NORCO DS-12D 12 3.5" Drive Bays 3 x SFF-8088 external connectors External 2U 12 Bay Hot-Swap 6G SAS / SATA III Rackmount RAID / JBOD Enclosure - OEM

Pros: Works out of the box as a cheap external SAS solution.
Double boxed when shipped.
Comes with a 80+ Bronze ATX PSU (Seasonic SS-300ES)

Cons: Loud as hell (like seriously)
Broken when I received it (plastic housing on side for power switch. Outside boxes fine, shipped from Norco broken.)
Misleading photos and a description that doesn't indicate what fans will be in the rear panel.

Other Thoughts: Just to be clear there are not 2x 80mm fans in the rear panel. There are 4x 40mm fans are loud and high pitched (45db to 60db in my estimate.)

I'm a network guy. I have loud equipment 10U worth of Cisco equipment, two Dell R610s, and a Norco 4020 (which this is replacing) and hands down this is the loudest thing I have on the rack. I will be replacing the fans with Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra 40mm x 20mm Silent Minis (SY124020L).

The HD sleds are updated from the Norco 4020 I bought back in August 2011 but compatible in case you don't want to swap the drives or find it annoying that the sleds don't have the option to close the vents if they aren't being used. They have cheapened the quality of the sleds.

Pros: Inexpensive clean look.

Cons: Complete failure. Some drive bays would not work while others would. Then after moving disks to other drive bays they would work and others would not. Some of the drive LEDs would not work some would work. Not sure if this was even tested coming from the manufacturer with this many problems.

Other Thoughts: Would definately buy something else as it will now be a huge hassle for me (as a government contract) to return the item and receive a replacement.

Pros: compact short (19") 2u enclosure with 3 sas ports.

Cons: You get what you pay for, but I needed a short enclosure. Must contact NewEgg and Norco about warranty. I've had it a week and drive activity indicator lights have gone out on random bays, certain bays don't work at all.

The pictures are not quite the same as the current unit, handles are different, buy the rails, the mounting brackets cannot support this from front posts alone, sagged 30 degress in about an hour.

Overall if you have a depth limit like I do i guess you're kind of up the creek, I've had it a week so hopefully warranty won't be an issue.

I had decent expectations for this unit, all fairly let down.

Other Thoughts: I'm still hopeful Newegg and Norco can resolve this as this is clearly a defective unit, if it worked correctly it'd would be a great purchase/value for a solution.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We apologize for the issues you are experiencing with this case. Please contact us at service@norcotek.com, so we may get more details and assist you in resolving this issue.

Best Regards,
Norco Support Team

Pros: We needed more disk space for our corporate backup server, so got this plus a Norco DS-24E expander chassis on the same day, and then daisy chained this DS-12D off the DS-24E. The cabling looks like this, using external multilane SFF-8088 cables:

Server -> Areca 1880X -> Norco DS-24E -> Norco DS-12D

Added a bunch of Hitachi 3TB drives, formatted the drives in RAID6 arrays of 12 drives per array, and it was off to the races. We looked at big name brand stuff that cost 5 figures and it wasn't in the budget, and we also didn't have time to piece together our own "box of disks" so this fit the bill.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: Disks stay cool in this case even though there are only two rear fans.