- Rack mount hard drive enclosure project
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 2
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 3
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 4
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 5
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 6: Follow up with Protocase
- Rack mount HDD enclosure, part 7
- Rack mount HDD enclosure — final and retrospective
It’s never good when a company that has so much praise among computer builders screws up your first order from them.
This time, the culprit is CaseLabs. That’s right. CaseLabs. The CaseLabs. The company making cases featured in builds that have caused our eyes to bleed with envy.
And I wasn’t even ordering a case, but a case component. I ordered two of item MAC-361, which is a mounting bracket for two 3.5″ hard drives. What they sent me was two of item MAC-362, which is a mounting bracket for 4 SSDs.
So that basically means that all of the highly-praised companies from which I’ve ordered have gotten an order wrong at least once. FrozenCPU. Performance-PCs. Mountain Mods — okay they just screwed up how it was shipped and refunded me the difference, but got the items themselves right.
And now CaseLabs is starting out 0 for 1.
In all instances where orders have been wrong, it’s typically been because of similar item numbers. But in all seriousness, how hard is it to double check that what you’re about to send out is correct for the order? I don’t know how many people at CaseLabs sign off on an order before it is shipped — the packing slip doesn’t give any indication — but this has happened even at FrozenCPU and Performance-PCs where multiple people sign off on an order before it ships. Hell there was that hilarious order when FrozenCPU sent me 5 backplates for 2 GPU blocks.
And who particularly at CaseLabs looked at my order, saw it was for a dual HDD mounting bracket, looked at the quad-SSD mounting bracket and thought “Yeah, that’s the right item”?
Okay, rant over. I’ve contacted CaseLabs about this and hopefully they will alleviate the discrepancy via 2-day shipping or better.
Otherwise, yeah I’m pissed. It means delays and extra expense very time something like this happens.
If CaseLabs had gotten this order right, I would have needed only a bunch of 60mm fans and a Flex ATX power supply to finish this project — or at make something that functions how I’d want. Now instead I need to wait for them to send the correct mounting brackets, as the internals of the enclosure depend heavily on how those are placed.
Follow-up — Jan 24:
As mentioned, I e-mailed CaseLabs about the concern. Unfortunately they didn’t receive my original e-mail — I suspect the attachment caused it to be filtered out — but replied to my follow-up e-mail on Friday, Jan 23. That same day, they sent out a package via FedEx 2-day that should also contain a return shipping label for sending back in the SSD bracket they mistakenly sent me.
