_Rackmount Reviews
 
     
  Vasco 19" Rackmount Case PE 200 - Page 2  
 
 
 
     
 

On to the interesting part, namely inside. You can see the whole top cover removes to access the inside. Firstly it is important to note the 2 fan units at the front right of the case. Vasco appear to have proceeded with a configuration to optimise airflow through the case. Therefore you have the airflow from the fans having a clear path to the rear of the case. However this has resulted in all the storage components being on the left. I am not too bothered about this however it results in both the floppy and one hard disk slot being vertical. It is a strange configuration.

The main problem is that you have to take the entire cage out to change drives. It gets quite fiddly and that is the most annoying thing about this case. They could have used another layout which would work better. Once you have installed the floppy and vertical hard disk you have to remove them again if you need to access the internal drives because they cover the screw holes.

A good idea may be to get some generic hard drive removable caddies and this would make hard drive replacement much easier for two of the external 5.25" bays.

The problem is that hard drive caddies can be quite long. You would be able to install in the two top 5.25" bays but the bottom bay would pose a problem because of the proximity to your motherboard. Therefore you might be able to install a small cdrom there like a liteon which is not so deep. All that depends on the dimensions of your motherboard and whether it will interfere with what you want to place in the bays.

 
     
  On to the accessories, you get included in the box some plastic clips which serve well to tidy your power cable away. That bar where they are secured can also be used to secure Long Cards and the necessary hardware appears to be included. You can remove the bar also to perform service on the motherboard easily.  
     
  The PSU is their own brand namely VASTEC and is manufactured in Taiwan therefore includes a large selection of Taiwanese capacitors which I hope will survive longer than one year (the warranty). Since I have not seen any PSU bought recently which uses nice Japanese capacitors it is not fair to comment further.  
     
 
 
     
 
The rear panel is shown above and appears to be typical atx. You can install some external parallel or other large external connectors at the top for industrial server use.
 
     
 
 
     
  Close up of the fan unit. These Adda fans move quite a bit of air and make a nice sound. They have not started making an offensive sound after many months of service so they must be good quality. It is quite a different experience to the tiny Adda fans on graphics cards which i have seen start to make a terrible noise early on.  
     
 
 
     
  Close up of the fan details. I have no idea about the specs of this model.  
     
 
In conclusion these cases are nice and solid but lose out because the drive cages are not very user friendly. There is not much competition here for Vasco though.
 
     
  Source : Grammi Computers  
     
     
Not bad rackmount cases but the hard drive cage is annoying to install.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
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