Every NAS Case/Enclosure on AliExpress - The Best and Worst!

foreign [Music] welcome back and that's right today is a very special video on the subject of Nas cases and the website AliExpress have you been looking at getting a new case for your new Nas system maybe you were looking to buy a bunch of component parts and random all together for your new true Nas or unrained build you didn't want to go turkey you didn't want to go technology or qnap you wanted to go DIY do it yourself and when it comes to buying a case to put that all in a normal PC case isn't really going to cut it it's inefficient in terms of cooling a number of bass for all your storage drives and it can be quite a struggle and often online you do find that people recommend head over to a website like Ali and get something cheap from overseas it'll take about 30 40 days to arrive but at least you're saving a few Bob and getting something a little bit unique but definitely specific to NAS however have you ever used the actual search functionality on AliExpress it's awful no matter how precise you go when you're looking at the solutions you're looking for in the search terms you use in this website all too quickly you end up getting four or five pages deep and then all of a sudden it's showing you irrelevant stuff like fingernails so in today's video what we're going to do is go through every single kind of Nas case on AliExpress right now as of September 2023. now we can't go through every single one of them without a few caveats you can see a load of tabs here at the top of the screen and I'm going to be straight with you along the top of the screen there there's even more than that so I've had to put some rules in otherwise we'd be here all the live long day number one any duplicated cases if I see the same case exactly the same from two different vendors I've not bothered showing both of them there are a few slight exceptions to that rule that you will see where it's an incredibly similar chassis from two Brands but there is Market differences either in pricing structure or materials being used the second thing again new cases are going to come out all the time therefore this video probably is going to be out of date within a few months but sooner on the list will ultimately cover the bulk of Nash chassis that you can buy on AliExpress all of these by the way will be linked either in the description or they'll be linked on an article and there's compared to what we go through it and compare them all for which is good which is bad and lastly if you've gone to this video for a recommendation of the now chassis you should get for your custom build although I would say throughout the course of these tabs there's only about five that I would genuinely recommend and you'll know which ones they are when I let you know if you are looking for a case the Johns bow case is still pretty much the best Nas case in the market not only because arguably it's probably one of the most affordable options in the market that John's about but I know it's not the cheapest it's the best in terms of quality and what you're getting also that John Bro case that comes from a brand that's pretty well regarded online so if you come to this video to know the right case to buy and save a lot of time go for the John's boat into or in three if you want to think with bigger CPU headsets more bays and just a bigger build overall or the N2 pretty much Services everyone but if you're still on the fence let's start making our way through every single Nas case chassis that we can find on AliExpress and even look at some winners or some absolute monsters so straight away I will say the ugliest the award for the worst now chassis across the whole of AliExpress goes to this one if you needed to know the worst one what is the one you need to avoid more than any other it is this absolute monstrosity this is a two by desktop Nas that is almost bigger than some of the six Bay devices I've looked at in the past it's knocked around for nion 37 knicker and 42 quid delivery UK which is comedic for what you're getting here the inside is dated beyond all recognition and even if you factor in Cooling and ventilation this is terribly designed and along the bottom there not only is did we mention it only supports up to two drive but the motherboard support is weak as well the efficiency of the system is weak the production and the reviews are terrible it is just generally the worst one of all and I thought I would get it out the way to save you guys wondering I wonder what the worst thing he's going to show me today is it's this thing it looks like a bank site from the 1970s cannot recommend it to anyone so it's all up from here right well first up I want to talk about a couple of one by chassis now again I'm generalizing there are actually quite a few one by Nas chassis out there one of which later on in the rack mount section later in the video at the top right that was a real hum Dinger but generally the one by now chassis on AliExpress to build your own Nas or remote access server come down to ones like this which are a single docking station that you pop a drive in that you can work with wirelessly not and like synology's uh B drives are not strictly in theirs but it can be modified to work as such and again it's about 80 knicker not too shabby the other alternative well load a note and loads of options like this one a single little one by chassis that's been modded to have an Ethernet Lan there on the rear and a wireless antenna again not really a Nas and definitely with no redundancy or backup options or a decent you know OS you can put on it but as a single drive that can be utilized as a local remote access drive not the end of the world bit dated but for 37 knicker free delivery it it's not the end of the world for those of you that are looking for uncomplicated and non-dangerous