Looking for a suitable Micro-ATX case

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Hi everyone!

Yet another post from a total newbie, both on assembling hardware and on FreeNAS (but not on FreeBSD nor ZFS), looking for advice on building his first FreeNAS box, mostly centering around finding a suitable case.

I've come to settle on Supermicro's X11SSH-TF board, which is Micro-ATX, and I want a case for it that'll allow me to fit hot-swappable 3.5" drives, hopefully around 6 and hopefully front-mounted, plus SSDs (likely internally and non hot-swappable) for L2ARC and ZIL caching (and whatever else, e.g. onboard USB, for the boot drive).

I've been searching endlessly, though, and I just can't find a suitable option that'll meet the requirement of having at least 4 3.5" hot-swappable bays and the two internal bays (plus whatever for the boot drive). Neither Supermicro's, Fractal's, Lian-Li's, SilverStone's, nor any other of the usual suspects. SilverStone's DS380 is a pretty appealing option, but it's Mini-ITX; in summary, most cases I've found that'll allow a decent number of hot-swappable bays (to me, decent = 4+) have a strong tendency to be Mini-ITX, with most Micro-ATX cases almost always having no more than 2 hot-swappable bays.

So, questions: Am I not looking in the right place? Did I miss an obvious option out there that'll meet my requirements for a Micro-ATX case? Should I instead bite the bullet and go for a Mini-ITX board? And, if so to that last question, which would be a good Mini-ITX equivalent to Supermicro's X11SSH-TF (I'm really looking forward to that board's goodies, i.e. 64GB of ECC RAM, a XEON v5, two NICs, IPMI with a dedicated NIC, etc.)?

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

PS: Quick edit: I've also searched for U-NAS cases, with the NSC-810A coming pretty close to meeting all of my requirements (only caveat I can currently find is that it only offers one internal fixed bay, rather than 2 or 3 that I want), but the hardware guide (2016 R1e) warns about NAS-oriented cases usually not being too good on the cooling aspect. Do people here find that that advice stands? Should I indeed steer-clear of those boxes? Or have people here had good experiences with them? Thanks!

 

[Ericloewe]

The easy option is to get a cheap chassis with tons of 5.25" drive bays, like the Sharkoon T9, and add drive cages, like I did (check my sig for details).

It's not as compact, but it works well.

PS: Quick edit: I've also searched for U-NAS cases, with the NSC-810A coming pretty close to meeting all of my requirements (only caveat I can currently find is that it only offers one internal fixed bay, rather than 2 or 3 that I want), but the hardware guide (2016 R1e) warns about NAS-oriented cases usually not being too good on the cooling aspect. Do people here find that that advice stands? Should I indeed steer-clear of those boxes? Or have people here had good experiences with them? Thanks!

Experiences seem to vary a lot, so I'd definitely only get something after receiving specific feedback about it.

 

[Stux]

From what I've heard on the STH forums, cooling on the 810A is actually pretty good.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

The easy option is to get a cheap chassis with tons of 5.25" drive bays, like the Sharkoon T9, and add drive cages, like I did (check my sig for details).

That's indeed a very interesting suggestion, even if the case is definitely a lot larger than I'd hoped for. Thanks!

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

From what I've heard on the STH forums, cooling on the 810A is actually pretty good.

Thanks for that info! I'll search in that forum for relevant discussions (but if you happen to have pointers on where I should look, most appreciated! ;)

 

[Stux]

I suspect with creative mounting you could get more internal bays into the UNAS 810A. I saw one guy used a PCI mounting bracket to mount one.

Alternatively, you can mount 2.5" SSDs in the hotswap trays.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

I suspect with creative mounting you could get more internal bays into the UNAS 810A. I saw one guy used a PCI mounting bracket to mount one.

Alternatively, you can mount 2.5" SSDs in the hotswap trays.

That's indeed a good, and kinda obvious in retrospect, suggestion, which would leave the internal bay for the boot drive. I didn't think about such a configuration because I always saw the hot-swappable bays as meant only for storage, and using them for anything else maybe being a bit of a waste (which I'm sure plenty here would argue for)... but if my ideal number of storage drives is 6, and I got 2 bays to spare (and not enough inside for my needs), then maybe I could indeed use 2 of those hot-swappable bays for the L2ARC & the ZIL. Great plus, the U-NAS 810A fits my motherboard of choice, sweet!

