Norco 3U Rack Mount 16-Bays SATA/SAS Server Chassis RPC-3216

This is a first impression because I have only installed the motherboard, power supply, and connected some cables to this point. I knew this case would have shortfalls because it costs far less than any other 16 bay hot swap case and the reviews were just okay. I am going to use this for a Xpenology NAS build because I have a lot of old, smaller capacity WD Red drives sitting around. I am also using old parts from a computer decommissioned years ago. Because of the price, I am willing to accept some issues. Here's a quick summary of my first impressions. I will update this as I get further into the build...Pros:- Low, low price. Cheaper than almost anything new and with comparable features.- Decent amount of room. I installed an ATX motherboard and non-modular PSU. Though it accepts an ATX board, the PSU does cover two of the PCI slots. More on that in cons.- Not as heavy as I expected, but then again, it's made of cheap materials. It will be heavy when I load sixteen WD Red drives. I bought a rack shelf that can hold 175 pounds.- 3U! I almost went with 4U for the extra room, but I really prefer 3U. It's the sweet spot for me.- Description and photos on Amazon and Norco website are wrong. This case comes with three 120mm fans and not four 80mm (but they are garbage - more on that in cons). That was changed by the manufacturer and not the model number. Too bad the fans were garbage (more on that later).- The 60mm fans are not nearly as loud as I expected (and they actually work).- There's room for a couple SSDs on top of the hot swap bays, but I am not using them for my build.- You can install a slim optical drive, if you will ever need such a thing.- I think it's a decent looking case.Cons:- The 120mm fans are garbage. One of the three fans didn't work, and this seems to be a common problem according to other reviews. Another fan was very weak and barely moved any air. I ordered three Noctua fans and I will replace all three because I don’t want to have to do this in the near future when the one good fan fails. Please note that these fans have 4 pin connectors and replacement fans should be the same so they can fit in the trays that hold the fans (see photo). There's a clip that holds the 4 pin connector and a three pin would need a shim or something to hold it in place. You could go with any 120mm fan and not use the fan enclosures that allow them to be easily removed and reinserted. If you do that, you will want some type of grill to keep wires out - and you will need that because space in that area is cramped!- Space is tight between the backplane and the fans. Routing the SAS cables is going to be a challenge. I waited to order these to see what I would be dealing with. I was going to order angled cables due to the lack of room, but I went with regular cables that were flat and likely easily bendable. I estimated I would need cables around 2' 7" long, but went with 1m. I have a little room behind the PSU rats nest of cables for more.- The bracket that holds the fans should have been adjustable. I have a decent amount of room between the fans and the motherboard. It would have only required the manufacturer to drill extra holes. This would have made it easier to plug in the molex power cables.- Back to the space between the fans and the backplane. The backplane requires 4 pin molex power and it can be difficult to route power to them. There is a notch between the fan bracket and the side of the case, but it is very narrow. My PSU cables barely made it through that notch and were not long enough to get to all four molex power on the backplane. I ended up using long molex extension cables to run to the backplane. This made it much easier, but it was still difficult to plug them in. I wish the backplane used SATA power, which would have been much easier to plug in!- You will also want a fifth molex extension cable because the fans connect to a bracket that provides power to the fans. This bracket uses a molex connector that is crammed in a really tight spot. Plug in this molex power first because the other cables will get in the way. See the photo.- Not really a fault of the case since it is 3U, but you should get a modular PSU (if buying one for the build). I had an old 850 watt that was not modular and there are a lot of cables I don't need bundled and taking up valuable room. This will also block some airflow. Please note that this case uses a standard computer power supply and not a redundant server PSU.- The PSU mounts partially over an ATX motherboard and covers two PCI slots. This covers my third PCIe x16 slot, which I may need if I want to add another card (considering 10Gbe). It looks like a PCI riser card with a ribbon cable can fit.- The HDD trays do not slide smoothly. I pulled out a couple and they are stiff. I don't mind as all of them at least move in and out. I will not be removing hard drives unless they fail. I wouldn't want to remove these trays too often because I could see them breaking.- There is one USB 3 and one USB 2 port on the front of the case and not two USB 2 as in the description. It's nice having USB 3, but the cable from the case has the USB 2 plug connected to the USB 3 plug and they cannot be split apart. That means the USB 2 and 3 ports on the motherboard must be close together or you will need some type of extension cable unless this cable provides either USB 2 or 3 to both ports depending on what you have plugged in to the motherboard. I don’t know if that is even possible. I'm going to use USB 3 since I will probably never plug in USB devices. See the photo.- The PCI slot covers on the case don’t screw in. They welded on a couple spots and it requires wiggling or prying them until the welds break. I did not know this before mounting my motherboard. I now need to remove the motherboard or very carefully try and remove the PCI covers. See the photo.Cheap materials, but decent build. What do you expect since this costs a heck of a lot less than anything else with comparable features?- There was no manual of any kind included. I wanted to look up something (I forgot what) and I couldn't even find a manual online (I didn’t look too hard). This was not too important since everything is fairly straightforward.There are a lot of cons compared to the pros, but the cost makes up for it (so far). If I were building something else for a more important purpose and buying new components, I would not have purchased this case. In that scenario, I would have looked at Supermicro. However, this is not going to be for a mission critical purpose. I am building an Xpenology NAS and likely going to use it for on-site backup. I will have the original data (depending on the circumstances) and an off-site “cloud” copy.As far as my components, you can see from the photos that I am using an older Gigabyte motherboard. We have a few of these at work as legacy machines and they are solid! I have a Corsair 850 watt PSU, which should be adequate as long as the drive spin-up does not fry it. I have it topped off 32GB of RAM and an Intel i7-3770S. This CPU is more than I need for this build and only 65 watt TDP. I will be using two LSI 9207-8i SAS cards, which will take up my two PCIe x16 slots and not leave room for a 10Gbe card that I know to work with Xpenology. I will add a riser if I really want 10Gbe. I don’t think that will be the case considering I will not be in a huge hurry to transfer data to this device. I will instead use both ethernet ports with load balancing for now.I am awaiting some parts to be delivered. Once I receive these items, I will surely have updates for this review.