and you know insecure data there and you're not too worried about it this isn't terrible for what it is but still let's be realistic about this it's a hard drive with an aerial stuck on the back of it so you know me um moving forward we can look at some four by now chassis now of all of the four Bays I'm going to show you this is my favorite and that's stretching it because it's still not a great looking chassis to start with but it's not terrible looking it looks not unlike across between the drobo and a qnap it supports a mini it exports not unlike the John's bow M2 so there is the capability in the space there for uh implying that card but unfortunately no pcie slot which is super weird to me because that's you're going to be missing out on any kind of enhanced network connectivity but the very least you'll be able to get an M2 card inside there available in silver and black and this copper one which if those trays are the right color wouldn't be the end of the world it's not terrible looking but it doesn't have a you know decent LEDs for the drivers it doesn't have any kind of LCD panel which USB 2 on the front doesn't have a copy button it's very Billy basic but of all the four Bays I'm going to show you this is probably the best outside of Jon Snow of course uh moving forward we can look at this hideous thing here um and again this is another one of these Billy basic cookie cutter chassis but at the very least this has swap things out a little bit going for a more compact PSU to be slopped in slotted inside there and get ready to see this hideous little chassis a lot more because it does appear across several different brands in different scaling and sizes there next up we've got another example of That Hideous little two Bay case where they've slapped on two more trays it kind of makes a little bit more sense in this context barely and I still don't really like the internal design of this device but at the very least they've changed things up a little bit in terms of placement of the LED it's got the piece cie capability there allowing you to install a card on that MTR um ITX board there and the pricing of around 80 knicker including delivery in the UK isn't terrible I mean what I'm saying here is in terms of a forebay it's not going to win any you know good looking Design Awards but at least they've improved the USB connectivity improved kind of what the mobile support there is compared to the other one and as an industrial looking system at least you know you've got a rugged bit of kit here but moving forward from that we can look at this this padlock looking thing that kind of looks like drobo if drobo had come out in around 1996 arriving with that key lock front panel and Trays inside it's a slight modification of the chassis design that we've just been looking at up to this point again got the LEDs got all of the USB stuff there on the front and again it's going to be OS ready it's got a slight mix up and change a slightly lower chassis design than the previous one there but still supporting that compact slot in PSU not a terrible chassis and it does include the tray something you'd be surprised actually you know some of these cases get released without trays included which I find mind-boggling um but moving forward from that one it's a nice compact chassis there is a two Bay version of that as well um again you're gonna keep seeing that same modified internal chassis there with slight changes throughout but it also ultimately comes to the same thing between all of them in this company innovision you're going to hear that name a lot uh throughout the course of this video and again this is when we move into the more classic classic style of chassis no LCD panel there but again knocking around for about the 70 knicker mark this one isn't actually that much different but they've still at least gone with the placement of that mobo with a slight change up but still no access to a pcie upgrader although it supports uh mini ITX and micro ITX boards it's still going to you're going to lose out on that network connectivity there overall so if you're not fussed about that and you wouldn't go straight to an M2 case this isn't too bad for the pricing and they've at least rounded off some of those harsh edges of some of the other cases that we talked about earlier on not Beautiful by any means but a more classic style of uh four bay casing that we've talked about up to this point here on the channel again the return of that Randy off chassis there but this time with slight changes in terms of the back plate there between the two and the placement of the mobile of the motherboard then the again that modification we saw before off that forbade but now they've swapped around the motherboard placement and that PSU they've increased the price for some bizarre reason there but with the exception of that still a reasonable chassis just not really awe-inspiring and those horrible harsh edges will never make sense to me in terms of ugly design um overall Now we move into six pages there aren't actually that many six space chassis on AliExpress and the six base that you see are pretty much identical to what we've seen already on those eight base slight changes in layout I think the mobile some of them start to support standard ITX and even ATX boards um allowing you know better support of of PCI upgrade a lot as you can see there with that new modified slot placement because the card gets uh stacked vertically rather than horizontally again knocking around for about 100 knicker this is one of those cases that if if the John's boat N3 case didn't exist I'd actually think it might not be too bad but the very fact that the johnsbo N3 case exists and it arrives at a better price point than this largely undermines it now the reason I include it here on this list and I stated earlier on that some of the uh