Fractal Design Node 804 Is a Great DIY Home Server Option
If you have a lot of data – photos, movies, backups, or other files – a home server is a great way to keep it all in one place for use throughout your home. Fractal Design Node 804 is my pick as a beautiful, functional PC case for DIY home server.
Sure, you can buy a Synology or another NAS enclosure and they will probably be smaller, but nothing gives you the flexibility that you get from a PC you built yourself. You can go as cheap and energy efficient as you want by buying old parts that no one else needs and installing anything on the operating system of your choice .
The problem is, most PC cases are either big traditional towers that are annoying to the eye, or small with no space for hard drives. If you’re just building a small server that’s fine, but over time you may find that you need room to expand (my home server now has up to five hard drives).
This is where the Node 804 comes in handy: it is a “cubic style” microATX chassis split in two. On the left side, you have the motherboard and other components, as well as space for two hard drives. On the right side, you have a power supply, cables, and two racks of eight hard drives, so you can expand as much as you want. While not entirely “small,” its cubic shape makes it easy to place in an entertainment center (like mine, pictured below on the right) or somewhere in a closet. And while $ 118 may sound expensive, it’s actually a very decent price for the quality – and much less expensive than comparable hot-swap server chassis or dedicated NAS like Synology.
Of course, in that sense, you get what you pay for – replacing hard drives is not as easy as dedicated server enclosures, and more than Synology would be. But as long as you have room for it (and the patience to open it up as you add new drives), it works great.
If you can live with fewer drive bays, the Lian Li PC-Q08B is a good smaller option that costs about the same but only requires Mini-ITX, so make sure your motherboard has enough SATA slots for those drives.
There are many decent cases on the market, but Fractal Design Node 804 is what I use for my home server and I love it. You can get it from Amazon or Newegg .