An alternative is, of course, getting an HBA card that'll give me two extra internal ports to connect my cache drives, if that can be done, and thus leverage the full suite of hot-swappable bays, which needless to say would be even sweeter! Do you have suggestions for that?

 

[Stux]

Thanks for that info! I'll search in that forum for relevant discussions (but if you happen to have pointers on where I should look, most appreciated

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/u-nas-nsc-810a-matx-chassis.12897/
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/zeus-v2-u-nas-nsc-810a-x10sl7-f-e3-1265-v3.13678/

 

[Stux]

That's indeed a good, and kinda obvious in retrospect, suggestion, which would leave the internal bay for the boot drive. I didn't think about such a configuration because I always saw the hot-swappable bays as meant only for storage, and using them for anything else maybe being a bit of a waste (which I'm sure plenty here would argue for)... but if my ideal number of storage drives is 6, and I got 2 bays to spare (and not enough inside for my needs), then maybe I could indeed use 2 of those hot-swappable bays for the L2ARC & the ZIL. Great plus, the U-NAS 810A fits my motherboard of choice, sweet!

An alternative is, of course, getting an HBA card that'll give me two extra internal ports to connect my cache drives, if that can be done, and thus leverage the full suite of hot-swappable bays, which needless to say would be even sweeter! Do you have suggestions for that?

Are you remembering that the X11SSH-TF has an M.2 slot? I suspect its only 2 lane, but still, that's significantly faster than SATA at circa 2GB/s. You could use that for a cache drive.

 

[jlentz3]

If you only need 4 3,5" drives look into the supermicro cse-813mtq-350cb.
It's quiet enough to keep on your desk. You can put the ssds inside the case. The make a barebone that's basically that case with an x11ssm-f mobo.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[garym]

If you do some testing, you will find that you don't need a zil or l2arc thereby saving 2 drive slots.
l

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

If you do some testing, you will find that you don't need a zil or l2arc thereby saving 2 drive slots.
l

What kind of testing would do you suggest I perform to determine that? (other, of course, than simple day-to-day usage of my system without the cache and determining whether it behaves to my liking or not).

 

[Ericloewe]

What kind of testing would do you suggest I perform to determine that? (other, of course, than simple day-to-day usage of my system without the cache and determining whether it behaves to my liking or not).

That's actually the best testing you can do. It's hard to predict exact performance with ZFS.

 

[garym]

That's actually the best testing you can do. It's hard to predict exact performance with ZFS.

I have to agree. I would add that I would set up tests with various file sizes and types that you will be using and check the throughput using all protocols that will be used, cifs, nfs iSCSI, etc. I for one have done that, I have also varied the amount of RAM and found that 8 GB was more than enough for my needs and ZIL l2arc SSDs made no real difference to my system. I put those SSDs to better use. Have fun and play with it.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Thanks for that suggestion, I will definitely do it once I finish my build (and, of course, before I purchase the SSDs, which already are in the "Optional" section of my budget).

This is what my build is looking like so far:

1. Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F-O.
2. CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1240 v6.
3. RAM: Crucial 16GB DDR4-2400 ECC UDIMM VLP.
4. PSU: SeaSonic SS-350M1U 80 PLUS GOLD Certified.
5. Case: U-NAS 810A.
6. Drives: still undecided.

 

[Ericloewe]

Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F-O.

Why do you want four NICs?

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Why do you want four NICs?

I didn't specifically want 4 NICS. I was looking at a simpler but similar X11 (don't recall which right now) with just 2 that'd let me do link aggregation, but the SSH-LN4F-O was there right beside it smiling at me for a meager 5 bucks more, or something, so I just went for it figuring "ah, why not?!".

 

[BigDave]

Why do you want four NICs?

There's no kill, like OVERkill :D

 

[Ericloewe]

I didn't specifically want 4 NICS. I was looking at a simpler but similar X11 (don't recall which right now) with just 2 that'd let me do link aggregation, but the SSH-LN4F-O was there right beside it smiling at me for a meager 5 bucks more, or something, so I just went for it figuring "ah, why not?!".

Because link aggregation rarely works and you lose two PCIe lanes to the NICs. The X11SSM-F is the better board for FreeNAS.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Because link aggregation rarely works and you lose two PCIe lanes to the NICs. The X11SSM-F is the better board for FreeNAS.

Ah, thanks for the pointer! I'll give mine a try and, if I indeed can't get it to work, I'll look into selling the board and trying again with the X11SSM-F... or the X11SSH-F. You don't see an interesting use to the M.2 slot on the latter?