chassis I'm going to talk about today I actually not okay saying I like is a bit of an extension but to say that some of them are better than others this is an example of that and why is that because this one at the very least includes psus with it so they'll take care of a lot of that hassle for you now they don't really go into a vast amount of detail about the psus that are included with it but at the very least they do include psus with a number of these saving you a little bit of time and hassle with that PSU pre-installed with your purchase so although I'm not going to say this is like topping the lists and you will get onto one that I love the look of shortly it's not terrible and I would say of the six base probably the preferable one because this six by towel that looks not unlike some of the older Buffalo now chassis but again That Hideous dated looking chassis design there and a price point of around 100 knicker so it's largely undermined by the previous one that I saw look at the tightness placement of that fan behind those yes you've got the space there for that pcie card on that on that card but that fan is really going to struggle to circulate the air around that chassis and it's something we're seeing Oh with a lot of these cases where they've taken that preset design that existed in that two and four bay case and just trying to Ram more drives in there without really factoring in a lot of that ventilation this is a nice case that is not only gonna get hot it's gonna get noisy when those fans are going to have to respond to those increased temperatures and with the placement of the mobo underneath all of that with the heat rising there isn't a lot of dissipation in circulation that's going to counter that now moving forward from that we could look at again That Hideous little placement design there but this one at the very least when we look at it includes a little bit more and is a little more affordable so if you were prepared to go for that six Bay why would you uh this one's just a few quid cheaper now we got into the probably the second Nas on this video I would think it's actually slightly recommendable and this one here again not real wood it was never going to be real wood it's got this really nice uh transparent top panel there built into it it is a six by uh sorry an eight-bane now chassis with the trays included with it and again this uh there's lots of different designs there's a black design that I'll show you in just a moment the white and cream design there and it's surprisingly nice looking as an 8 by the details on what you can install inside it are actually surprisingly you know detailed throughout the course of it and this is one that we might actually be buying here for the channel and the fact that it supports an ATX board as well opens the door to the level of pcie compatibility that we can use and there's a better example of that later on to show you what I mean by the layout but this allows you to use a bigger motherboard something that the jonesbow N3 doesn't have the John spiral N3 that we talked about before although it has multiple pcie slots built into the case it only supports um the compact Boards of an MIT X or only a single pcie card could be used inside this and it's got the extra space in case you want to go for like a double barreled graphics card or a wider card to go inside there at full height this at the very least is an 8 bay chassis that allows you to use the bigger motherboard and therefore more pcie upgrade cards something that I think not enough people talk about on that John's boat N3 as much as I like it that single card slot support on it is a bit of a kicker it's not the cheapest that price of 200 knicker ignore the delivery at 15 sure but 200 knicker for this eight by this is why we might buy it for the channel just to see if it's actually worth that extra money in this building once we finish the N3 don't be surprised if you see this chassis on the channel soon now again I mentioned earlier on let's find it there there is an another version of that case in Black let's bring you over there again very similar but this time largely the same price but with shipping we all know the con with post and packaging but at the very least this one goes into a lot more detail about the mobile you can install a lot a little bit more guidance there on how things can be installed inside for those extra pcie slots overall again definitely one of the cases I think is worth looking at if you're looking at a bigger eight by desktop build and certainly better than a number of again we've seen that chassis already and given the similarity between this pricing and this one here I think this one's still for me is good and it supports that larger card something that again is a weakness in the John's bow N3 I would say is at the very least something that's supported across the bulk not all but the bulk of the eight Bay desktops that we're going to talk about of cases available on AliExpress now this is a weird looking one this is some Tron level Logan's Run style casing it's cheaper than the other eight Bays if you factor in shipping than any of the others and this is again one I was considering buying that only just lost out to the other chassis I'm talking about it's got the multiple pcie slot it's got you know it looks like it's a big case that can sport the bigger cards sadly it doesn't support as larger cards as the predecessor it does support um mitx and larger it export for multiple pcies but still not the larger range of cards and the height of cards of that previous case it's only a small difference but it's enough for us at least here at the channel myself and Eddie to order the other box and not this one this one's got this weird external chassis but it is one of the only ones with a LCD panel on this video that you're going to be seeing it was a real