Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
My other alternative is using one of the very few mid-size case that still exist with top-to-bottom 5.25" bays (like the Sharkoon T9), and install three 5-into-3 or 4-into-3 hot-swap cages in them, but that ends up being fairly expensive, even using the cheapest cage ( from Rosewill). I’ve routinely built my NAS machines with around the bare minimum recommended amount of RAM, and I’ve yet to wish that I hadn’t. Last year’s NAS wound up being an exception because I wanted the machine to be able to host and power virtual machines. For this year’s NAS, I chose to buy 8GB of Crucial 2666Mhz ECC DDR4 RAM. While I’ve long advocated the use of non-ECC RAM in the building of DIY NAS machines, it made sense to use ECC since I’d already chosen to pay the premium of an enterprise-grade motherboard. Had I gone a different route with the motherboard, I would’ve been more than happy to use non-ECC RAM. Case, Power Supply, and Cables This took some serious patience and planing to make it all fit but in the end I proved that it was possible to install with off-the-shelf SATA cables
The underside of the door has a large vent to allow for fresh airflow into the case. However, if you pay close attention to the design, you will notice that the airflow goes directly to 80mm fans, which push cold air directly to the internal components. While I opted for the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F, I liked that the Supermicro family of motherboards contained several bigger, badder versions of the motherboard also available for DIY NAS builders:I couldn’t seem to get the machine to boot up off either my Ultimate BootCD flash drive, or my Memtest86+ flash drive. The design of the Node 804 is based on the two-compartment cube design. It also competes with the Thermaltake Cores and the Corsair Carbide Air in that category. But it outshines them for a NAS build, with the ability to house 10 3.5″ drives. The hallmark Fractal attention-to-detail is present here, which sets it apart from the rest of our list. For beginners building their first NAS, this case is very forgiving. Some cases on our list simply do not have space for a large GPU. If you simply must have a graphics card, maybe look at full-towers such as the Phanteks Enthoo 719 that support ludicrous numbers of drives. But then you’re moving away from Network Attached Storage and into gaming systems. Cooling Options
Thoughts? Please share them on the forums here and be sure to thank @Silverstone for making these products for our community. I really enjoyed using the new user interface. I didn’t have any issues or concerns about FreeNAS’ legacy interface, but it was quite dated. Among the biggest improvements of the new UI is the improved dashboard. Being able to log into the DIY NAS: 2019 Edition and get a live peek at what was going on with the NAS was really helpful in the creation of this blog. And of course, the newer, weaker CPU would have a harder time running multiple VMs while doing NAS duties, so it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Best NAS Cases – The Roundup
I execute each of my four different tests (described above) individually in IOMeter against the drive mapped above. 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 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.
Great Deal 
New Comment