| Manufacturer: Fractal Design | Model: Array Mini ITX NAS Case |
| Price: £149.99 | Web: Fractal Design |
In early April we heard news of Swedish company Fractal Design’s latest chassis, a six bay unit designed specifically for network attached storage and home server self builds. Now home server chassis aren’t known for their great looks – indeed, other than the Norco and Chenbro barebones we reviewed a couple of years ago, there have been few dedicated home server chassis released to the market, and so self-builders have had to rely on cramming as many drives as possible into small footprint desktop PC chassis.
The Array looks a very different beast – a chassis specifically designed for home server use, offering six hard drive bays, a 300W PSU onboard with silent fan and sized to take a mini-ITX motherboard. Before you even took a glimpse at its brushed gun metal finish and sharp lines, it sounded a little special. So we were thrilled when Fractal Design agreed to send us one over which has now been built and hosts our Windows Home Server Vail test build for the summer.
Let’s a take a look at the Fractal Design Array NAS Mini-ITX chassis in detail.
Who are Fractal Design?
If you’re new to self-building, you may not have heard of Fractal Design. Based out of Sweden, the company specialise in high-spec, design-led components built for quality. Here’s what they have to say:
The concept – Design
The concept of Fractal Design is to provide products with an extraordinary design level, without compromising the important factors of quality, functionality and pricing. The computer of today has come to play a central role in most people’s home, creating a demand for appealing design of the computer itself and its accessories. Our main product areas are computer enclosures, power supplies, cooling, and Media Center-products, such as Home Theatre-enclosures, keyboards and remote controls.
Designed and engineered in Sweden
All Fractal Design products have been thoroughly designed, tested and specified in our Swedish head quarter. The well known ideas of Scandinavian design can be found through all of our products; a minimalistic but yet striking design – less is more.
Visions and goals
Our vision is to have a constant, healthy growth together with our partners worldwide. Our goal is to be widely recognized for our designed products and to have them available in all major market regions within EU and US. We should be a good alternative to the already established retail brands of today. It’s of great importance for us that our partners understand the values of Fractal Design, therefore we are putting great effort into choosing the right partners from the start. We will work actively to maintain sales territories and profitable business for our partners.
The way to reach our goals
In the competitive market of today, it’s not enough to just provide excellent products. Regular and well planned marketing activities in close cooperation with the channel and the available media, are keypoints to succeed. We are well experienced in marketing brands in the IT business, and we will use this to create efficient marketing tools – to gain a bigger market share and good earning possibilities for our channel.
That ethos translates into beautiful looking products, which may cost a little more than your run of the mill, high volume components, but then you’re not getting run of the mill in terms of design. That said, the price premium raises expectations on the Array’s construction quality and ease of build – let’s see if it delivers.
What’s in the Box?
Thanks to the mangling of the courier, our Array box arrived a little worse for weather, but we’ve included a couple of unboxing shots for completeness.
Open up the packaging, and there’s not a lot to go on at all. You’ll find:
- Array Mini-ITX Chassis
- European Power Cable
- Pack of Screws (for securing hard drives)
No documentation or assembly instructions are included in box, which is a bit of a shame. Whilst it’s perhaps a nicety, some simple details on the construction of the chassis, as well as high level instructions on how to disassemble the case would have been really useful, as it actually took me a little while to work out how to best open up the case to install the motherboard.