close thing between this and the other one who might still go for this here on the channel later on if you guys want to see it but it was just a shame that we couldn't really go for both of them we didn't want to go for it you know all of the ones are our favorites in this video we are going to order for future videos so if you would like us to see us review this one to find out what it's like let me know in the comments because it you know might be worth our time but now we look at some real Argos such as this one and again very similar chassis design to the other ones we've looked at very very similar it's only a slight modification of what we've seen from these other chassis but unfortunately it's just hideous the placement of the ventilation and cooling throughout the chassis everything's blocked in it's got that removable tray which you know is nice but given the whys that you're going to be looking at here how often you're going to be accessing that tray and again the support the motherboards inside although similar it's still not as you know bro in terms of height as it was on that previous Nash chassis that we talked about there but the price tag is what really let this one down because once you've looked at all the eight by now chassis on AliExpress you soon see that you know the going rate for how much you can spend on these things remember right there at the beginning of the video when we were looking at this knocking around for 80 quid this hideous little two by well now fast forward when we're looking at these eight base chassis and we've gone up to 200 Nika you understand just how much your money can be stretched and when you reach that point some of these chassis are just not good by comparison now this one I was intrigued by again there's innovision again and this is one or I would argue more than a dad's style it's obviously another example of people utilizing this oh so familiar chassis design we've talked about plenty up to this point but they've gone for the tower style there there isn't a huge amount of room it is a mini ITX board case here but we're kind of intrigued by this it obviously prioritizes the storage bays and they've really crammed them in there so I'm not completely convinced it's going to be either the quietest or the coolest to run and they still want for that box design there for the way the trays meet the fans and therefore I question the ventilation around the rest of the chassis but it's surprisingly affordable and it's the cheapest 8-base chassis so far so it might be worth the look maybe you've gone for this and you know you've seen value in it you tell me I'm not convinced and maybe it's the use of Comic Sans at points in this description as you can see it's All-Star part of that same family but overall as we go through these eight bays and now on to the 12 by which by the way could not look more functional if it friggin tried this 12 by although by no means the most attractive and I have no idea what that galvanized material is he looked for it at the first glance I thought this was uh like built on the 5.25 installed caddy system onto an existing rack cabinet a a rack mount chassis design but this is indeed Standalone there it's got the space um for that mini ITX board to go straight into there again PSU supports surprisingly small cavity for a 12 Bay there and of course zero opportunity for a pcie upgrade slot which for 12 Bays therefore no ability to get 10 GBE for me is a cardinal sin as is that horrendous delivery price um but overall it's one of the only 12-day desktop Solutions you're going to see before you get into the rack mount area and you know it's not nice looking but you're kind of lost for choice and I would argue if you're at the 12th day point this is when you're going to start looking at rack mount anyway but how about a quick diversion a quick slow journey into the world of caddies I mentioned that earlier on some of you may not be aware that you can modify your existing PC chassis to incorporate Nas Bays earlier on I might have touched on or I believe I did in the previous edit of this video that some users when they want to convert an old PC tower case that they've got from an old crappy you know AMD Athlon PC they had knocking around into a Nas one of the biggest issues they find is where to put the storage base you can't just you know put the a SATA um connector into the mobile and have the drives dangling around they've got to go in now some chassis will have the kind of placement cavity inside their PC casing to put multiple 3.5 inch drives but what about hot swapping what about access what about swapping them out in a degraded raid date they're all adding more drives later and this is one of the ways in which you can get around it this is when you can get hold of effective blocks 5.25 inch blocks which you can just slot into existing PC chassis into available cavities on the front mounted panels and add future drives and again the logic behind this is actually surprisingly old this is existed for quite a long time in the early days of San growth storage then to factor them in you can even go for if you choose pre-defined chassis like this one that allow you to just block in over time more and more drives there and make your own kind of customized 12 Bay chassis each one of them grouped into a multi-lane cable which can then factor into a raid card there so these are an option for users out there that are looking for packed in storage as much as possible into very compact chassis but just bear in mind that the depth of this system is enormous the chassis designs are built around not only big mobos but also for huge depth for those extra cards and that performance threshold you're going to be getting a lot of these coming from companies like net store and Highpoint traditionally um when it comes to graphics card not this similar