planning to design a case , how do i start ?

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fastapifastdisks

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i am planning to design a case something that fits a matx board and couple of hard drives but is slim and compact. Lot of matx cube/htpc cases are quite large. Many popular htpc cases from silverstone/fractal design/lianli are not even manufactured anymore the era between 2013-2016 was a golden period for these.
 
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Best way to start is to get some old HTPC cases u mentioned and design only outer covering or cover of the case. Use hard drive/ SSD and mouting points from old cases as they are manufactured with required tolerance which will avoid fitment issues
 
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How much do you want to store? That is the primary consideration. Then comes the number of hard disks you can afford to buy to satisfy that target. Smaller capacity drives are cheaper while larger are expensive. But they physical size & power requirements are inverse.
You have said that you would like an matx board. So most of SFF cases are out of the question. I will come up with a suggested case for you but first give me an idea of your capacity target & the number of hard drives you want to deploy.
 
bornlibra23 said:
How much do you want to store? That is the primary consideration. Then comes the number of hard disks you can afford to buy to satisfy that target. Smaller capacity drives are cheaper while larger are expensive. But they physical size & power requirements are inverse.
You have said that you would like an matx board. So most of SFF cases are out of the question. I will come up with a suggested case for you but first give me an idea of your capacity target & the number of hard drives you want to deploy.
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8 hdd's 3.5 inch one's or 2.5 inch one's. Matx or Atx board, support for mid sized gpu. slot can be horizontal instead of vertical. support for add in raid pcie raid cards,network cards etc. i am thinking of a air 240 from corsair but with more storage capacity. The fractal 804 is a great example of this, little bit big and not manufactured anymore but great. supports 8 drive's,good cable management. Good radiator support if one wants to put a aio. Supports quite long gpu's.+ has support for slim cd drive. The air 240 though was a great speciment sadly had only limited no of hdd support.
 
fastapifastdisks said:
8 hdd's 3.5 inch one's or 2.5 inch one's. Matx or Atx board, support for mid sized gpu. slot can be horizontal instead of vertical. support for add in raid pcie raid cards,network cards etc. i am thinking of a air 240 from corsair but with more storage capacity. The fractal 804 is a great example of this, little bit big and not manufactured anymore but great. supports 8 drive's,good cable management. Good radiator support if one wants to put a aio. Supports quite long gpu's.+ has support for slim cd drive. The air 240 though was a great speciment sadly had only limited no of hdd support.
Click to expand...
804 checks all the boxes. It's still manufactured. If you want a new one I can help you get it.
On a side note if you want to ditch the gpu, switch to mini itx & allow for some modding then Cooler Master Elite 310 is the prefect sized case for this work. In fact I have one myself.
But then my use case is strictly for NAS/Plex & am using Intel QuickSync to decode h265 & encode h264 for Plex.
I am getting the hard drive mounts for the case 3d printed right now actually.
I will send you photos if you want.
About my more advanced NAS setup.
I am projecting to use a CM HAF XB to house 20 HDDs in the lower partition & have the 3d print ready for the custom hdd cages while having the top for compute & power.
Alternatively I am considering to use the top partition for ~30 HDDs but havent designed the custom cages & the lower partition for compute & power.
I hope this fires up your imagination further.
 
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