Gadgetory

now this is a product that is going to be completely boring for some people but really exciting for others because it is a mini ITX case that houses six three and a half inch hard drives and one two and a half inch drive so that means if you're into Windows Home Server or any other kind of home storage software or if you if you have a media PC that you like to keep a lot of content stored on this is for you this is an aluminum case this is the fractal design array are two mini ITX case I guess I'll show you what it says on the outside so the case size it looks like they actually made some adjustments to the box but it's 250 by 250 millimeters so it's quite small it's compatible with mini ITX boards it has a 140 millimeter fan which is also very impressive for a mini ITX case I already talked about all that storage space okay there's a little bit about fractal design itself and then finally I just want to show you what it says on the front oh yes and it does also include a 300 watt SFX power supplies so that's pretty sweet as well so let's go ahead get this open thought I wanted to okay I have not seen this one in person yet although everything that I've seen from fractal designs so far has looked great on paper and then looked even better in person so I have very very high expectations for the array r2 I apologize for it taking me so long to do this unboxing but this haven't really gotten around for some reason alright now one thing that I have on fairly good authority but you know keep it to yourself is that this case is actually om at least in part by Lee and Lee so the finish on it you can already see is just outstanding a beautiful black anodized aluminum finish all over the outside of this case very clean looking which is something that we've come to expect from fractal design just lots of straight edges ventilation holes and places where they make sense and an overall elegant elegant design and look and feel to the case so I'm going to flip it over on its side oh I feel terrible flipping it on to its eye on the table so this looks so nice so I'm going to just put down some plastic here and there we go so you can see that it does have four rubber feet on the bottom and we've got yet another looks like this panel is actually removable the Assembly of the case looks quite modular so I'm going to have to go get a screwdriver so we can take this apart so we're going to a voyage of discovery about how exactly all of this fits together right now so I removed the top panel and you can see we've actually got some noise dampening material here on the top alright so you got to be really careful when you're handling these are these anodized aluminum panels because as soon as you touch them once the oil from your fingers will leave a fingerprint on it that you can't even remove so you want to be really careful when you're working with cases like this and this goes for pretty much all anodized aluminum surfaces and even some of the non anodized aluminum cases you just got to be very very careful now the the screws on the top allowed me to remove the top panel and then these two screws here appear to loosen the hard drive cage which is here so that's where we mount our six hard drives and I have yet to figure out exactly how to remove this part oh you know what I figured it out but this is going to take a little while I think I have to remove the screws on the bottom so you can see that there is some disassembly required for this case so I better just turn off the camera permit all right well after about 20 screws and removing some completely unnecessary parts I think I finally figured out how it works so you do not remove the screws in the side actually what you do is you remove the four screws in the top of the hard drive cage which slides in like this and then when we move the power supply cables over there so you can see it rests on top of these black pads so that you get some anti vibration action going on there and so you just screw those in and I'm just going to remove it for the sake of showing you guys some of the other things that are included so maybe I can also figure out where the two and a half inch drive goes hmm oh there it is so the two and a half inch drive mounts on the bottom of this and you can see that there are four convenient screw driver holes located here so you can actually screw the drive in and then it just sits on the bottom of the entire hard drive cage so this holds six three and a half inch and two wide rather one two and a half inch drive all right now let's finally look at the accessories and what's inside of the case so here we have motherboard screws we have lots of hard drive screws and that's pretty much it we've got one cable management tie and then we have our motherboard tray which I removed which is entirely unnecessary so what I would like to do is this back down get some of the stuff out of my mail comes with a power cord since it does include a power supply so I can take this put it back on top where it belongs and now we can examine what the inside of the case looks like so here we go here is the SFX power supply you can see that it is a 300 watt unit capable of providing up to 14 amps on one of the 12-volt rails and 16 amps on the other 12 volt rail so it does have two 12-volt rails in terms of connectors we have a 24-pin connector oh no way is that it is that a 20 pin no it's a 24 pin good yeah we have a 24 pin so a 20 + 4 and then we also have a 4 pin p4 connector and then go figure we've got a bunch of SATA power so how many of those do we have we have one two three four five six seven SATA power which makes sense because that's how many drives it holds and then we have one additional molex connector so this is pretty much designed to power your board your drives and that's it the front 140 millimeter fan hooks up via a three pin fan connector and you can see that the whole front assembly for the 140 millimeter fan is held in by three screws at the top and it's also held in by matching three screws at the bottom so you can remove this whole thing put on a different fan if you so desire and it can be easily replaced that way the front panel connectors are here so we've got a power switch as well as a power LED and that is it the front of the case is very clean and they're able to achieve that by only having one switch and then the LED is actually inside there you've got space for two expansion carts so that is you can install one expansion card with ITX or you can install one dual slot card although I wouldn't be expecting to install any any long graphics cards unless you make some modifications to the hard drive cage which you could quite easily do now that I look at it although you'd have to make some modifications to the power supply mounting and you'd be you'd be making some pretty serious modifications to the case itself not something that I think is for the first time modern necessarily but it does look doable actually if you wanted to take this out you could probably cut out a new hole for a full-size ATX power supply and then you could probably chop this off and do up to like a 12-inch graphics card in here kind of cool anyway that is my unboxing and first look at the fractal design arrear - thank you for checking it out and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips