Smallest Mini-ITX case for "portable" FreeNAS?

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My family and I spend 1-2 overseas every year visiting family. Over the course of the visit we always end up taking a buttload (metric, not imperial) of RAW images. That, combined with files I need for work, mean we've outgrown USB drives.

I was looking at the Synology DS416slim but I thought I'd check to see if anyone had experience building a portable FreeNAS setup. Ideally it would be the smallest mini-itx case available that can fit 4-6 2.5" drives, preferably taking 15mm drives so I can get the 4tb drives that are now available.

Any suggestions?
 

brando56894

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This is the smallest case that I know that's NAS/Server capable: Silverstone DS380. You can cram 8 3.5" HDDs and 4 2.5" HDDs in that baby, the 3.5" bays are hot swappable since they're connected to a backplane, which makes wiring slightly easier since you only need 2x 4 pin Molex plugs instead of 8 SATA power cables, if you don't need all 8 bays, you can use one for a GPU or other PCI add-in card, if it's small enough (for example the IBM M1015 HBA card) you can have both the card and the drive bay filled. It's about the height of a large hard cover book, but pretty deep.


Now for the bad stuff:
1. It's an absolute PITA to work on since it's so small and crammed with so much storage space. If you need to get to anything on the motherboard you first have to empty all the 3.5" bays, take out 4 screws that hold the 3.5" drive cage in, remove the SATA and Molex cables, then remove the drive cage just to get to the motherboard. Not much of a problem if you don't upgrade it constantly like I did.

2. If the backplane dies (like mine did after about 1.5 years of being on 24/7) prepare to modify the drive cage so that you can power all the drives individually or you risk loosing about 3 drive bays due to the way the cage is formed since it's meant to use the backplane. Also it's steel and not aluminum so it's not the easiest thing to cut.

3. It isn't cheap and will run you about $150 USD without a PSU, and it needs an SFX PSU. I believe the "proper" Silverstone SFX PSU I used eventually caused the demise of my whole system, minus the drives. Make sure to get a short cable set or custom cables because there is literally no space for cable management since the 3.5" cage takes up about 75% of the usable space. Same goes for SATA cables, they need to reach a total of 4-6" so 16-20" cables are total overkill and just add to the clutter.

4. Airflow is horrible, which is pretty bad for a NAS/Server case. The two 120mm intake fans blow directly onto the 3.5" cage but the problem is that it's largely impermeable since the small "windows" that it has to blow air into is completely blocked by the HDD itself so about 95% of the drive never has any air flow, this goes for all 8 drives. Obviously the ones at the top have it the worst since heat rises. The air just takes the path of least resistance and goes along the cage, blows across the RAM/CPU and then exits through the exhaust fan. My HGST drives would get about 50-60C under normal conditions and that was all bays filled. People have found that creating a block off plate out of a rigid material forces air across the drives and drops temps by about 3-5C.


I keep finding this out the hard way: small computers seem awesome but they usually want to make you pull your hair out, so either buy something off the shelf, or get a big beast that you can keep at home and make sure you have a good internet connection hahaha. On a side note, I've usually found the "cheaper" (sub $700) NAS devices to be largely under powered, for example the one you linked to uses a dual core 1 GHz ARM processor with 512 MB of RAM. I had a Netgear ReadyNAS that had a single core 1 GHz ARM processor and it would crash repeatedly after transferring over 100 GB worth of data. Essentially it was garbage. I then bought one that was $400 and made by Thecus, it had a dual core Atom processor and 2 GB of RAM, it was powerful enough but the interface sucked. After my frustrations with those two, I decided to build my own and I stumbled upon FreeNAS and the rest is history haha
 
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I actually use a DS380 for our home server, I'm very happy with it. If you're looking for a case with a little more room inside the Fractal Node 804 is a good, compact option but doesn't have the hot-swapable option. Thanks for the note about the backplane, I hope I don't run into that problem.

A friend hit the jackpot for me a little bit ago though. An aluminum case that holds 4x2.5" and (if you use a thin mini-itx board) 2x3.5". I don't think it's going to get much smaller than this without having airflow/heat problems:

http://www.minicase.net/product_E-W150.html

$50 on Alibaba too. Not bad. I'll follow up with a build out in a month or so.
 

