Curious - Case selection

[David Hood]

I am looking to start a FreeNAS build and I am having some issues selecting an enclosure/case. I may just be picky. I was wondering what some of you guys here had set up? I am looking for something with no more than 4 drive bays and mini-itx.

 

[nojohnny101]

Only 4 drive bays? I don't know how many cases have so few drive bays. There are some I know that have 6.

Do you just want a small footprint?

 

[m0nkey_]

This makes a great NAS case: http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-q25/

I'm using one myself.

 

[David Hood]

I like that case. I only need 4 bays because I am not storing that much data. It's all personal stuff and movies/tv shows. I had a 1Tb 100gb free and I had another 1Tb internal disk with about 200gb of iso files.

 

[ewhac]

Since we're talking about cases, I wonder if anyone has opinions about these guys, which I've variously encountered:

• iStarUSA S-46-DE6: 6 hot-swap bays, requires unusual power supply (not included).
  
• Fractal Design Node 304, 6 internal bays. Takes standard PC components, but would require full shutdown and opening the case to swap drives.
  
• Will Jaya NAS enclosure: 8 hot-swap bays, includes 350W PSU, but I'm dubious about its provenance -- it shows up on Amazon, but not on Will Jaya's own Web site.
• Norco ITX-S8: 8 hot-swap bays, requires "1U" PSU (not included).

Since I need to expand my NAS, I've been looking around for boxes with six or more bays, so that I can do RAID-Z2 properly.

 

[ewhac]

...Really? No one's played with any of those cases?

The Will Jaya case noted above appears identical to the U-NAS NSC-800 case. There's a (thin) review of it on Anandtech. I rather like its compactness and appearance. I can't find any discussion on its airflow/cooling of the drives, though.

However, that Anandtech review pointed me at the Silverstone DS380, which is easier to find, but is a bit larger and has uneven reviews on Newegg (the principal complaint being airflow/heat).

 

[Stux]

Node 304 gets good reviews. Major complaint is difficulty when swapping drives.

 

[ewhac]

Necro!

So, the U-NAS NSC-800 case has been something of an unhealthy obsession of mine because it's small, relatively cute, and reasonably priced for an 8-bay box. However, reviews are uneven, due mostly to its size (it only accepts Mini-ITX boards, and even then it's an artful squeeze) and the internal layout is somewhat wonky. Looking at the box from the front, the motherboard is placed vertically on the left-hand side, behind the power button; the power supply is over the drive bays, and the power cable frequently needs an extender to reach the motherboard. There were also reports that cooling for the drives wasn't all that good because the SATA/SAS backplane was blocking a lot of the air flow. So I continued my search...

Well it seems U-NAS have been busy, because I stumbled over a newer version of essentially the same case -- the NSC-810A. It's slightly larger than the NSC-800 -- adding about 20mm to width and depth -- but through the simple expedient of swapping the locations of the motherboard and power supply, the box can now accept a microATX board, which greatly expands one's options for system building. You can also install up to two PCIe cards, though it's not clear whether they include a required 90-degree PCIe riser.

Judging from the photos (which show a Supermicro board in place), it looks like there could still be an issue with getting power to the motherboard, as the 24-pin connector is about as far as possible from the PSU. Placing the motherboard on top of the drive cage means it gets the heat rising off all the drives. It's also not clear how much vertical clearance there is for the CPU cooler.

Still, I think the improvements have made it worth considering again...

 

[Evertb1]

The problem of course with almost all the "cute" cases is that they can give heating problems. I had a pretty nice looking case (Silverstone DS 380) but once filled to the max with HDD's the drives never went below 50 degrees Celsius. Now I have bought a cheap Midi case (Sharkoon T9 Value blue edition) with 9 5.3 slots and I put 2 Icy Dock MB074SP-1B Black Vortex HDD cages (4 slots each) in it. It is a bit fancy for my taste (don't really need fans with led lights) and you might even call it ugly compared to my Silverstone. But the case is very functional, roomy and relatively quiet and the HDD's keep their head cool now (30 degrees Celsius). And of course the case can house all ATX form factor motherboards making it possible to upgrade to a (for my use case) better motherboard without being restricted to a small form factor.

 

[ewhac]

Found a thread on ServeTheHome.com describing a build with a U-NAS NSC-810A case and a Supermicro X10SL7-F mATX motherboard:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/zeus-v2-u-nas-nsc-810a-x10sl7-f-e3-1265-v3.13678/

The builder described the experience as unpleasant. No reports yet on drive temps.

 

[Jasse Jansson]

I'm about to build a new server because one of them behaves anything but good.
NOSSLER's current case is a Bitfenix Phenom and it's a really nice and compact case that easily harbours 6 HDD's, but it's a mini-ITX case and my new mobo is m-ATX so it does't fit.
I bought a Cooler Master Force 500 for my new build. It easily holds 10 HDD's and have good options for cooling fans to keep the HDD's alive for a long time.
Oh, it was pretty cheep. Not the studiest case available, but I have worse cases at home, and they work too.

