3 Potential FreeNAS Solutions I'm Considering...

[fourpastmidnight]

Hmm, if I'm willing to renege on the hot-swap HDDs, what about the Fractal Meshify 2 (XL)? Plenty of room--seems to have plenty of fans. It's a bit larger than I want but smaller than a SM 4U Pedestal/RM case. (And of course, as others have used and mentioned, the Node 804.) Tower vs. Cube...

 

[Etorix]

But I'm leaning towards that you have a very good point on going for the A2SDi-H-TF with the C3758--it's still not actively cooled, but it is only a 25W part, and the rest of the board has everything I want and/or need.

Slapping a NF-A6x25 on the heatsink works for any C3000 or Xeon D-1500, and is probably a good idea if the motherboard is not in a 1U server case with the expected server airflow. Variants with fans use a tiny, whiny, fan and you have to remove the heatsink to change the fan, so it's best to buy a fanless motherboard and put a Noctua on the heatsink.

If you go with a tower any Fractal Design model should be fine, but I'd prefer a solid front design like the Define series over the Meshify because drives easily make more noise than a set of quiet fans. The humming of six drives in a Node 304 may be considered acceptable, but ten drives in a Node 804 is more than I can tolerate (noise comes out unrestricted from the meshed top, but my NAS3 with this case is the backup of the backup, tucked away in a closet).

 

[fourpastmidnight]

Good point on the noise aspect. I had a Thecus N5500 5-disk system sitting on top of the hutch of my (old 80's ) desk. After I shut it down due to a drive failing, only then did I notice how much quieter my office became. It wasn't really loud, but there was a constant level of low background noise. While I'm not averse to that, if I can keep that background noise down, that would be great. But I wouldn't want it louder than the amount this unit produced.

Part of the reason for the noise was not so much the disks, though they did make a bit of noise on their own, but the power supply fan and the 80mm case fan. It was a very compact unit, and though it ran a 1.86GHz Celeron M chip, the PSU fan and 80mm case fan ran constantly and were the source of most of that noise. It wasn't, by any means, a great unit, but it was far from the worst. The worst part was support for the embedded Linux OS and web interface stopped in 2014, two years after I bought it. One other thing to note is that this unit only had a 200W PSU.

Anyway, today's modern PSUs--esp. ones rated Platinum and above (perhaps even some Gold+ ones?)--don't crank up their fans unless you start really drawing some power. And having 8 HDDs will be louder than 5, but I had 5 WD Gold drives...how much louder would 3 more be? And they'll be in a much bigger case than my previous tiny NAS.