When I started this NAS, I thought I was going to be using something like the Norco RPC-4020. This is a sever case with 20 hot-swappable SATA bays, so it’s an ideal form factor for a NAS.
Having been made aware of it on a US forum, I encountered the dollar price at first. Typically around $280 (~£190) I thought it was quite a good deal. I searched high and low for it in the UK, but no-one seemed to stock it. I did manage to find a site selling what seemed to be the same hardware, but re-branding it as their own. To my shock and horror it was in excess of £350.
I went back to the US sources to see if it was plausible to import one. A site I found, along with a few eBay sellers would send it across the Atlantic, but that would cost as much as the case itself. By the time you’ve added VAT to the price on import, it ends up being more or less the same price as the UK website.
There were a few people at AVSForums trying to organise a bulk-buy to get the price down, but when that came to nothing, I thought I’d contact Norco myself. It turns out that the wholesale price was just $10-$20 lower than the retail price at places like Newegg.com. I don’t know why they had such a slim margin on it, maybe they used it to get customers to buy the PC hardware and hard drives at the same it. This pretty much made me give up hope on a decent rack-mount case with hot-swap bays.
Getting desperate for space, I went to the easy solution. I had found a cheap 4U case that holds up to 11 hard drives, plus I could get hold of it fairly quickly. It was even on offer at the time (~£5 off), although now it looks like the regular price is less than what I first paid anyway.
My next post in this series will discuss the hardware I put in the case.