SilverStone Technology Silverstone CS280 Premium Mini-ITX NAS case with Eight 2.5" hot-swappable Bays, SST-CS280B,Black

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But for a Network Attached Storage, you want your cooling to be focused on your drives, especially if they’re HDDs. This is a small letdown. Be aware that premature failure is possible if you don’t get your thermals right. I personally felt like this was a missed opportunity to a case that I was genuinely excited to work with. The primary feature to look out for is drive bays for sure. You’ll want at the very least six or more drive bays, preferably 3.5″ ones. Once again, going for an all-SSD build will be different. That is a costly endeavor, but you can manage to minimize space to an extreme that way.

Without supporting a dedicated GPU, I guess this case could work for APU fans that are looking for a half-decent NAS chassis to stuff a 2200G or 2400G into. Even then, if the case was specifically designed for the use of an APU, it could have been even smaller. So what did I wind up deciding to do in 2019? Make it even smaller! I’ve always preferred making my NAS builds diminutive on account of my limited desk space. Additionally, what I saw as one of the biggest advantages in comparing a DIY NAS build to the off-the-shelf NAS offerings from folks like Drobo, QNAP, Synology, et al. is the fact that the off-the-shelf NAS machines are nearly always compact. In building my own NAS, I wanted to demonstrate that a DIY builder could do it better! While the case advertises that it supports a card up to 8.66″ (220mm) in length, it also needs to sit lower than 2.39″ (60.75mm) to slip under the bay.

Cable clearance is very tight but everything fits. The fully modular power supply is almost a must here. SilverStone CS280 Cable Clearance I'm also very much interested in this case -- I want one than can hold 8-10 3.5" hot-swap disks and two 2.5" SSDs, for a NAS (and eventually general-purpose home server) than can grow over time and last 5-6 years. Once I exhaust the 8 hot-swap bays (each of which supports either a 2.5" or 3.5" drive -- nice), I intend to install a 3-into-2 hot-swap cage into the top two 5.25" bays, something like the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS .

This is non-issue if you decide to go 100% SDD, which could prove quite costly given the current cost of NAND. The functionality of the hot-swap bays are very smooth and not janky. They don’t feel cheap at all.Still, to answer your question, I wasn't originally looking at dual-CPU systems at all, figuring they'd require large mobo & case and be pretty expensive overall.