iStarUSA D-400-6-ND Black 1.2mm SECC Zinc-Coated Steel 4U Rackmount Compact Stylish Chassis 6 External 5.25" Drive Bays

Pros: Solidly built, comes with all the hardware, very easy to work with.

Cons: Not big enough! I am really disappointed in this case because it says that it supports 12"x13" motherboards, but only at the expense of not being able to use the drive bays. I also bought 2 sata backplains, but they totaly run into the CPUs and I can't even fit a CDROM in either of the bottom 5.25" bays. (It runs right into the RAM slots. DO NOT Buy this case for an 12"x13" board!)

Overall Review: I'm a little ticked off now because I have a deadline on this server's implementation in our network and now I have to run around to find another case.

Pros: +Plenty of room. +Very high quality construction. +6X 5.25" external drive bays +No frills

Cons: -2X 80mm exhaust ports (they could've gotten away with 2X 92mm probably). -The power LED connector is a three-prong style, incompatible with a lot of motherboard headers (I had to get the pliers out and 're-assign' the offending wire :) )

Overall Review: This case is a joy to work with. The 6 5.25" bays allow me to have two 4X 3.5" -> 3X 5.25" adapters for two 4-drive RAID arrays. The additional 3.5" bays allow for system drives as well. The power LED thing was a bit of a bummer, but easy enough to fix (This is with an AsRock Extreme4 mATX board). Plenty of room inside when dealing with mATX/mITX. Plenty of room for a dual-fan Noctua NH-L12 installation, as well.

Pros: plenty of room, nice air flow.

Cons: fans a little lound. none of the front lights would work.

Overall Review: if it werent do expensive to return them and replace them i would, but the lights arent a huge deal breaker.. i can tell when its powerd on because the fans run lol

Pros: Good design. Great price. Very sturdy.

Cons: Needs to be about 2" longer to truly hold an 8x13 mother board. I Had to mod the front drive bays to get my mobo to fit. This is why I didn't give it 5 eggs. Could use the second 80mm fan for even better airflow.

Overall Review: I bought two of the D-406-B6SA (with 6 hot swappable drive bays) for my office to build as replacement servers. I run VMWare so I can run several virtual servers. I used the Tyan S5396A2NRF Tempest i5400XT mobo in them. It would not have fit, but I moved the 3.5" bays to the bottom and cut them back to clear the board. I bought the D-406-ND for my home. I won't be putting in a full size mobo and I don't have the added drive bays because I use an external ESata tower to help keep things cool. I will be modding the front panels to add two 120mm fans for proper air flow that is quiet. I am primarily doing this because my 1u servers at home are driving me crazy with all the noise from the fans.

Pros: Very Solidly built. Roomy, Great ventilation.

Cons: I had to pay shipping? Pretty petty but hey free shipping is always better :-)

Overall Review: This was a great case to put my Home server into. I only use a m atx board but everything fit right in there. I added my own power supply and swapped out the fan on the back for two 80mm Antec tri cools You can get them from here. With those on low and my 80+ psu and low noise cpu cooler you cannot hear this case from 2 feet away. That was important to me because it is in my guest room and I don't want to have turn it off for people to sleep over. I would not hesitate to buy another one of these cases. As a matter of fact I just did. Only I got the one that comes with the 3x5 Sata backplane in it. I am gonna put the backplane in this machine and put my gaming rig in the other case. I am going to be converting all my pcs into this line of cases. Tired of juggling towers around and going with a full rackmount system.

Pros: It was really easy to build out. It was a perfect mate for my RAID5 build with an Athena BP-SATA3051B backplane. It even looks impressive. It is well built and designed especially for the price.

Cons: Minor. 1. I can see where there would be a problem with a full-sized ATX MB as in the previous review but it wasn't a problem for me. 2. I had to drill the case to make my rack rails work with it but I think that was more of a case of my rails being an antiquated design.

Overall Review: It was nice to have 2 floppy bays. Usually I use the one and only floppy bay for a card reader since I am a photographer. It is nice to have a floppy drive if I need to make boot or recovery disks.

Pros: EXCELLENT case, especially for the price!!! Heavy, sturdy cast one-piece rack mount bracket/handle on each side instead of plastic handles that screw to flimsy thin "rack ears", decent space inside, works well with some SATA/SAS internal hot-swap enclosures, works with a wide variety of standard size power supply units, including some standard size compliant redundant ones. No front doors or cover panels to get in the way and block airflow and/or block quick access to any customer installed hot-swap bays and status lights. Amazing product for the unbelievably low price!

Cons: Alarm light, Alarm Reset button, Fan speed warning light, S1, and S2 indicators have a single female header connector that's intended for other iStar optional accessories in other case models, making them sound impressive in the description but they're mostly useless in actuality unless you get creative with wire splicing...

Overall Review: Some motherboard layouts (cpu or ram or sata ports) and/or some oversized gamer video cards may not allow for some deep drive bay devices to be installed on one side or the other in this chassis. Verify that your motherboard layout and intended 5.25" devices will fit before ordering this chassis. Twin 80mm rear fan ports (one's labelled vent) instead of a single 120mm port and only the one 80mm fan included makes for louder operation and less efficiency but it serves its' purpose just fine. The "Lock" knob does nothing on this case since it doesn't have the various front door options the company offers in their variants of this chassis. I built a broadcast audio server in this chassis, ASUS Striker Extreme mobo, adaptec 4-port host raid card, a 5.25" 3-bay sized internal 5-bay 3.5" hot-swap enclosure, 1TB raid drives+hot spare, dual GB Nic's, C2D E8600 cpu, Antec 850 Trio PS, and a few other things that cause it to generate a lot of heat and it's been serving 24/7 for >3 months.