Silverstone DS380 NAS Chassis Review

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.