Review on 💾 Highpoint RocketStor 6418S: Efficient 8-Bay Tower Enclosure for 6Gb/s SAS/SATA Drives by Atheendra Wroblewski

Overall a good device. The fans are very slow and the case will slowly cook your HD. Prepare from 5400 rpm to 30°C approx. At 7200 rpm and Raid, the temperature of hard disks (under Linux: smartctl -x /dev/sdX) reaches 50-55 °C, which is too much. You want to max out at 45C. I opened the whole box and removed the standard fans (3 pins with PWM) and put in 2 80x25mm 2.4w fans each (originally 1.2w) so I doubled the power of the vacuum. I connected the fans to the hanging extra Molexes (nice!). SAS connectors seem solid. There is room inside for a card so I could fit my LSI SAS controller in it with a Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe adapter. still overall a good product. Not perfect, but close. I could buy another one. Avoid the case with built-in Thunderbolt (raid doesn't work with Linux). Stick with the SAS version. Get some good cables, a good LSI controller in your computer, and you're good to go. The lights are visible and flashing. What else can I ask? EDIT 3/24/2021 I bought a second and two new fans. Overall a good product. EDIT 4/3/2021 I bought a third and two new fans. Overall a good product. I use it with Linux chipsets and LSI-SAS3008. EDIT September 27, 2021 I bought a fourth and two new fans. I gave up on NAS-QNAP which was a huge headache to maintain/programming. I reused all the hard drives and voila. mdadm recognized the partition immediately. Virtually painless transition. Now I have a Nuc with an external Thunderbird LIS and 4 of these boxes (32 HD total). Everything is protected by a triple UPS with a pair of external SLA/AGM batteries (so I have 90 minutes of power instead of the standard 10 minutes).