Great build quality, a little tight for SAS cables.

Pros: The case is well built, plenty of room and the design idea was good. Packaging was solid, the item arrived intact.Cons: (1) The case comes with 3 120mm fans well placed in the middle, however 2 out of 3 fans were dead.The fans would spin up, run for about 5 seconds then stop. The canter of the fan gets really hot.One fan works okay. Moving the fans around does not change anything -- quick spin, stop and thecenter gets very hot right away. Hope the seller is reading this.(2) The backplain connectors are MOLEX. You need 4 of these to power up the backplains, and 1 topower up the row of fans in the middle of the case. It is very hard to find a power supply today thathas more than 2 MOLEX connectors, so delivering power to the internal components will be challenging.[SUGGESTION] -- if the manufacturer is reading this review -- PLEASE change the power input to SATApower connectors. Your customers will love you if you do.(3) Power Supply placement -- the case can fit ATX mainboards of pretty much all sizes, BUT... Power Supplycovers part of the main board making one PCIe slot inaccessible. In my case, I had to fit an ATX main boardwith 2 Adaptec 6805 and 1 Intel 4 ports LAN adapter, each of which requires an PICe slot.Now one of the PCIe slot is under the power supply -- not very convenient.Other thoughts: Overall the case is very good, but the cons above make it very difficult and inconvenient to workwith. Sadly my expectation was fulfilled by less than 50%. If the case was 4U and the power supply positionedvertically it would be a 10 star hardware, until then only 2 stars. Dear 120mm fans are definitely a minus!

good quality, easy to work with.

I bought this case for an inexpensive home fileserver build. I would recommend it, but with some serious caveats:1) The manufacturer's description says that it can mount an ATX Power Supply. This is not necessarily true. I received a revision that could only mount 2U/3U power supplies. The revision was laid out such that it would have been impossible to swap out the back "window," as you could with the older versions. I had to return the ATX power supply I'd ordered (shipping out of my own pocket) and hunt down a 2U power supply. Not only are 2U supplies harder to find, they're more expensive and generally come in two varieties: cheap, no-name garbage and ultra-expensive redundant models. As this was a home server, I had no need for redundant versions, but finding a reputable brand 2U PSU is harder than it sounds.When I contacted Norco to inquire about the discrepancy on the website, I got a response in broken English that basically said, "Yeah, we're bringing back the ATX one next week."2) The build quality on this case is only slightly better than a $25 mini-tower with sharp edges. The expansion card spacers are permanently attached and require you to bend them back and forth to permanently remove them. The fitment of expansion cards is less than ideal (always a sign of a poor case design). No expansion card screws are included with the case. No spare screws are included with the case. No instruction manual is available to explain how to assemble the numerous bracket pieces included for OS drives, Optical drives, etc. The area designed to accomodate the SFF-8087 drive cables is extremely tight, leading me to question how much shoving would be required to load up all four cables.On the plus side, once assembled (with my unecessarily expensive power supply), it's a solid hot-swap case. I've not encountered the backplane issues that others have reported online, so that's a major plus.Overall, if just one of the two issues existed, I'd give it a 4/5 stars. An incorrect description is inexcusable in my book.