Final Thoughts
Pricing
The Silverstone DS380 isn’t one of the cheapest chassis on the market, but when you think of all the features, hot-swap bays and other included bonuses – I’d call it a bargain. What you’d otherwise pay to upgrade any other chassis with 8 hot-swap backplanes, would most likely already exceed the costs of the DS380. At the time of writing, the Silverstone DS380 can be had for £116.99 at Overclockers UK, £107.04 at Scan UK while Amazon UK will charge you £189.62. Our American readers can pick up the chassis at NewEgg for $149.99 or Amazon for $149.99. German fans can get it for around €135 and upwards through Geizhalz.
Overview
The overall build quality on the Silverstone DS380 is great. I didn’t have the feeling at any time that the materials used were inferior as I’ve seen lately in my personal choice of chassis. The side panel is sturdy and doesn’t bend or wobble, which of course partly due to the small size. It does however become clear very early on that Silverstone put a lot of thought into this chassis and how to create a great storage solution with a tiny footprint.
The quality continues when we take a look at the stock fans and their noise. Rated at a maximum of 22dBA, the fans aren’t audible in any normal environment and especially not when you add 12 mechanical hard drives. The three 120mm fans also did a very good job at keeping all this hardware at a normal temperature that will ensure a long lifespan on your parts.
The front panel door gives the chassis a clean and great look, whilst also protecting your hardware. The built-in protection against outside use of the power button is a great addition to a chassis that is going to run 24/7 and the lock prevents sticky fingers from tampering with your setup.
Building the system itself was easier than expected. I’ve built quite a few tiny systems in my days and this was by far one of the easiest, while also being the one with the most drives. We did see that we could get some issues cables that are too long and stiff, but nothing that can’t be prevented with the right choice of parts to begin with.
All that said, there is still room for improvements, though tiny. I’d love to see a new version of the chassis that is 5mm longer and 2mm wider, because that would have allowed me to fully utilize all the chassis drive bays with my current hardware.
Pros
- Great build quality
- Several smart anti-tamper protections
- Good price for what you get
- Room for a lot of hardware considering the size
- Great cooling abilities
Cons
- Some larger add-on cards might cost you a hot-swap bay
“Silverstone hit a triple home run with the DS380. It comes at a tiny footprint, allows for a massive amount of hardware inside, and with a quality that doesn’t leave many wishes open.”
Thanks to Silverstone for providing us with this sample.
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.