The professional blog of Christopher Randel

Lian-Li PC-Q08 Review – Love it.

Posted June 2nd, 2010 by chris

It’s been a long time coming, I ordered this case March 20th, 2010, and recieved it May 28th, 2010. But I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve looked at a lot of other small file servers, and was never happy about just about everything. I’m pretty happy with just about everything. Great capacity. 6 3.5″ drives, + 1x 2.5″ drive, without any mods. Easy to add in 4 more 2.5″ in the 5.25″ bay. Nice weight, great design, sturdy. It’s great, but not perfect. I wasn’t expecting perfection though, either. There has been some hype with this case, and I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. Other that I’m an idiot and thought I bought a ITX motherboard, and didn’t. Fixing that involved a thin piece of wood, some motherboard mounting pegs, some glue, and a drill, and rotating the motherboard platform 180 degrees. And cutting the IO panel a bit. Initially wanted to roll free-NAS, but in the end chose W2K8 Server.

So, some things I like about it are that:

Nice sized. Full size power supply.
Six Drive bays, and a seventh 2.5″ drive bay below the CD tray. Not to mention what you can squeeze in the 5.25″ bay [potentially 4 2.5" drives]
It’s pretty quiet. You will hear drive seek noise over the case fans, especially in an aluminum case . Note the drive vibration is pretty well dampened by the silicon grommets.
Fantastic Construction, feels sturdy even with the weight of six 3.5″ drives
Love the power and reset buttons

Con’s

Easy to lose black, nonstandard [flat top] screws
Six phillip’s screws to remove to get either side off. It’s certainly set it and forget it.
Power supply is directly over motherboard. Not much you can do about it.
Cable management is tight. The space between the side panel and your power/sata cables is tight, 90 degree connectors recommended.

A ton of stuff to fit in a fiarly small case.

Lian-Li PC-Q08

Supermicro X7SLA-H

Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Corsair 400VX