Interior
When we remove the side panel and have a look inside, it doesn’t look like we have much space to work with at first. Spoiler alert, there is plenty of room for everything once you get going. To the front and top rear we see the drive cage for our 12 hard drives.
The rear exhaust fan is mounted right next to the motherboard to aid in the cooling of it and there is still plenty of room to use a 120mm AIO liquid cooling solution.
The side fans, seen from the inside here, provide direct cooling to the large drive cage. The front IO connections look a bit like a mess here, but you’ll have a clear airflow once the system is built and the cables are routed.
At the bottom of the chassis, we see both the four large rubber feet as well as the additional screws to secure the drive cage. Eight 3.5-inch drives weigh quite a bit and create equal vibrations, so a secure mount is important.
Removing the hot swap drive cage gives a better look at how one of the drive bays can be utilized for expansion cards that otherwise would be too long to use. The attached bracket can be removed and replaced with one that opens up the area while preventing drives to be inserted into the bay at the same time.
The backplane features both SATA and SAS connectors for all drives while getting the power from two Molex power connectors. Silverstone made sure that each and every drive will get a stable and efficient power supply with the design and they also added two fan headers to connect and control the two fans located at the side of the chassis.
The drive caddies are made from simple plastic and don’t feature a tool-less design as seen so often. Using screws might however be the smartest idea anyway in a system like this, but it does put some strain on the wrist to mount 12 hard drives with 4 screws each. Seen to the right in the image below is the LED strip that forwards activity light for each bay from the backplane to the front.
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.