So today we're going to be unboxing something a little bit different. I
don't think we've done anything like this. Okay, so this is a computer case.
This is probably the largest computer case we've unboxed on the show before.
It comes in a stylish brown box which
includes no information about the product inside whatsoever except for a
part number. So, 10 points if you know
what this is already, although I really doubt it because it's a brand new
product from Norcco Tech. Now, Norcco
Tech is a little bit different from Norcco that makes bicycles.
Now, Norcco is not really focused on uh you know what kind of high-end video
card fits in their case or you know how
many uh you know stylish plastic bezel
designs they have or what kind of aluminum chassis they're using. Norcco
is all about functionality on the cheap.
So, this is a 4U ATX case that is
designed. You know, I'm just going to have to bring this down to the ground
because there's no way I can uh it's so heavy. It's a 4U ATX standard
case that is designed to load up with as many hard drives as you could pretty
much need as a home user. So, let's just
uh keep working on getting this box open. You can see it is double boxed to
protect it during transit. And here is
the case itself. So, this thing weighs
like about as much as I do. So, I'm going to have to find some way to unbox
it. And
uh this may be my most difficult unboxing yet. So, we're going to go
ahead and tilt it this way and then tilt it this way. And finally, there it is.
The RPC 4224.
So, four, it is a 4U case. I don't
remember what the first two stands for, but the 24 means it holds 24 hard
drives. So, let's go ahead and put this down over
here. Okay, like I said, steel construction.
It's not going to fall apart. They actually have a wide variety of uh rack
mountable chassis that are designed for just building little file servers. And
what makes them great for home users is the fact
that unlike enterprise level chassis or
um or barebones, they're cheap. This
case only costs in the midunds versus
what you might pay for something from a super micro or from another rack
mountable chassis brand which might be as much as $1,000 just for the chassis
itself. So, like I said, 24 hot swappable, uh, 3 and 1/2 in, also 2 and
1/2 in compatible. You can see it has 2 and 1/2 in mounting holes, hard drive
bays. Okay. And these all run off a very
large back plane. Now, I might have to run inside and get a uh screwdriver. So,
just pause that video. Okay. So, we got the case open. That was step number one.
So, I want the cameraman to come have a look at the inside of the case, which is
where we will find all of the things that make this otherwise very plain
steel box uh worth a lot of money and uh
what make this one a particularly good value compared to the other stuff out on
the market. So, first I want you to have a look at the inside here. The interface
that actually runs that 24 drive
um hot swappable like massive storage
compartment here. So, this this whole part of the case is dedicated to this
back plane. Okay. So, you can see here there are actually uh two redundant
power inputs. I'm not talking about the fans yet, cameraman. There are two
redundant power inputs. So if you're using a redundant power supply, it means
you take one Molex from each redundant power supply and plug it into each of
these two Molex here. So you can see there's a total of six. Okay? So that's
6 * 4 is 24. All right? So that means 12. Six on each power supply. And then
over a little bit further, you can see there are
SFF887 connectors. So there's a total of six of those, each of which runs four
drives on each one of these PCBs here. You can actually remove these. Although
it's not really necessary to do so, and I can't really think of a reason to do
it, but I'm going to do it anyway because that's what unboxing is all
about. Like, you know, just taking stuff
apart for the Oh, there it is. Okay. So, you can see here we've got activity
LEDs. We've got the actual SATA or SAS.
You can run either SATA 2 or SAS drives
off of this back plane. So we you can see we got the four interfaces here.
There's the connector I was talking about. Here's the power inputs. So this
distributes data to all four drives and this distributes power to all four
drives redundantly. So even if one of your power supplies fails in a case like
this, if you're using a redundant power supply, the other one will continue to
power the drives. The case does not or the u the system does not even need to
be shut down. So now if I can figure out how to get this back in there, that
would be
tremendous. And my battery ran out. Okay, now let's talk fans. So this case
includes six what appear to be 80 mm
fans, although the ones at the back might be No, I think these are all 80
mm. So these ones here, the four that are mounted on kind of a a mid plate,
those are all a single set of blade fans.
