Silverstone DS380 and HGST 6tb temperautre

[PhilZJ81]

I probably should have mentioned that they are the 4TB version, but here is the link to the ones I got. I have a mix of mostly HGST but have some WD's and Toshiba's. The Toshiba's run much cooler at around 31-35c @ 50% fan speed. I've come to the realization that I won't be getting the HGST any lower without sacrificing noise levels.

Great thanks, that's the type I have, but the 6TB version. I'm in the same situation with noise too, I have that thing in my office, and it's already, by a long way, the loudest thing there. NAS box is louder than my gaming pc but that's sitting in our bedroom, so I can't compare them side by side.

 

[blahhumbug]

I'm using 8x 3TB WDReds in this case and gave up trying to keep the PC as silent as my gaming desktop and had to move it to a different room. The drive cage design is just terrible from a cooling aspect.

In order to keep the drives under 40c, I ended up replacing the side intake fans with enermax twisterpressure fans (4 pin) and just letting them run at full speed all the time. Taking off the dust filter for the side intake fans also lowers the drive temperature ~5c for me, but I leave it on. Bay 7 (top of case) stays the coolest for me at 29C, with the bottom 4 bays idling at 34-36c.
They peak at 40c during scrubs.

 

[PhilZJ81]

In an attempt to increase airflow. I removed the back plane on the HDD cage included in the case and connected every drive individually. I also moved some drives around a bit, but it didn't help a thing.

I might try to go to home depot and see if I can build my own HDD stack and put it in the case. I will lose the 'hot swap' feature, but if it keeps my drives cooler, I'm definitely willing.

Or, I might just admit I screwed up with the case and get another one.

If any of you have a suggestion of a case that can house 8 drives and is QUIET, please let me know

 

[depasseg]

I know it might sound strange, but if there are vents on the front of the drive caddies, have you tried making all of the fans exhaust, and rely on intake air to keep the drives cool?

 

[blahhumbug]

The one thing I've been meaning to try, the next time I need to open the system up, is is to mount 2 additional fans inside the case directly attached to the drive bay (same side as the intake fans) to see if I can force more air to flow through the tiny drive cage slots. The sata backplane connectors are a bit flimsy and despite trying to be careful, I've already had the plastic on one of them crack so that the sata cable doesn't really fit as snug as would like. So I'm a bit paranoid about disconnecting everything so that I can mount the fans.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Alright, I've given up, I'm getting a Lian Li PC-Q26B http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=11-112-459
and a power supply EVGA 220-G2-0550-Y1 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=17-438-053

Hope these work out better. The current Silverstone power supply has the most irritating buzz from the fan too!

 

[PhilZJ81]

I know it might sound strange, but if there are vents on the front of the drive caddies, have you tried making all of the fans exhaust, and rely on intake air to keep the drives cool?

I thought about that, and it's a great idea, but in this case even with my carboard deflector to keep the drives isolated, it looks to me like I would have too many easy ways for the air to suck through without passing over the drives. Atleast with them blowing, they follow the direction towards the drives atleast briefly.

Anyways, as stated above, I gave up on this case, getting the Lian Li which can host 10 drives and looking at the youtube clip, each drive seems to have more gap between then the Silverstone DS 380B.

 

[Bidule0hm]

If any of you have a suggestion of a case that can house 8 drives and is QUIET, please let me know

Fractal Design Define R5 (or R4) ;)

 

[Kevin Horton]

If any of you have a suggestion of a case that can house 8 drives and is QUIET, please let me know

If you want something roughly cube shaped, I'm very happy with my Fractal Design Node 804.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Fractal Design Define R5 (or R4) ;)

If you want something roughly cube shaped, I'm very happy with my Fractal Design Node 804.

Thanks guys, I looked at both of those. I was about to pull the trigger on the R5, but ended up going with Lian Li PC-Q26B.
I also looked at the Node 804, I couldn't tell how close together 7 or 8 drives would sit, plus my current intended location for it is more upright.

Do you guys have an opinion about the Lian Li I picked? I hope I don't mess up again...

