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Physical design
Made of standard sheet metal, the I-Star D-300 weighs in at about 22 pounds without any internal components installed. A thick aluminum crossbeam spans the width of the chassis near the top, adding extra internal support when transporting the system.
The 3U height means that standard PCI, PCI-X, PCIe, and AGP peripheral cards will fit into the case without needing to replace the faceplate. There is also a lot of room to work with, and plenty of space for just about anything designed to be installed into a 3U or smaller server, or a standard desktop or workstation PC.
The front of the chassis has two vented and filtered steel doors that swing out; these cover the drive bays, and the power and reset switches. The doors are locked by a knob in front. There is one LED for the power, one for a hard drive, one for the fan, two extra LEDs for other system functions, and an LED and reset button for the intrusion alarm. Below those are two frontpanel USB ports.
Internally, there are two separate drive cages on the left and right side of the chassis. Each holds two 5.25" and one 3.5" drive bay. Between the cages there are mounting plates for two 3.5" hard drives, offering a total of four potential hard drive bays. This doesn't seem like enough to me, but if you have some 5.25" drive caddies, you could put them in the larger bays to expand your hard drive options.
The only cooling solution in the D-300 is a small 60mm fan mounted in the back. There is a vent space and mounting plate for another 60mm fan. I'd prefer to see larger fans here, but there simply isn't any room for them on the rear plane. iStarUSA sells an optional 80mm fan with a bracket, but I'm not really sure where it's supposed to mount. This chassis could potentially get pretty warm, but it's not really designed to accommodate high-end servers with multiple CPUs and stacks of hard drives.
Power supply
Supporting the assertion that the D-300 is not meant for the post powerful x86- and AMD64-based servers, the unit is equipped with only a 300W I-Star brand ATX power supply. Most Intel Xeon systems require more than that, especially if multiple hard drives are involved. You could replace the supply with a more powerful one, but there aren't enough fans in the chassis to properly vent power-hungry internal components.
The ATX motherboard connector is 20-pin by default, but has a unique 4-pin offshoot connector for 24-pin motherboards -- I've never seen anything like it before. There are only 4 Molex connectors and one mini-Molex, and a paltry two SATA power connectors.
Assembly
The D-300 is not a tool-less assembly. The top cover has one thumb screw on the back and one Phillips head screw on each side. The side screws are not absolutely necessary because the front of the cover has four pressure clips that will keep it in place as long as the rear thumb screw is tightened, so you can probably remove them if you like.
The removable motherboard mounting plate makes it theoretically possible to remove the motherboard and all peripheral cards by removing the two screws on the plate and any screws that secure the peripheral cards. Unless you have other spare plates handy (the chassis does not come with any and I didn't see any for sale on the I-Star site), I'm not sure why you would want to do this. The only advantage that I can see is, you don't have to mess with as many screws inside of the chassis if you're removing the motherboard.
I like the drive cages -- only 4 screws hold them in, they are all on the top and easy to get to, and the cages themselves lift straight up, so there's no special rail or guide to slide it into.
The aluminum support bar was almost a dealbreaker for me. It's held in by two small flat-topped screws on either side. The Phillips head grooves in them are not deep enough for any of my screwdrivers, which almost caused me to round one of them out because it was torqued in so tightly from the factory. I had a heck of a time trying to get the bar out because of the badly designed screws. You can't put a motherboard into the chassis without removing the support bar, so rounding out the screw would have forced me to drill it out. I don't know if I'll just leave that screw out, look for other screws that aren't as shallow, or refuse to put the support bar back in.
Conclusions
The I-Star D-300 is a great mid- or entry-level server chassis. Since it can support desktop motherboards and components, it may be ideal for the low-budget do-it-yourselfer looking for a dedicated server. You can even make it fancier by buying differently colored drive doors.
OEMs and custom computer shops may also find this an ideal chassis to work with, the troublesome support bar screws aside. You could build racks of inexpensive servers based on desktop hardware with this enclosure and use them as a cluster, or as production servers for non-critical services.
If necessary, you could make a robust server out of the D-300, but it isn't factory equipped for that kind of work. You'd have to add a hot-swappable backplane (or at least removable drive caddies), at least one extra fan, and a power supply capable of heavier duty. It may be possible to replace the stock ATX power supply with mini redundant supplies, but I-Star doesn't sell any such conversion kits. A competent technician wouldn't need more than a few minutes to replace a standard ATX power supply in a voluminous chassis like the D-300, so downtime wouldn't be too bad. Still, in its default configuration this is not meant for mission-critical production machines.
| Device | 3U rackmount server chassis with 300W ATX power supply |
| Manufacturer | I-Star |
| Device support | |
| Market | OEMs, do-it-yourself system builders |
| Price (retail) | US ~$165 |
| Previous version | N/A |
| Product Web site | Click here |