Gadgetory

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 ten points if you know what this is already although I really doubt it because it's a brand new product from norco tech now Norco Tech is a little bit different from Norco that makes bicycles now Norco is not really focused on you know what kind of high end video card fits in their case or you know how many you know stylish plastic bezel designs they have or what kind of aluminum chassis they're using Norco is all about functionality on the cheap so this is a for you ATX case that is designed you know I'm just gonna have to bring this down to the ground because there's no way I cannot oh so heavy it's a for you 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 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 on this thing weighs like about as much as I do so I'm gonna have to find some way to unbox it and this may be my most difficult unboxing yet so we're going to go ahead tope it this way and then tilt it this way and finally there it is the our PC 4224 so for it is a for you 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 like I said steel construction it's not going to fall apart they actually have a wide variety of rack mountable chassis that are designed for just building little file servers and what makes them great for home users is the backpack unlike enterprise-level chassis or or bare bones they're cheap this case only costs in the mid hundreds versus what you might pay for something from a Super Micro or from another rack-mountable chassis brand which might be as much as a thousand dollars just for the chassis itself so like I said 24 hot-swappable three and a half inch also two and a half inch compatible you can see it has two and a half inch mounting holes hard drive bays okay and these all run off a very large backplane now I might have to run inside and get a 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 worth a lot of money and 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 hot-swappable like massive storage compartment here so this this whole part of the case is dedicated to this backplane okay so you can see here there are actually two redundant power inputs I'm not talking about the fans yet Cameron there are two redundant power inputs so if you're using a redundant power supply it means you take one mole X from each redundant power supply and plug it into each of these two mole X here so you can see there's a total of six okay so that's six times four is twenty-four alright so that means twelve six on each power supply and then over a little bit further you can see there are SFF 8087 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 gonna 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 ii or SAS drives off of this backplane so we can see we have 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 though are the 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 millimeter fans all the ones at the back might be note I think these are all 80 millimeter so these ones here the four that are mounted on kind of a mid plate those are all a single set of Blade fans now I get it yeah they're normal fans okay as opposed to the counter-rotating fans at the back I'll get more into those when we talk about them but these eight eight four eighty millimeter 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 so you 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 twenty four hard drives running in here so you want to make sure you're removing it effectively or ultimately you can go ahead and throw it in like some closet somewhere where you don't have to listen to it alright let's move into the actual motherboard compartment you can see this is an e ATX motherboard compartment that means you can put in up to an e ATX motherboard although the beauty of an Orko'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 counter-rotating fans you can't really see it too well from the phone maybe you can maybe you can ok 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 280 millimeter 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 airflow 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 mess then you can buy one of these you don't have to run all 24 drives it actually got to you cases 3u cases and other 4u cases that take fewer drives and not all of the cases they have have the SFF 8087 connector so many of them including the I believe it's the 40 20 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 4 port SATA cards and then run them two 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 because I believe the 40:20 holds twenty 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 red card so this is about a $1,500 red card this is my Rika arc 1680 IX 24 so if you wanted to use this particular case to its full potential meaning you're running 24 drives in raid 6 or hopefully not raid 5 if you got 24 drives or if you're running 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 cheap tie an or Supermicro 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 2 grand you can have the case and the card all you need to do is throw in some value priced hardware for all I care I mean if it's just going to be a file so ever 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 Norco and thank you for checking out my video blog I will actually be doing a build in this case just to show it and 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 Norco and their I mean it sounds expensive but believe me these are inexpensive rackmill 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 for you means for you is for x 1u which is the height of a rack okay so a 1u rack mountable case you're using low profile heat sinks low-power hardware it's going to be about this thin a to you is like this a 3u is like this and a for you is like this so it just means how many racks plots that one case takes up thanks for watching