Hi guys, I'm looking at options to upgrade my good old P180. My main concern is that I'm running out of space with hard drives. I currently have 4x 3.5" and 1 SSD and need to add two more 3.5".
Also I have a bunch of (almost) silent 120mm Scythe fans I'd like to use in the system. I guess my requirements are as follow:
- Fairly quiet case (better or equal to P180)
- 6x 3/5" HDD bays with room for probably 2x 120mm fans in front for cooling the HDDs.
- Probably enough openings for 4-6x 120mm fans.
- Reasonable budget of around $150 or so.
- There must be dust collectors on the intakes (I now have a cat and my P180 gets so dirty it's not even funny... ;P)

I was just looking at the P280 and it seems like it would do the job. What do you guys think? Do you have nay better recommendations? I've been out of the loop for a while now.

Thanks in advance,

- Cas

The P280 is a good candidate (SPCR has reviewed the case). You should also look at the cases from Fractal Design. The R4 holds eight hard drives and the Mini (mATX case) holds six hard drives. The latter has also been reviewed by SPCR.

Hard drives have gotten a lot bigger in capacity, also quieter and less expensive. Have you thought about consolodating into a smaller number of drives? Even if you do get a new case, might be a good idea.

Have you considered a 5.25" > 3.5" bay adapter such as the Lian Li EX-36B1 for your P180 instead of getting a new case?

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=557&cl_index=2&sc_index=5&ss_index=12&g=f

May do the job for you if you've not filled all the 5.25" bays in your P180, and has an air filter on the front to keep the hairballs out . Would also let you keep your SSD out of a 3.5" bay.

Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback!

I ended up buying a P280. I did the switch from P180 yesterday and i absolutely love the new case.

A couple notable things:
- Cable management is WAY better
- I love the hard drive tray (the one in the P180 was a pain to deal with)
- The fans that come with it are okay (nothing amazing, but since my fridge makes more noise I decided not to bother swapping them.)
- Power button is now on top rather than hidden behind the door... Obvious improvement.

Now to answer some of your comments:
m0002a: I know but I actually need a lot of space. This is both a media server (2+TB of movies/shows/music/photos) and a workstation (for video/photo editing, development, etc...) Since I don't want to lose my stuff I decided to use a raid for redundancy. Also I have different HDDs for different usage. I.e. I don't want to put my important stuff on a hard that's used for caching and has a lot of I/O.

mentawl: Yup, I did look at something like this, but I kinda felt my P180 was getting too messy and crowded.

kuzzia: I decided to go for the P280 since it was available for pick up and I've always liked Antec.

Thanks again for all the advices,

- Olivier