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The design of the case is largely unchanged with a well fitted hot-swap bay mounted to the front of the chassis as seen through the rear the case. The size of your case is similarly variable. Larger cases will have more options for drives and cooling. Smaller cases will be easier to maintain and even carry around. Increasingly, there are 2.5″ hard drives available, which changes the scene a bit. These can run hot and offer smaller storage than their larger counterparts. But the reduction in size is a definite advantage. Speaking of the proximity of the power supply and the drive cage, I also wound up deciding that instead of stretching and tugging power cables across the already crowded space in the drive cage, that I’d buy a SATA-to-Molex Power Adapter for providing power to the drive cage. This allowed me to route two of the separate accessories’ power cables from the power supply to either side of the case and keep the drive cage clear for just the SATA cables.
A small detail, but never the less something I can appreciate -the simple design of the the door hinge. The brushed aluminum front with the silk screened logo looks fantastic. The brushing is very smooth and the logo is extremely crisp. So what did I wind up deciding to do in 2019? Make it even smaller! I’ve always preferred making my NAS builds diminutive on account of my limited desk space. Additionally, what I saw as one of the biggest advantages in comparing a DIY NAS build to the off-the-shelf NAS offerings from folks like Drobo, QNAP, Synology, et al. is the fact that the off-the-shelf NAS machines are nearly always compact. In building my own NAS, I wanted to demonstrate that a DIY builder could do it better! We would advise against a water-cooled build. Your rig should never be pushing out really high-temperatures unless something is wrong. Water cooling will also be more complex and involved, for no apparently useful reason. Most NAS servers are not built for aesthetics, so the advantages of water cooling are overlooked. Each bay has LED indicators to let you know which ones have been occupied. This is also visible from the front the chassis though a little clear window -helpful if ever you have a drive failure.
While the case advertises that it supports a card up to 8.66″ (220mm) in length, it also needs to sit lower than 2.39″ (60.75mm) to slip under the bay. The CS380 is for ATX / micro-ATX, so there's a wide range of mobos that will fit. I'm currently considering a dual-Xeon one. If I am to be perfectly honest with all of you. I was a little disappointed to discover that the SilverStone CS280 doesn’t support dedicated graphics cards. As a NAS user, if this case had supported a dedicated GPU for improved transcoding times, it would have been catapulted to the front of my list. As a result of this omission, I want to give the case a hard pass in the hopes that they will release a much improved version in the future. Two key specifications to look at here is the limitation of 65mm CPU Cooler height. At this size, a standard Intel Xeon E3/ Xeon E heatsink will work fine, but it is a tight fit for any aftermarket coolers. Next, is the PSU depth specification at 100mm, this falls into the SFX PSU size. I was very interested in building the most compact DIY NAS as I could reasonably achieve, but I was almost nearly as interested in evaluating the latest release of FreeNAS, FreeNAS-11.2-U2. The DIY NAS blogs wind up being an excellent way for me to tinker with the latest version of FreeNAS, before deciding to upgrade my own NAS. The release notes from the FreeNAS 11.2-Release r talk extensively about the new Anuglar-based UI, which has been something I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.
At this point, some of our eagle-eyed viewers might recognize that the Silverstone CS280 is using the exact same platform as the Silverstone SG05/SG13.
Under the 8-bay 2.5” cage is a single 2.5” drive cage for an OS SSD. This cage can be removed if space is needed underneath. Technically, this makes the unit a 9x 2.5″ chassis. SilverStone CS280 HDD Cage One of the central components for a NAS build is going to be your case. A NAS case is a tiny niche compared to mainstream tower cases. But there is undoubtedly a market for them. In this article, we will round up four best NAS cases you can buy right now.
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