of the board platform meant there was nothing to screw one corner of the mainboard onto. Not a big deal, the rest of the screws were sufficient to secure it firmly.

Pros: awesome case included everything i needed used mine as a workstation for Pro Tools computer
Very sturdy case

Cons: none

Pros: The case is extremely solid, large, easy to work in, and very robust. Had no problems dropping in a Micro ATX board, standard PSU two 1TB hdds, etc and had plenty of room to spare.

Cool that they include a set of "feet" for you to put on the bottom of the case if you like the case, but don't have a rack to mount it in.

Cons: Only con I can think of is that the design isn't toolless, but it's not enough of a gripe for me to drop an egg for it. Also, at this price? I can't really complain.

Other Thoughts: This is a very affordable and spacious server case that will likely outlast many systems you will be placing in it.

Pros: this is a great case. we have 4-6 of them. just bought another for a new GPU compute server we are building. discovered that EEB server motherboards will not fit.

this is an important detail that should be mentioned in the description.

Cons: EEB motherboards do not fit.

Pros: Great overall case with lots of room for expansion. I've had two of them for a long time and had many motherboards in it over the years.

Cons: I noticed an issue just recently. If you're putting a RAID controller and other cards that tend to run hot you better invest more money in a faster fan in the front.

Other Thoughts: I have 7 drives in the front drive cage and the fan is just not reaching the PCI slots. The BBU on the RAID controller stopped working because it was too hot and something melted on a TV recording card. I would still recommend the case. Can't beat the price.

Pros: -Big
-Well Built
-Price

Cons: -Poor QC (a couple stripped screws, door scrapes on front handles)
-Heavy

Other Thoughts: I bought this case to build my desktop in (to mount in a rack). It is about what I expected for a low cost rack mountable case. Plenty of hard drive bays. Although if you want to run a decent graphics card you may have to do some jerry rigging with the hard drives in the hard drive caddy. 11.5" to the caddy from the front of the pci rail. 9.25" MAX if you have a hard drive installed in front of the pci rail on the motherboard.

Also if you want a decent CPU cooler you're going to have to watch your height, keep it under 5.5" and you should be ok. (the Hyper TX3 was about the maximum I could fit in there)

Assembly was a little more complex than a regular desktop but nothing an intelligent individual can't figure out. My setup is as follows;

AMD AM3 FX8150, HYPER TX3 DUAL 92'S CPU COOLER
SABERTOOTH 990FX, 4GBx4 DDR3 1866MHZ G.SKILL ARES
OCZ MODSTREAM PRO 700W PSU
(2) POWERCOLOR RADEON HD 7850 (CF)
ADATA 120GB SSD
(2) 1TB WD BLACK SATA 6.0GBPS 7200RPM HDD

Pros: Case fits everything that i threw at it. But overall nice case at a great price!

Cons: I have a smaller heatsink and fan. if it was a lot bigger it wouldn't have fit. I had to remove the card holder so the processor fan would fit. I also had to remove the front handles to fit in my rack. there are no instructions which sucked.