SilverStone Releases Premium 8-Bay SFF NAS Chassis

SilverStone has shown us some great DIY NAS chassis’ in the past and this newest one called the CS280 looks just as sweet. With a tiny footprint and general small chassis size, it still allows for plenty of hardware to be built in and it does so without sacrificing any of the important functions.

The new SilverStone CS280 supports both Mini-ITX and Mini-DTX motherboards as well as dual-slot low-profile expansion cards with a length of up to 8.66 inches (about 22 centimetres). It also has space for an internal SFX power supply, so there is no need for any external power bricks here.

Behind the front door, you’ll find eight hot-swappable drive bays that each can hold a 2.5-inch SATA or SAS drive. For SAS use you’ll naturally have to have a controller that also supports this, but the built-in backplane comes with support for these kinds of enterprise grade drives too.

The CS280 also comes with front USB 3.0 ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks, although those most likely won’t be used in many NAS oriented setups. The audio ports are still great to have when needed, for example, if used as a compact gaming rig, and since there is plenty of space for them, there was no reason for SilverStone not to add them.

Hot-swappable front drive bays are great, but you wouldn’t really want to put your OS drive here. Instead, there is another internal drive bay for this that can hold another 2.5-inch drive. That way you still have 8 bays available for your storage drives and you’ve also made sure that you don’t unplug your OS drive by accident.

Internally, the DS280 is just as well built as on the outside with a quality backplane with extra capacitors. These will make sure that your drives have a stable power supply at any time. The backplane also reduces the amount of power connectors needed down to two 4-pin Molex connectors. A small chassis has limited space for cables and having to run 8 power cables just for your drives can seriously hinder the air flow on top of being tricky when it comes to the available connectors on SFX PSUs.

Speaking of airflow and cooling, the SilverStone DS280 comes with two 80mm sleeve bearing fans at the front of the chassis. This should be plenty for cool and silent operations from a system built into this chassis.

Besides the front intake, the DS280 also features air vents on both sides of the chassis.

Last but not least, there is the price and availability, which of course are relevant factors. The case isn’t the cheapest you’ll find with its $209.15 MSRP, but it isn’t a high price either considering the included technology and more or less unique setup. It should be available globally at the time of writing, so check you local dealer for more information on this.