Fractal Design Define R4 Vs Fractal Design Define XL-R2?
#1
Gotta buy new server case next week trying to decide on these two cases

XL-R2 is about $30 more but larger size

The server will have about 8-10 drives total (using 5.25 to 3.5 brackets in Drive bays)

Anyone recommend one or either of these need good cooling for all the drives it won't have graphics card and has stock intel fan just drives, mobo, cpu, psu

any suggestions to sway me in a direction would be appreciated
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#2
Not sure what you want us to say? Both are good cases. Just pick the one that fits your needs. If you want the bigger case with more drives, pick it. If you want the smaller case then pick that.

That's really all there is to it. It's literally based on how many drives you want to hold.
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#3
Both are really great cases Smile
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#4
both cases hold the same amount of drives the XL-R2 is larger and has a couple extra 5.25 drive bays

i am just wondering are these cases good with cooling as there will be a lot of drives in there and will be powered on 24/7 although the drives will most like be WD Red's and Greens so should run cooler just looking for opinion from someone who owns either case to see what they are like in a real environment before I order online
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#5
Just pick a motherboard with enough fan headers.

I have FD Define XL (8 WD Reds, no hardware RAID) and 3 fans on front panel which are controlled by SpeedFan - i can play with HDD temps as i like. I can go sub 40 degree Celsius (when they are idling) so i doubt that you will have a cooling related problems.
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#6
I have a fractal r3 with 7 drives in it and the cooling works fine. My case came with 1 rear exhaust fan, and 1 front intake fan. I added an extra 120mm fan at the front. I had been thinking of adding another couple drives up in the 5 1/4 bays but didn't see an easy way to stick an intake fan in front of them.
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#7
(2014-07-28, 04:22)booker88 Wrote: I have a fractal r3 with 7 drives in it and the cooling works fine. My case came with 1 rear exhaust fan, and 1 front intake fan. I added an extra 120mm fan at the front. I had been thinking of adding another couple drives up in the 5 1/4 bays but didn't see an easy way to stick an intake fan in front of them.

al lot of 4 in3 or 5 in 3 converters bringt their own fans. So no problem.
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#8
I've got the Define Mini and my only regret is that I didn't get the XL R2.

The R4 has 2 mounts for SSD drives on the back of the motherboard mounting plate that the XL R2 lacks, but otherwise the # of External 5.25 bays on the XL R2 is just better for adding RAID cages, etc.
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Fractal Design Define R4 Vs Fractal Design Define XL-R2?0