iStarUSA Inc. S-35-3M1BK server chassis, 3× 3.5″ hot-swap, mini-ITX, black

Compact Tower for Mini-ITX Storage Builds

This black aluminium-and-steel tower accepts a Mini-ITX motherboard and provides three front-accessible 3.5-inch hot-swap bays plus one internal 2.5-inch bay. A single 120 mm fan and two front USB 2.0 ports complete the basic I/O and cooling. It suits home or small-office NAS appliances that need dense drive capacity in a small footprint.

SATA and SAS at 6.0 Gb/s per Bay

Each hot-swap tray connects to a backplane that supports 6.0 Gb/s SATA or SAS hard drives, so drive throughput is limited by that interface speed. The single expansion slot and lone 120 mm fan restrict add-in cards and airflow, making the chassis unsuitable for workloads that demand multiple GPUs or high-wattage CPUs.

Three Drives Plus One SSD — Room to Grow, Then Stop

Three 3.5-inch bays give ample room for multi-terabyte arrays, while the internal 2.5-inch slot holds an OS SSD. Once all four bays are populated there is no further internal capacity, and the single PCIe slot cannot host a second HBA or RAID controller for external expansion.