Introduction
There are three important aspects to consider when selecting an NAS enclosure for your DIY build. You’ll want as small a size with as small a footprint as possible, you’ll want an efficient design with space for all your drives and other parts, and finally you’ll want it all to be well cooled since it will be running 24/7. With this in mind, it sure looks like Silverstone hit a triple home run with their DS380 NAS Chassis.
The Silverstone DS380 has a tiny footprint of just 211 x 360 mm and is 285 mm high. This isn’t much, but it still has room for a total of 12 drives, mITX motherboard, SFF PSU and three 120mm cooling fans. The rear fan area is even placed so it can accommodate AIO liquid cooling solutions such as the Silverstone TD03 and the three included fans have a maximum noise generation of 22dBA.
The 8 of the drive bays can take up to 3.5-inch drives and are hot-swappable from the front. The connecting backplane can connect with both SATA and SAS controllers for added possibilities and features. The backplane gets power from two Molex connectors, which helps a lot when you want to connect this amount of drives to an SFX PSU. The two fans mounted at the side are also powered and controlled over this backplate; this is both a smart and a nice addition.
The last 4 drive bays are internal and only for 2.5-inch drives, which is perfect for a raid 10 setup as your system drive, or just another raid array at your disposal with smaller drives; there are almost endless possibilities with the Silverstone DS380.
If we’ll couple those 12 possible drives and think current 6TB 3.5-inch drives and 2TB 2.5-inch drives, we can get a total capacity up to 56GB possible storage inside this chassis and depending on setup more with external connections via eSATA or USB, or even iSCSI targets.
Just having room for a lot of drives isn’t everything to a chassis, all those drives have to be cooled effectively as well. Silverstone took care of this with two 120mm fans on the side of the chassis blowing cold air in on the front mounted 3.5-inch drives and one 120mm rear exhaust fan to help get the hot air expelled.
Silverstone added a front door with lock to prevent anyone tampering with your drives. The reset button is hidden behind door and it’s up to you whether the power button will work through the door or not by using the internal lock function. The DS380 has two USB 3.0 front ports as well as 3.5mm audio jacks for when audio should be needed.
What would you say is the shortest sata cable length to keep cable length at a minimum yet allow for air flow routing? I was thinking of using the right 90 degree connector on the backplane, not the 90 down connectors used on the HD, which would route the cable flat along the backplane toward the motherboard without the big loops. Thanks for the article. It has been 3 years but still relevant.
The parts I have so far are; 8 x 8TB WD Data Center drives, one SSD for cache drive, the DS380 case, a sfx 300 watt 80+ power supply, and assorted used other parts and cables if needed.
Do you have a suggestion for a motherboard considering I hope to run unRAID 6.4, NAS and File Server, NGINX, PLEX, and VMs all on this one box. I would like to keep the power consumption as low as possible considering the use of the type hard drive.. Yes I did the demo for FreeNAS and I did like it, but the memory and HD requirements I did not. I kinda like the unRaid idea of putting all of a file on one drive yet recoverable, and especially the ability to remove a disk and use it on another computer if needed. unRaid is now using xfs and I read although zfs is the new guy on the block, xfs is still really good.. Having NO experience with all this I may have other thoughts down the road but I have almost 6TB of data on two very aging HDs that have started to have SMART errors. Time to move my bottom side.
Thanks again,
Anne
The cable length is a difficult thing to answer as it depends on your components. Where they have their ports in relation to the drive’s/backplane’s connectors. My best tip would be: Take an old SATA cable and connect it at one end. Now run it the path you’ll want it to run (in an as empty case as possible). When you get to where you want to go, make a mark with a soft-tip pen on the cable. Add 1-2cm for extra routing as well as plugging and unplugging. Now you have the length you need by measuring that cable.
As for which motherboard, that’s always a difficult choice. Connection and calculation power is what you need to find. For basic file sharing, you don’t need a whole lot. But VMs do require a lot more power. The options are nearly endless, from low-powered APUs to high-powered Xeon SoC. Budget and needs are what will make your end decision. Of course, since you already have a PSU, that’s another factor you need to take into consideration along with peak-power draw from the drives.
I have no personal experience with unRaid, but it sounds like a good idea on a theoretical level.
So overall, a really difficult thing to answer. Oh, and there are more OS options too such as OpenMediaVault and Nas4Free besides FreeNAS. Of course, there’s also always the option to just do it all manually from a scratch OS, if you don’t need a fancy remote interface.