Hello everyone-
I have a unique situation for which I’m hoping another community member has some input.
I live in an apartment in the city and therefore do not have a basement, closet or other space that is suitable for a traditional home server rack for my self-hosted servers.
I do have a “home office” (A desk in the living room) where it would be suitable to have a quiet enclosed rack below my desk. My desk is about 20" or so deep and it would prefer it not to stick out too much. I am okay building a DIY enclosed server cabinet that meets this constraint however my challenge is finding a suitable server chassis. Most of the typical Dell servers are >25" deep. The popular SuperMicro SC846 is 26" deep. These options are too long for my use-case. Does anyone know of a 2U/3U/4U server chassis that is <20" deep? Ideally 4U/24 bays, but also willing to consider 2U/3U 8-12 bay. I prefer whitebox servers as I find using traditional desktop components allows quieter and more efficient servers.
TLDR: Looking for server chassis for whitebox NAS with a depth of <20". Ideally 3U/4U, 2U is ok. Ideally has hot swap style drive bays in the front.
Thank you
I have yet to find a 2U or 4U server that is like the 813mtq/113mtq, if anyone finds one I would be very interested. I have a hard depth limit that those two just barely fit in (have to use a right angle power cord). Specifically I’m looking for the same or shorter depth, with either 8x 3.5” or 12x or more 2.5”, in 2U.
I think the Norco RPC-2304 could suit my needs for a 2U Proxmox server for sure. Only 4 hot swap bays on a 2U case is a bit less than ideal, but still something I can work with. For my needs, I don’t need a lot of storage in my Proxmox server. I’m going to start watching for this model on eBay.
The 4U wouldn’t be useful for me. A 4U server with only 8 bays is really not useful for my storage needs.
In terms of the supermicro recommendation - 1U is not useful for me, but maybe it would make a nice server for another user! At some point in the future I expect to be in a less noise sensitive environment where 1U servers would be great for proxmox or pfsense servers.