Now, they're normal fans, okay? As
opposed to the counterrotating fans at the back. I'll get more into those uh
when we talk about them. But these eight
eight four 80 mm fans draw air through
the front of the case. So, if you look at the front of the case, we have ventilation holes over every single hard
drive. So they pull air through there and then all the way through the entire
interface back here and then push it into the case. So these are all about
static pressure. These are going to be high RPM fans. They actually all run off
a single Molex connector though, which is very convenient. They've already gone
and wired all of the fan. Don't move around so much. They've gone and wired
all of the fans into a little PCB down at the bottom of the case. So, I'm going
to tilt this so you can have a look down there. See? Just like that. So, the
power goes in there and then gets distributed to all four fans. So, these
are going to be quite loud for you cases. In fact, any rack mountable case
is generally not designed with silence in mind. So, that's something you have
to bear in mind. If you wanted to build yourself a file server based on a case
like this, you would either want to replace the fans with something quieter.
Mind you, remember there's loud fans in here for a reason. There's a lot of heat
being generated if you actually have 24 hard drives running in here. So, you
want to make sure you're removing it effectively. Or alternately, you can go
ahead and throw it in like some closet somewhere where you don't have to listen
to it. All right, let's move into the actual motherboard compartment. You can
see this is an EATX motherboard compartment. That means you can put in
up to an EATX motherboard. Although the beauty of Norcco's cases is you can just
use a standard ATX power supply, a standard ATX board if you want to build
yourself a simple home server, and boom, you're done.
So, you've got seven PCI expansion slots, and I want to have a closer look
at these counterrotating fans. You can't really see it too well from the Oh,
maybe you can. Maybe you can. Okay, so there's actually two full sets of
blades. The reason for that is because at the back of the case, you've only got
three fans. So, one power supply fan, two 80 mm fans here that actually have
to move out all of the air that those four at the front drew in. So, that's
why we're using a very advanced design where it's going to be high RPM. It's
got two sets of blades which are spinning in opposite directions, counter
rotation, because if you actually spin the blades in the same direction, you
don't get any additional benefit. So, those are going to be very high static
pressure, very high air flow fans, and extremely loud. I think we've talked a
lot about the features of the case in general. Let's talk about why you'd
actually buy one. If you have a ton of storage space and you don't you're not
content with just a simple NAS, then you can buy one of these. You don't have to
run all 24 drives. They've actually got
two U cases, three U cases, and other four U cases that take fewer drives. And
not all of the cases they have have the SFF887 connector. So many of them uh
including the I believe it's the 4020
although I may be wrong. That one I believe uses simple SATA 2 connectors.
So you could run SAS drives, SATA 2 drives. You could just take a standard
desktop motherboard, fill it up with PCI uh four port SATA cards and then run
them to drives. And I mean, if you're not running a high-end RAID array, if
you're just running like a Windows home server or something like that, that kind
of setup could be perfect versus spending a ton of money on like a more
expensive rack mountable case or trying to find a desktop case that's really
going to hold an appropriate number of drives cuz I believe the 4020 holds 20
drives. Now, if you are doing something high-end, you can take this case and you
can turn it into something really file server worthy with just a RAID card. So,
this is about a $1,500 RAID card. This is an ARA RX1680 EX 24. So, if you
wanted to use this particular case to its full potential, meaning you're
running 24 drives in RAID six or
hopefully not RAID 5, if you got 24 drives, or if you're running uh several
arrays in varying levels of RAID, this
is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to use. So, you go ahead, you put like a
nice reliable motherboard in there, or maybe you buy a cheap uh cheap tie or
super micro board. You go ahead and throw a card like this in there, and
there are your six 8087 connectors. You
can actually run up to 24 drives off a
card like this. So, for two grand, you can have the case and the card. All you
need to do is throw in some valuepriced hardware for all I care. I mean, if it's
just going to be a file server, you don't have to be too worried about that. and you can run basically any hard drive
setup that you could pretty much want in
a case like this. So, I think that covers everything I wanted to say about
the 4224 from Norcco. And thank you for
checking out my video blog. I will actually be doing a build in this case
just to show it and uh for the fun of it, I guess we might see what kind of
numbers we can pull out of 24 hard drives and RAID six or whatever it is we
decide we want to do. So, thank you for checking out my video blog, and I hope
you've learned something useful about Norcco and their uh I mean, it sounds
expensive, but believe me, these are inexpensive rack mount cases. Oh, one
last thing I did want to explain for our viewers who aren't really up on all of
the server terminology, what 4U means.
4U is 4* 1 U, which is the height of a
rack. Okay, so a 1U rack mountable case,
you're using lowprofile heat sinks, low power hardware. It's going to be about
this thin. A 2 U is like this. A 3U is like this. And a 4 U is like this. So,
it just means how many rack spots that one case takes up.