 

[brando56894]

I originally purchased one of the FD Node cases but realized that the 6 HDD capacity was nothing since I had pretty much already filled it from day one, so I bought the DS380 and thought everything was going to be great. A little over a year later (15 months?) I wish I would have never wasted almost $200 on that piece of crap! As pretty much everyone else noted, the air flow in the case is horrendous, my 6x 4 TB HGST drives were regularly in the 50-60c range. I didn't see the airflow mod until about after a year and as said above, it's not fun to try and fit it in there. It didn't really seem to help me much. Also to fit my HBA card in there I had to modify the plastic piece that you would take out to use a videocard, so I wouldn't lose one bay simply because there wasn't a few millimeters clearance for the card. Next up is the complete lack of cable management: trying to fit 10 SATA cables, 2 4 pin molex connectors, 4 sata power and the 24 pin in there is like cramming 10 pounds of spaghetti into a 10 ounce bowl. The cables would constantly obstruct the air flow and hit the fans, switching to the HBA slightly helped with the cable mess, but then I had to deal with 2 14" SFF-8087 that I had no place to stash. Also having to take all the drives out just to do anything on the motherboard or anything else made me want to punch babies time and time again. Since the backplane cables and the 2.5" drive cables butted against each other it was always fun reconnecting and disconnecting them whenever I needed to do something. I almost ripped off one of the capacitors on the backplane because of this and I actually did rip out one of the SATA ports, but luckily it went right back in.

After using a standard sized PSU in the case (well actually hanging out the back) for almost a year I decided to finally get Silverstone's SFX PSU to go in it. This turned out to be a costly decision because a lot of people on NewEgg said that the PSU has caused various problems for people, from outright dying after only a few months to completely frying peoples systems and killing their drives! There were good reviews for it, I think it had maybe 3.5 or 4 eggs, so I decided to go with it and take my chances. After maybe a month of using it one of the intake fans on the side of the case started grinding, so I replaced both of them with some older Thermaltake fans that I had lying around and everything was good for a few days until the fans started making noise again (I think something was hitting them) so of course I had to rip the drive cage out again and when I reassembled everything I had found that the backplane had mysteriously died in that short amount of time. It wasn't static that caused it because I was doing everything on a hardwood floor. I took the backplane out and then found out that even more modifications had to be done because the two cross braces actually block the SATA power and data connectors on two of the drives. Luckily I have a nice Dremel (rotary tool) with a good cutting wheel or I'd be screwed because that's some pretty tough steel to cut though. Once I made sure everything would fit, I put everything back together and thought the worst was behind me....boy was I wrong.

Everything was fine for a few weeks, I woke up at like 4 am one night and couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to mess with my NAS a little. I don't even remember what I actually did, I think I had connected in the fan splitters that I had bought or something else simple like that. Then I queued up a few TV episodes to stream from it and eventually fell asleep around 6 am. I woke up around 11 am to an unresponsive NAS, it wouldn't stream anything, I couldn't SSH into it, and there was no video output from either the IPMI or the VGA connection, just a black screen. I rebooted it, hoping it was just frozen, but I was stuck with the same black screen forever. The IPMI didn't show any errors, and the board itself (AsRock C2750-D4I) would physically power up since the fans would spin, but I would get nothing out of it. Since it's SoC there went $450 down the drain! Good thing is that it gave me the chance to upgrade, because buying that board was a bad choice also considering that putting 64 GB in it will cost you about a grand since only one company makes 16 GB ECC UDIMMS that will work with it. I managed to snag a deal on an openbox SuperMicro octocore Xeon board (I saved $150!) which supports 128 GB of ECC DDR4 RDIMMs or 64 GB ECC UDIMMs, I went with a 32 GB stick to start off with obviously :D

In an attempt to increase airflow. I removed the back plane on the HDD cage included in the case and connected every drive individually. I also moved some drives around a bit, but it didn't help a thing.

I might try to go to home depot and see if I can build my own HDD stack and put it in the case. I will lose the 'hot swap' feature, but if it keeps my drives cooler, I'm definitely willing.

Or, I might just admit I screwed up with the case and get another one.