design aesthetic has gone in here but as you can see ventilation is going to be key on a design like this so do bear that in mind but it's just nice you know there is a way for users that just want to mod an existing PC case into something more manageable and more Nas like in a tower form but just bear in mind this is going to be noisy not only due to a lot of the ventilation and cooling that's going to be factored in just a sheer amount of clanging metal that's going to be next to each other and the vibration so let's move forward into our final section rack mounts and again let's start with a mutant right here this I don't get this if this is for you do tell me and I know a number of you are going to say in VR this is a one by one U rack mount chassis I didn't you know get that wrong this is a one you Nas and again supporting a micro ITX board and he's only got one SATA by inside which to me is absolute Madness the pricing I mean I can't even describe how good or bad that pricing is given this scale of what we're talking about here and again if you've got one u3 in a rat cabinet don't go for this never go for this because I mean you don't have to go that far look at the damage look at the price here 35 quid plus 41 quid delivery One Step along boom we're looking at a three by two you rack mount chassis again another weird mutant chassis for us here but at the very least it supports slightly better motherboard design there for more cards but again at three you who is buying a 3u rack mount uh not a three a three Bay rack mount that is to you in height when you know in your heart of heart how easy it is to get a four bay rack command now this is another mutant rack man I will say because again the pricing not the cheapest but with rack mount there's a lot more raw materials in use but this is probably the oddest to you rack man I've seen in a very long time the reason being that when you think to you you immediately go eight by you go 12 by you know because to you you're factoring a lot more storage yes you're factoring in those taller cards that you may be utilizing as well but ultimately when it comes to Iraq man you tend to as a rule of thumb one U equals four Bays of storage and it kind of goes up with those increments every single time this is a four by two U because for some reason they decided to stack them two by two formation absolutely no idea why and it's a strange choice to make and as I say above and beyond the placement of taller pcie cards which as you can see you can install quite good card depth here on you know the available options within this chassis it's still a very strange aesthetic choice to go for when you look at the bulk of uh systems like oh there's the same one there you look at this a classical 12 base system here and again that's 126 plus 100 quid delivery again normally because of the volume of the of the package you're receiving that to me as a 2u makes infinitely more sense not only is it 12 Bays of storage not only has it got support of the same kind of motherboards there not only has it got support for a redundant power supplier something in 2u is largely Associated to be an absolute given at Enterprise level but you've got all of those pcie slots and 12 Bays of storage so why are y o y Delilah would you go for a 12 by 2u that's got really inefficient space utilization and when you go to the rear of it odd PSU choices as well and moving forward from those we have got this very strange looking 12 Bay system and again we've got a 12 Bay rack mount which is a for you depth who is this for it's cheap it's cheaper than the other ones we've talked about actually in terms of delivery costs there and when we look at the rear there the placement of everything is just strange it's using that slot Barrel PSU it's got support of a bigger card depth there not huge but still it's an ATX but still nonetheless who on Earth is going to buy this 4u height rack mount chassis here and get it for that kind of storage especially when you can get a 3u 16 Bay rack mount here yes it costs more but this again makes infinitely more sense and it's got the additional removable fans in there that already plumbed in if you will with the starter connectors and it's just a bigger badder full depth chassis overall yes it's going to cost you an absolute pack it in terms of delivery because they're still talking size and volume and weight but it just seems Madness to me when we keep seeing these rather odd chassis designs here in terms of the depth of the rack mount and I don't know who they're for so please tell me in the comments if you know who these sort of cases are for and again moving forward another four by uh for you but 24 by rack mount that is what I'm talking about and of course they've made allowances there for dual PSU architecture of course they've made allowances for a wide array of pcie upgrade slots because you wouldn't look at a chassis design like that and then go Micro ATX you were going to go Mainline ATX or full fat card there but things really do continue to get out of hand as you can see here with this 60 by chassis design here it's even taken advantage of the SAS expander backplane as well something that you're largely going to need in something like this because this really is an absolute monster casing here all the way along again in terms of card support quite large card support as you will no doubt be you know unsurprised to hear because you're gonna need some serious bandwidth for something like this if you run this on a Celeron there is something wrong with you uh the pricing of 1800 knicker it was always going to be high even if you factor in delivery which is still going to be pretty darn high but with Synology rolling out that HC 6400 and from what I understand even new high density systems just coming around the corner this is for those of you that are going to