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There are three drawbacks as I see it:
1) Noise - having built a ton of servers, I can tell you from first hand experience that the well built cases use fans that sound like shop vac's. Not a regular vacuum cleaner but an industrial shop vac. I wear ear plugs regularly when building servers.
2) Cost - a good rackmount case costs several hundred more then a desktop case. Rackmount ready motherboards are server grade, thus more expensive. Plus you need a special blower for 1U case CPU cooling, and then most rackmount ready mobo's require ram w/ECC which is quite pricey. Add an enclosure to it and you could get an extra desktop PC for all that money spent.
3) Expansion - most rackmountable cases (excluding 4U which is essentially a tower on its side) only have 1 or 2 expansion slots. So if you need more then video and sound, you are done. And you are stuck with regular pci, pci-x or pci-e but not a mix of them due to the way the riser card works.
Good luck man
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