Review on Fractal Design Node Computer Case by Mateusz Wysokiski ᠌

I took this case in February 2022 for a home media server / NAS. Assembly is not difficult. Only since I installed a rather large tower cooler did I have to tinker a bit with laying and connecting cables, especially to drives. A flat cable on the PSU will come in handy here. Nevertheless, there was enough space to screw an adapter for a 3.5" bay to two HDD / SSD 2.5" with an edge to the back wall. As a result, we got 8 disks - exactly for the ASR-5805 RAID controller. By the way, the 60x60 fan for cooling this controller also stood up successfully, being fixed to the bottom corner of the frame. Almost immediately after assembly, four significant shortcomings were discovered. First, the top cover resonated. The problem was quickly solved by gluing a small piece of sponge rubber on the inside so that it rested against the disk baskets, and pieces of electrical tape on the frame. Secondly, if you put all the disks, then the screws of their fastening can tinkle, touching each other. Eliminated by slightly bending the "wings" of the basket inward. Thirdly, due to indecently low legs, air intake by the power supply from below is difficult, and the PSU began to heat up, greatly increasing the fan speed. I had to glue one more legs higher. Fourthly, it turned out that the complete fans do not always start in the minimum switch position. Later, I replaced them (and the back, by the way, too) with Noctua, and forgot about it. From the drives, I first had three new WD Red drives and two old WD RE drives installed, and two WD Black drives in a homemade basket. It was still noisy with RaidEdition - it was normal during the day, but it made it difficult to sleep at night. When I replaced all 3.5 "drives with WD Red, it became normal even at night. At the same time, all the fans worked at reduced speeds, but the cooling of the drives and other components is just excellent. If you do not put a hot processor and a video iron in this case, then a quiet PC can be assembled without any problems. So for my chosen purpose, the case fit very well. I recently purchased the Define XL R2, so I'm much less satisfied with it.