BUILD uATX 8 drives. Help choosing case

[Pitts]

Hi everybody,

It's been a couple weeks since I started reading the forums for the "best build" suiting my needs, and I have to say that people work did made me change ideas several times. I was about to buy that beautiful UNAS NSC-400 with a mini-Itx MB but reading other posts lead me to rethink everything, for cooling and expandability purposes.
PS.: All prices shown are the best I could find from canadian retailers

Overview :
This is my first Freenas project, I think I've done my homework by reading a lot of noob threads, builds, the stickies and by experimenting on a VM. Now I think I'm ready ! I'm going for 8x 3tB WD red in raidz2 since I understand that 2 arrays of 4 drives in raidz1 (like I initially thought) is far from a good idea.


*** Case ***
Ok there's where I'm wondering. My box should be in the living room, I don't wan't it to be huge, noisy and ugly. I've come across two of the smallest that could fit 8 drives (using 5.25 bays) and I'm not sure about temperature/air flow inside those cases :

FractalDEFINE Mini (105$ shipped)
Lian LiPC-V354B (170$ shipped)

The fractal seems a lot nicer to work with, but I can live with whichever.
So any thoughts, experience, ideas for a case with quiet fans/cooler combination ?

*** PSU ***
No experience here in efficiency and power rating calculation. I've seen the "Seasonic SS-400FL2 400W Platinum Fanless PSU" on a similar build though. I understand that a modular PSU would be a benefit in those small cases, but not sure if wattage rating is to high and about fan or fanless ...

CPU
Xeon E3-1230 v2. Cheaper than the newer xeon, low idle consumption, future proof.

Motherboard
SUPERMICRO X9SCL-O (160$) + IBM m1015 (125$)
Cheapest from the x9 series, No IPMI or WOL supported but I don't see why I would need them

Memory
2x8GB Kingston ECC unbuffered
Starting with 16GB, 2 slots available for another 16GB


Thanks for all contributors who helped me learned a lot and thanks in advance for all who will help me on my build, you are awesome !

 

[JohnK]

Case
I don't have either of those cases, but my Fractal Design Arc Mini is a very similar case. The main difference is that it seems to be designed for air flow rather than silence. You might run into heating problems with the quieter model like Mtk on another post.
I stuck another Fractal Design 140mm fan and 4 more Cooler Master 120mm fans into my case and my drives are running at 20C. (Probably an overkill) Still the case is not more noisy than my Antec300 with i7 in my office.
Lastly on cases, have you considered the Design Midi? I know it is a little bigger, but it will make your hard drive installs much easier with 8 accessible drive slots.

Motherboard
Have you considered the X10SL7? It goes for $260 Canadian and has a build-in LSI. There is also a post out here of how to flush it. I bought on of these for my backup build that is going to run 8 /9 drives. It might take less room in a small case.

 

[Pitts]

Thanks for the input, I haven't seen that post and I would be frankly stupid to buy this casing knowing this, as I'm already planning on using 8 drives. I will have to wait how he manage to keep the drive cool or buy something with better airflow (Arc Mini). For the bigger cases, I think I could live with the hard time installing and accessing those drives and get a bit smaller case, it just feel like lost space. I would probably cool the 2 other drives with some 5.25 fans like this

For the motherboard, I did consider it, but I chose the MB based on the CPU which is cheaper than the newer Xeon and clearly made its proof. Not sure if newer Xeon power consumption is as good at idle. But I'm not set until it's bought ...

And I'm curious about your PSU in your sig, does it run silent ? Does the fan starts completely off and goes up when power is drawn ? Like I said, ain't got any experience with PSU (pretty much always had laptops)

 

[JohnK]

Just note that MtK is using WD blue 7200rpm drives. That might be part of his problem. I'm sure the WD Red drives runs much cooler.

I didn't comment on the processor as I don't know what you are planning on using your server for. It seems like people going for Xeon either have many users or are trying to do transcoding on the fly with Plex. I use my NAS as a media server feeding 4 OpenElec and 2 hand held devices, mostly MP4, MKV and AVI. My Pentium G430 has 44% Max usage. Then again I have only been up for a few weeks.

My PSU is the G-series and supposedly balances between noise and cooling. I went to check it and while my system is running cool the fan is running, but it is not audible. I suppose it will speed up when necessary. Note that this PSU is not modular, but I found that the Fractal Design great for hiding unused cables.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

The cases seem very much equal to me. I think you could get airflow problems with so many drives.

You could save a bit of money by going to a case that is a little bit bigger. For instance a CoolerMaster N300. Better airflow, more room for cables and more space between the drives.

You could also switch to 6 4Tb drives in raidz2, which would give you almost the same space but leave more room for air to flow through.

Just my random thoughts.

 

[MtK]

I also have 4 WD Black with the same heating issue.


and I have the same SeaSonic 360 on my FreeNAS, but the x-series fanless 660 on a PC in a bed room...