If any of you have a suggestion of a case that can house 8 drives and is QUIET, please let me know

Aww I guess I'm a day late! After a few days research I went with the NZXT H440 and I love it. I holds up to 13 drives (2 SSDs in the motherboard area, 10 2.5" or 3.5" [mix and match!] in their unique mounting brackets, and one 3.5" drive on the bottom of the case), the one thing I really love about this case is there's no wasted space since there aren't any 5.25" bays which would have been largely useless for my NAS, so that space is used by 3x120mm fans that blow directly across the HDDs (there's about an inch or two between neighboring drives, even if you have it filled with 10 drives!) so it keeps them all at a nice 30-35c :) Cable management in it is also phenomenal since you hide everything behind the motherboard tray and the HDD cage.

The only issue that I had with it was that the case tended to vibrate a lot and when it was even slightly off balance (my floor isn't completely level), it would hum and get exponentially louder until I smacked the side of the case to shut it up for a while. I never really did figure out what was actually vibrating like that, I think it was the side of the case since it would stop when I applied pressure. I ended up buying a bunch of rubber HDD mounting grommets since there wasn't really much to dampen the vibrations since the drives were in metal trays that connected directly to the frame of the case, and the one on the bottom of the case was just vibrating the bottom of the case, and they were fun to put on. First off I had to use the bottom mounts for the drive sleds since they slid in there and there wasn't even a big enough gap for a piece of paper, then the grommets were too thick so I had to cut them in half like a bagel, and the screws that came with them didn't work too well because the were assuming that you would be mounting them from the side or some other way. After about three hours messing with all those, the case is now whisper quiet (it comes with thick sound deadening on the side panels). I can only hear the fans, which are muffled, and I can only hear them because the case is about 9 inches from me. When I'm a few feet away I can barely hear it, you can't hear it at all while watching a movie. Best of all it was only $100. I wish I would have gotten this in the first place and saved $80 and multiple hours worth of headaches over the past year or so.

 

[PhilZJ81]

I originally purchased one of the FD Node cases but realized that the 6 HDD capacity was nothing since I had pretty much already filled it from day one, so I bought the DS380 and thought everything was going to be great. A little over a year later (15 months?) I wish I would have never wasted almost $200 on that piece of crap! As pretty much everyone else noted, the air flow in the case is horrendous, my 6x 4 TB HGST drives were regularly in the 50-60c range. I didn't see the airflow mod until about after a year and as said above, it's not fun to try and fit it in there. It didn't really seem to help me much. Also to fit my HBA card in there I had to modify the plastic piece that you would take out to use a videocard, so I wouldn't lose one bay simply because there wasn't a few millimeters clearance for the card. Next up is the complete lack of cable management: trying to fit 10 SATA cables, 2 4 pin molex connectors, 4 sata power and the 24 pin in there is like cramming 10 pounds of spaghetti into a 10 ounce bowl. The cables would constantly obstruct the air flow and hit the fans, switching to the HBA slightly helped with the cable mess, but then I had to deal with 2 14" SFF-8087 that I had no place to stash. Also having to take all the drives out just to do anything on the motherboard or anything else made me want to punch babies time and time again. Since the backplane cables and the 2.5" drive cables butted against each other it was always fun reconnecting and disconnecting them whenever I needed to do something. I almost ripped off one of the capacitors on the backplane because of this and I actually did rip out one of the SATA ports, but luckily it went right back in.

After using a standard sized PSU in the case (well actually hanging out the back) for almost a year I decided to finally get Silverstone's SFX PSU to go in it. This turned out to be a costly decision because a lot of people on NewEgg said that the PSU has caused various problems for people, from outright dying after only a few months to completely frying peoples systems and killing their drives! There were good reviews for it, I think it had maybe 3.5 or 4 eggs, so I decided to go with it and take my chances. After maybe a month of using it one of the intake fans on the side of the case started grinding, so I replaced both of them with some older Thermaltake fans that I had lying around and everything was good for a few days until the fans started making noise again (I think something was hitting them) so of course I had to rip the drive cage out again and when I reassembled everything I had found that the backplane had mysteriously died in that short amount of time. It wasn't static that caused it because I was doing everything on a hardwood floor. I took the backplane out and then found out that even more modifications had to be done because the two cross braces actually block the SATA power and data connectors on two of the drives. Luckily I have a nice Dremel (rotary tool) with a good cutting wheel or I'd be screwed because that's some pretty tough steel to cut though. Once I made sure everything would fit, I put everything back together and thought the worst was behind me....boy was I wrong.

