And while we’re at it, let’s bring back rack mount chassis. The rack mount market is appalling at the moment. If you don’t want the volume sales model imported to your region, your stuck getting overpriced models shipped at overpriced rates all the way from the increasingly limited number of manufacturers in china/India/etc, many of which are slowly sliding into overpriced industrial only markets. I bought one at full list price and shipping that had so little care put into it they didn’t even take the protective plastic wrap off the metal subcomponents before slamming them together! All because I wanted a generic 3U chassis to put together a compute node with low profile network cards. I looked at getting an empty chassis to just go open frame drill my own holes and it would have cost more to get a hollow sheet metal tube 3U high than the rack mount unit I bought… ridiculous!
I had a similar experience trying to find shallow storage chassis that would fit in 2 or 3u. Seems like a no brainer to me to have just a rack mount array of 5.25 bays I can put hot swap cages in but nope.
Absolutely! It’s so bad that “custom” rack mounting is one of the reasons I got myself a drill press. Sheet and bar stock is trivial to order cut to simple dimensions for panels, corner bracing and making “rack ears”.
But it still comes back to the fact i shouldn’t need to make a mini metalworking shop in order to affordably mount hardware horizontally in my rack. Rack mount should be the ultimate in “big computer enclosure” but instead of cool things like having a 2/3/4U massive rack mount water cooling radiator with big quiet fans to silence everything in a computer, it’s getting harder and harder to buy any parts for a non-OEM computer that aren’t festooned in RGB and designed for transparent towers with all the structural issues highlighted in the original article.
