[Battlestations] roirraW "edor" ehT:
I've enjoyed building my own PCs since the 1990s. I also use a lot of local storage and often use a half dozen virtual PCs (usually in Hyper-V) in Windows (10 right now). I've previously used Microsoft's Storage Spaces with dual parity and to great effect until suddenly I lost nearly everything after about 8 years' use when it declared my 64 TB ReFS partition as "raw".

I built my previous PC in 2016 - an Intel 6-core with 32 GB of RAM.

As a PC builder, I really appreciate having as much room inside a case as I can get, and I knew I wanted to stick 18+ internal hard drives in while being able to easily replace most or all of them without opening the case.

I don't give a hoot about looks or color at all - it's all about performance for me. I'm not much of a gamer. The prime of my gaming was probably 25-30 years ago, although I do like X-Com and Civilization. I don't care about included fans. I'd rather use ones I supply myself, but I generally make 100% usage of what fans do come with a case, as I could spend hundreds of dollars more to replace them with my preference and it probably wouldn't make much difference.

I believe in positive air pressure, I really prefer not to have any holes in a case that aren't covered by a fan, so I seal them up with gorilla tape. I also prefer the largest and as many fans as I can fit in a case with the highest CFM per $ ratio.

After much research, I bought the following:

Anidees AI Crystal XL PRO RGB computer case. Official website here, lengthy review with tons of pictures here, NewEgg here, and Amazon here.

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My favorite aspects of this case besides the general enormity are:

Every large front, side, top, and bottom opening has built-in easily removable and cleanable filters.

It has four USB-A 3.x ports on the top. I actually don't usually prefer all my "front" ports and switches on the top of a case, but this case is an exception in this area. It would've been nice if it had a USB-C port or two on top, but I'm adding my own to the front bottom of the case - or I plan to if my laziness ever allows me. Meanwhile, I just have them available but lose at the bottom. :)

I can fit 6x StarTech.com 3-Bay Hot Swap Backplane for 3.5in SAS II/SATA III - 6 Gbps HDD - Aluminum Trayless Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB3SATSASBA) in the front (pictured below), adding up to 18 total spots available for internal 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives. I have them connected to one of two Microsemi Adaptec ASR-78165 SAS RAID cards in JBOD mode via expensive cables and adapters to make up for how cheaply I bought the SAS cards.

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MSI TRX40 Creator AMD sTRX4 eATX Motherboard (MS-7C59)

I have 3x Samsung 980 Pro 1TB nVME SSDs installed in the motherboard. I am not currently using the 4x nVME PCIe adapter card that came with the motherboard, as I'd have difficulty using it with the two SAS controller cards installed.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X (24-core, 48-thread)

Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3, Premium-grade CPU Cooler for AMD sTRX4/TR4/SP3 (140mm, Brown)

Noctua NF-A15 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (140mm, Brown) for the exhaust side of the above CPU cooler.

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 256GB (8 x 32GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Intel XMP 2.0 Desktop Memory Model F4-3200C14Q2-256GVK

I only bought an Asus TUF Gaming TUF-GTX1650-O4GD6 Overclocked Edition. As I said, I don't game much, I do have a 4K TV and occasionally do some video editing for myself.

I also bought some extra Noctua NF-A14 iPPC-3000 PWM, Heavy Duty Cooling Fan, 4-Pin, 3000 RPM (140mm, Black) along with Noctua NA-SAV4, Silicone Anti-Vibration Fan Mount Set (16-Pack, Brown), and replaced the glass side with 0.125 THICK CLEAR CAST ACRYLIC PAPER-MASKED SHEET, Size: 14.36" X 18.985" @ +/- 0.015. I installed two of those extra fans to blow air in through this new cast acrylic side.

I also contacted Anidees (the case manufacturer) and got them to send me two extra of the top filter pieces so that I can eventually install them on the side. I got two because I actually got two of these cases, to put my old PC guts into one of these new cases to become my wife's new computer, and I'll do the same for the side of her computer.

I could spend some money on a bunch of thin Noctua 140mm fans and be able to fit 4 on each side of the case behind the built-in filters, and replace included fans with them on the top and bottom of the PC, but that would be a ton of money and I think I spent enough.

I used the fan remote control that comes with the case, and software made for my motherboard to turn all built-in LEDs in the fans and the motherboard off. Personally, I think they're stupid. No offense to those who like extra lighting.