SweetAndLow

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You have out grown a 8TB disk? Or even 2 of them in external enclosure.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
 
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We tried that, it doesn't work out that well for us two reasons. We have multiple people wanting to hit it at the same time (me, wife and relatives with laptops) and no one wants to have their laptop tied down to be the server. I also work while I'm there (wish I could take a month off) and a lot of my work is with datasets around 1-2 TB and a good sized ARC would help (this and the fact that they generally compress well is why I was trying to find a solution that would let me use ZFS... should be pretty zippy as long as I'm on ethernet). It's not a common use case, I know.
 

Stux

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It's not FreeNAS but I'd consider a drobo mini

mini-in-size-only.jpg


http://www.drobo.com/-products/mini/

4 hot swap 2.5" bays.
 
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Curious if you own one? All the reviews I've read for it have been "meh" at best (which seems to be the case for most Drobo products actually). I'd still need to hang it off a SBC or a NAS but it's a possibility.
 

Stux

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Photographers like them.

I have a 5d.
 

SweetAndLow

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We tried that, it doesn't work out that well for us two reasons. We have multiple people wanting to hit it at the same time (me, wife and relatives with laptops) and no one wants to have their laptop tied down to be the server. I also work while I'm there (wish I could take a month off) and a lot of my work is with datasets around 1-2 TB and a good sized ARC would help (this and the fact that they generally compress well is why I was trying to find a solution that would let me use ZFS... should be pretty zippy as long as I'm on ethernet). It's not a common use case, I know.
You make some good points and it sounds like you understand your use case pretty well. I would check out the fractal core 500 or node 304 if you want freenas and zfs. Or maybe something like a Intel nuc with storage attached. That would not use zfs though.

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brando56894

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I actually use a DS380 for our home server, I'm very happy with it. If you're looking for a case with a little more room inside the Fractal Node 804 is a good, compact option but doesn't have the hot-swapable option. Thanks for the note about the backplane, I hope I don't run into that problem.

A friend hit the jackpot for me a little bit ago though. An aluminum case that holds 4x2.5" and (if you use a thin mini-itx board) 2x3.5". I don't think it's going to get much smaller than this without having airflow/heat problems:

http://www.minicase.net/product_E-W150.html

$50 on Alibaba too. Not bad. I'll follow up with a build out in a month or so.


I actually had the Node 304 as my first self built case and immediately upgraded (like within 2 weeks) because I realized it only had room for 6 drives. I went back to "go big or go home" and got an NZXT H440 which is a full tower case without any 5.25" bays so the front of the case is filled with 10 bays that can hold a mix of 3.5" and 2.5" drives, then it has two 2.5" "show off" spots inside the case (useful if you have the windowed model, which I don't), and finally a hidden 3.5" bay on the bottom of the case. Three 120mm fans blow directly onto the 10 drive bay to keep the drives cool. I love this case, the only issue I had was drive rattle, since the way the drives are attached is odd (they're just flat metal plates that you screw the drives to, one on top and one on bottom) the rattle of the drives (even using NAS drives) exponentiated because each drive plate hooked into a metal rail, so if you had all plated filled you had 10 drives vibrating, which in turn vibrated the hell out of the case and made it hum like crazy. My solution was to use rubber grommets to dampen the vibration of the drive and the plate.
 
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A friend hit the jackpot for me a little bit ago though. An aluminum case that holds 4x2.5" and (if you use a thin mini-itx board) 2x3.5". I don't think it's going to get much smaller than this without having airflow/heat problems:

http://www.minicase.net/product_E-W150.html

$50 on Alibaba too. Not bad. I'll follow up with a build out in a month or so.
Please do update us once you get it built and in service. I too travel quite a bit, and can see the day when I would want something like this too.
 
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I love me some FreeNAS but would recommend a Drobo or other consumer-grade magical storage box for this purpose.

Drobo performance is not great compared to, well, just about anything else. But, as redundant storage on the road, ease of use, flexibility, size and power consumption, it really can't be beat. Plus it looks good.

I have personally deployed a Drobo Pro FS, Drobo FS (two), Drobo S (two), Drobo 5D and Drobo 5N (two) over the last six years. We use them in our smaller offices where there is no IT staff and no data we care enough about to deploy a better solution. The eight-bay, Drobo Pro FS started out with 1TB drives, went to 2TB and then 4TB without having to move data around during upgrades and without a moment of downtime. Never had a Drobo fail.

The Drobo Mini isn't networked but likely can be plugged into your router and shared over the network from there. If that's not an option, the Drobo 5N would be your best bet.

Cheers,
Matt
 
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