Everything was fine for a few weeks, I woke up at like 4 am one night and couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to mess with my NAS a little. I don't even remember what I actually did, I think I had connected in the fan splitters that I had bought or something else simple like that. Then I queued up a few TV episodes to stream from it and eventually fell asleep around 6 am. I woke up around 11 am to an unresponsive NAS, it wouldn't stream anything, I couldn't SSH into it, and there was no video output from either the IPMI or the VGA connection, just a black screen. I rebooted it, hoping it was just frozen, but I was stuck with the same black screen forever. The IPMI didn't show any errors, and the board itself (AsRock C2750-D4I) would physically power up since the fans would spin, but I would get nothing out of it. Since it's SoC there went $450 down the drain! Good thing is that it gave me the chance to upgrade, because buying that board was a bad choice also considering that putting 64 GB in it will cost you about a grand since only one company makes 16 GB ECC UDIMMS that will work with it. I managed to snag a deal on an openbox SuperMicro octocore Xeon board (I saved $150!) which supports 128 GB of ECC DDR4 RDIMMs or 64 GB ECC UDIMMs, I went with a 32 GB stick to start off with obviously :D




Aww I guess I'm a day late! After a few days research I went with the NZXT H440 and I love it. I holds up to 13 drives (2 SSDs in the motherboard area, 10 2.5" or 3.5" [mix and match!] in their unique mounting brackets, and one 3.5" drive on the bottom of the case), the one thing I really love about this case is there's no wasted space since there aren't any 5.25" bays which would have been largely useless for my NAS, so that space is used by 3x120mm fans that blow directly across the HDDs (there's about an inch or two between neighboring drives, even if you have it filled with 10 drives!) so it keeps them all at a nice 30-35c :) Cable management in it is also phenomenal since you hide everything behind the motherboard tray and the HDD cage.

The only issue that I had with it was that the case tended to vibrate a lot and when it was even slightly off balance (my floor isn't completely level), it would hum and get exponentially louder until I smacked the side of the case to shut it up for a while. I never really did figure out what was actually vibrating like that, I think it was the side of the case since it would stop when I applied pressure. I ended up buying a bunch of rubber HDD mounting grommets since there wasn't really much to dampen the vibrations since the drives were in metal trays that connected directly to the frame of the case, and the one on the bottom of the case was just vibrating the bottom of the case, and they were fun to put on. First off I had to use the bottom mounts for the drive sleds since they slid in there and there wasn't even a big enough gap for a piece of paper, then the grommets were too thick so I had to cut them in half like a bagel, and the screws that came with them didn't work too well because the were assuming that you would be mounting them from the side or some other way. After about three hours messing with all those, the case is now whisper quiet (it comes with thick sound deadening on the side panels). I can only hear the fans, which are muffled, and I can only hear them because the case is about 9 inches from me. When I'm a few feet away I can barely hear it, you can't hear it at all while watching a movie. Best of all it was only $100. I wish I would have gotten this in the first place and saved $80 and multiple hours worth of headaches over the past year or so.

That sounds like a wonderful learning experience... NOT.

So far, for me the AsRock board has enough RAM and cpu power for me, so I'm still happy with that board.
Regarding your streams, do you use PLEX, or something else?

At any rate, my new Case and Power supply (Lian Li and EVGA) should be arriving Tuesday. I have placed the case and psu back in their respective boxes and will be returning them today.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Alright, well, new parts are in... I forgot to remove the motherboard plate that fits against the case, so right now I have a big gap in the back of the case. Oh well, I'll call AsRock tomorrow see if I can buy one.

So far I'm quite happy with the new setup. Temperatures on the drives is 36C Idle and one or two drives reach 40C during extended file copies.

I posted my new case / psu in this thread if anybody is interested:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/joining-the-freenas-family.42403/page-2

Thanks again for the case recommendations, I really appreciated the help and thought during my moments of frustration with my build.

Btw, does anybody have a good suggestion for mounting a fan on the C2750 big heatsync? With the Silverstone DS380B, the motherboard was upside down and at the bottom of the chassis, so I had a fan propped by the MB power cable and the fan's own little power cable and it was fairly secure. In this new case, I need a proper solution. All I could think of was some rubber bands to wrap around the RAM's release clips.

Thanks