prioritize storage more than anything else and let's close this video on the last kind of area of Nas and Server Chassis design that in the last few years saw an enormous Spike and then immediately hit the ground like an effing Dart and that is chassis designed around the idea of chia mining remember that cryptocurrency maybe it will come back like Bitcoin did who knows but remember Chia it was that crypto that wasn't built around burning through loads of gpus it was about burning through lots of hard drives and ssds and there was an enormous spike in a number of users custom building service specifically for that purpose and although there are loads of different designs online now in terms of rack mount it'll deviate from the same kind of two builds number one those ones like this one this is a 48 by with the extra expander built into the base there along the top and just prioritizing storage in kind of crazy mental way in two directions overall and it's got the slide out feature of some of the ones we talked about but it's still a grand you're dropping on this and I don't know I don't outside of chair mining this kind of storage if you've got this amount of data I don't think I would trust some off the peg chassis from overseas unless you're going for a third party they're going to doing system admin and maintenance on this we're going to be looking more into the brand innovision very very soon because one kind of repeating Factor throughout the course of this video is they seem to be one of the bigger names on AliExpress when it comes to Nash chassis so you may have to do a dedicated video on them very very soon but if we tailor on this last chassis here a combination GPU and HDD chassis here and again this is as you can see it's a hanging chassis there for Chia it's a full you designed the number of Bays you could get in there did change and DVR over time for the amount of space that you might need and this is just another example of chassis design that has very much fallen out of Vogue and consequently as you can see the price has come down exponentially because of that because no one wants these cases which prioritized Chia mining over that of traditional storage use so if you are looking for a bargain when it comes to a rack mount design look at some of these ex-chia rack mount designs less so in the desktop form because a lot of those just didn't have the sheer scope of capacity for a lot of users to get the best bang for buck onto your mining but if you're a racked man buyer look up X Chia chassis designs because those you will find significant savings but just bear in mind if you want to go for more complete ready to go ones again as you can see with a SAS multi-lane adapter cards and of course these are going to be prioritizing very specific card utilization so you're not going to be able to use the micro cards not that you would want to in a chassis design at this scale overall this is probably one of the best bets for rack mount buyers looking for a bargain just look for X cheer components but there you go that is pretty much all of the Nash acids you're going to find on AliExpress right now as of September 2023 a lot of research went into this video I've got to say to find it but of course almost by the time I publish this there's going to be even more aren't there so maybe I'll have to do a follow-up next year um we're going to look more into that inner Vision company because I do think we may be able to see about their chassis design because as much as we do love the John's boat Nas case here something we've already started making our fourth or fifth video on that now a couple of those are probably already live I do think there's more to these custom DIY build chassis out there and definitely if you jettison some of these more dated chassis designs we talked about Like That Hideous tubei which I think is just appearing above my head on the video here ignoring ones like that there has been genuine Innovation throughout the course of this again all of the cases that I talked about today will be linked in the description we're going to go through some of the best ones uh on the nas compare article also linked above uh linked in that description for you to check out but apart from that thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this video do let me know if you found any this helpful I know it's been long this is an incredibly dull subject but unfortunately there was no way I could avoid make you know there's no way to make a subject like this any more interesting than it is thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this let me know if you've got any other recommendations this video came uh as I uh recommendation and a request from our inner circle area over on NAS Compares so if you do have a video request you want to make join the inner circle now and your video recommendation will get voted upon and if everyone wants it can go ahead then we will make a video just like this one for you but apart from that thank you so much for watching free advice linked below as well as several John's bow builds in terms of 250 500 and 750 dollars Linked In the description as well and we've got more content coming very very soon on unraid and true Nas as well so stay tuned for that but apart from that thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 21,236

Keywords: NAS Server, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, aliexpress nas, aliexpress, aliexpress nas eNCLOSURE, NAS enclosure, custom nas case, jonsbo nas case, jonsbo, jonsbo n1, jonsbo n2, jonsbo n3, innovision case, innovision nas case, innovision, nas diy, diy nas, diy nas case, custom nas enclosure, budget nas case, low price nas case, low price nas enclosure, nas enclosure, nas drive, nas server

Id: 68sudIiwh5w

Length: 34min 32sec (2072 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023