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We would advise against a water-cooled build. Your rig should never be pushing out really high-temperatures unless something is wrong. Water cooling will also be more complex and involved, for no apparently useful reason. Most NAS servers are not built for aesthetics, so the advantages of water cooling are overlooked. Cable clearance is very tight but everything fits. The fully modular power supply is almost a must here. SilverStone CS280 Cable Clearance How would I wind up making my DIY NAS builds even smaller? Find out what’s taking up the most amount of space–the hard drives–and replace them with something smaller! The footprint of a single 3.5” hard drive is about 147mm x 101.6mm x 25.4mm for a volume of 376.77 cm 3. The smaller 2.5” hard drive form factor is 100mm x 69.85mm x 19mm for a volume of 132.72 cm 3. A 2.5” hard drive is roughly 35% the size of its bigger brother. When you multiply that savings in space across 8 HDDs, the amount of space saved adds up to something impressive. CPU & Motherboard
I was also looking at the DS380 originally, but once I saw than it supported mini-ITX mobos only, crossed it off my list -- I want more than one PCIe slot for future expansion. I execute each of my four different tests (described above) individually in IOMeter against the drive mapped above. Under the 8-bay 2.5” cage is a single 2.5” drive cage for an OS SSD. This cage can be removed if space is needed underneath. Technically, this makes the unit a 9x 2.5″ chassis. SilverStone CS280 HDD Cage
Q & A
It turns out that the Sandy Bridge Xeons (E5 v1) are where Intel made a big jump in efficiency. It's quite difficult to find power usage numbers for motherboards in various states, but given my expected usage patterns (NAS idle most of the time), my calculation gave the break-even time in power costs of around 6-7 years, which is a bit more than the expected lifetime of the system.
Had I used Silverstone’s low-profile CP11 SATA cables, this job would have been a lot more friendly. A small detail, but never the less something I can appreciate -the simple design of the the door hinge. Over the years, I’ve tried to test throughput using a number of different methods— crudely timing large file transfers early on and in most recent years using tools likely IOMeter. Each of the different NAS builds has been unique in its own way, but I like using the throughput to compare the builds from the past to the builds of today. I started off with the results from last year’s benchmarks, but omitted the 10Gb results since the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F only contains the four Gigabit interfaces.
SilverStone CS280 Overview
A feature that some NAS cases have is hot-swapping. The term means that you can take out and reinstall your drives, while the system itself is running. Again, whether this feature will appeal to you depends on your usage. If you need your home server up 24×7, then this may be an excellent thing to have. Two key specifications to look at here is the limitation of 65mm CPU Cooler height. At this size, a standard Intel Xeon E3/ Xeon E heatsink will work fine, but it is a tight fit for any aftermarket coolers. Next, is the PSU depth specification at 100mm, this falls into the SFX PSU size. This is non-issue if you decide to go 100% SDD, which could prove quite costly given the current cost of NAND. To buy a computer case suitable for a Network Attached Storage, you first need to consider the form factor you’re looking for. Depending on the number of drives and how long you plan to use the rig, you’ll want to consider cooling options thoroughly. As the drives are the focal point of your build, the one features you will be most concerned about are the drive bays. Form Factor There's also a good chance that I'll be able to completely eliminate a computer from the home inventory: I'm thinking of running OS X in emulation, which will allow me to avoid replacing my current MacBook Pro with another physical Mac (I've been less and less happy with Apple's HW offerings for years, and they've now crossed my red lines).
Supermicro A2SDI-H-TP4F: 16 cores, up to 12 SATA devices, 2x10Gb RJ45, 2x10GB SFP+, actively cooled. I couldn’t seem to get the machine to boot up off either my Ultimate BootCD flash drive, or my Memtest86+ flash drive. 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 took some serious patience and planing to make it all fit but in the end I proved that it was possible to install with off-the-shelf SATA cables At this point, some of our eagle-eyed viewers might recognize that the Silverstone CS280 is using the exact same platform as the Silverstone SG05/SG13.The size of your case is similarly variable. Larger cases will have more options for drives and cooling. Smaller cases will be easier to maintain and even carry around. mATX and ATX motherboards will be larger but may come in cheap. They also often increase the number of available SATA ports. If your case has enough space and you are adding many drives, then these may be a better choice.
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