 

[John McNeese]

I haven't experienced any over heat issues with the Will Jaya 8-Bay NAS Mini-ITX Enclosure chassis. It is a tight fit inside the box, it has 2x Mini-SAS SFF-8087 cables coming from the backplanes for easy cabling. The only issues I have seen if you are using a PCI-e add-on card that produces a lot of heat like some older network adapter cards. The HBA and RAID card versions have no issues with heat from my experience. The U-NAS 810A is also a great 8-bay model that support the larger MATX motherboard (9.6x9.6) and as mentioned above the board is mounted on the top instead of on it's side. I think Will Jaya has a version very similar to UNAS 810 coming out.

 

[KevinM]

The problem of course with almost all the "cute" cases is that they can give heating problems. I had a pretty nice looking case (Silverstone DS 380) but once filled to the max with HDD's the drives never went below 50 degrees Celsius.

I know this is an old post, but adding this link for posterity discussing Brian Moses' 2017 DIY NAS build, which has some good advice about mitigating heat in these cases. including a link to some 3d-printed cooling fan ducts which help force air through the drive bays.

Edit: Adding follow-up post.

 

[Evertb1]

I know this is an old post, but adding this link for posterity discussing Brian Moses' 2017 DIY NAS build, which has some good advice about mitigating heat in these cases. including a link to some 3d-printed cooling fan ducts which help force air through the drive bays.

Edit: Adding follow-up post.

Yes, I have been reading the report on his bild some time ago. I found his solution pretty nice and inventive. Clap hands for 3d printing! But when I was confronted with the heating problems I just decided to be pragmatic about it. My server is stashed away out of sight in a room I don't use much. So I could afford to go for function and not so much for looks. And with zero modding time :). Ofcourse if Brian's project was published a bit sooner I just might have kept the Silverstone. Oh well

 

[Ericloewe]

I know this is an old post, but adding this link for posterity discussing Brian Moses' 2017 DIY NAS build, which has some good advice about mitigating heat in these cases. including a link to some 3d-printed cooling fan ducts which help force air through the drive bays.

Edit: Adding follow-up post.

Considering that guy's idiotic past choices, I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.

For several years (up until his 2015 build, IIRC, when he finally switched to server-grade hardware), he encouraged clueless users to go with inadequate systems. Why were they inadequate?

• Some of them were very underpowered, using the AMD E-350 platform.
• Some of them (if not all) relied on cheap motherboards. Being cheap motherboards, they're characterized by a Realtek 8111 GbE NIC of some sort. Realtek's reputation is well-deserved and should disqualify their use as a server NIC.*
• Specifically advocating against ECC RAM. The purpose of a NAS is to store data safely, and that is what he presented his builds as. Not using ECC goes against that stated purpose. Sure, scrubs of death are unlikely (not impossible, but certainly unlikely), but far more subtle corruption is still quite possible. And by the time it's detected, it's almost always too late, even with backups.
• Disks were not burned in - or at least that was not described. I might give that a pass, but the RAM was subjected to several days of memtest. A casual reader is going to be left with the impression that hard drives don't need to be burned in. In fact, they need it far more than RAM does. In fact, he sometimes says he's "not concerned" about HDDs failing, which is absurd coming from a ZFS user. If disks were magical devices that didn't fail early in their lives, in weird and wonderful ways, we might not even have ZFS. **
  
• For the first years, he actually recommended running below the minimum requirements with a measly 4GB of RAM (I'm not sure if the minimum was 6GB or 8GB minimum at that point).
• His "EconoNAS" line of articles still relies on crap-grade hardware (Realtek GbE) and non-ECC RAM. It's even more absurd when you remember that his "EconoNAS" is undercut by pre-built servers from the likes of Lenovo and HP, with ECC RAM.
• On the other end of the spectrum, the 2017 server is monstrous overkill for most users, with a price tag to match. It's a great improvement, but it doesn't provide much confidence in his skill at configuring a typical NAS server.

*An exception is made for use as an IPMI dedicated port. That stuff is rather lightweight and there's typically failover to a host Intel i210 NIC, so it's not an issue.

**This is a longer rant about hard drives.

Hard Drives are evil. I don't know who came up with this exact expression, but it fits like a glove. They're subject to electronic and mechanical failure modes (technically, all electronics are - see this example - but hard drives are precision machinery and much more vulnerable than any solid state technology).

Most importantly for this discussion, they fail with a bathtub curve. That is inevitable and the only thing that can eliminate the first slope of the bathtub is burn-in. How much is debatable and depends on your requirements, but it is a necessity. It will never eliminate failures, but it will significantly reduce early failures.
Mr. Moses says that he would rather deal with bad RAM and CPUs now and not later. But why not HDDs? They're far more likely to fail than RAM or the CPU or anything on the motherboard and they're actually easier to RMA than many other components - in part because failures are expected. Backblaze's data does not magically tell us that drives won't fail, it's only good to tell us how long certain drive models tend to survive.

And one final tangent about Backblaze. Their interpretation of the data has been horrible in the past, using extremely unsound methodologies. It's only good enough to get general trends, like "Seagate 3TB drives are expensive bitbuckets". I highly recommend a proper statistical analysis of their raw data - but that will take more time and statistics knowledge than I have.

Full disclosure: Everything below the first line is a clarification added on 2017-11-14T01:08Z

 

[KevinM]

Considering that guy's idiotic past choices, I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.

I don't disagree. If you want a decent NAS, budget appropriately or there will be pain. However I thought the solutions for controlling temps in the DS380B case were interesting, and $12 seems like a pretty small investment if you already have one of these cases and are thinking about tossing it.