mini-ITX is a common choice for smaller builds, especially ones also meant to be on display. Gaming ITX motherboards can and do have a premium price. There are some cheap ITX boards out there, but finding one with more than 4 SATA ports may be challenging. I personally felt like this was a missed opportunity to a case that I was genuinely excited to work with.

This case is an ITX enclosure that barely supports six 3.5″ drives. But we consider it fit for a NAS build because it manages impressive support for 11 2.5″ drive bays too. The Phenom does this without sacrificing on GPU support, as up to 320 mm GPUs will fit. At the time of the build, all our M.2 drives were being used on other projects, the EPC621D41-2M has two M.2 slots on the bottom of the motherboard which would work great for cache or OS drive. What size and motherboard form factor is ideal for a NAS case is a diverse topic. On the one hand, a simple build unconcerned about graphics and peak performance will not make use of larger motherboards’ features. On the other hand, smaller motherboards may not have enough SATA ports, and often cost a lot more than say, ATX ones.Because the SG05 supports a GPU in this same exact position, the case has the “extra room” for the card to run (both vertically and horizontally). Unfortunately, this is just wasted space in the CS280. Had they not reused the SG05 chassis, this case should have been made much smaller. How would I wind up making my DIY NAS builds even smaller? Find out what’s taking up the most amount of space–the hard drives–and replace them with something smaller! The footprint of a single 3.5” hard drive is about 147mm x 101.6mm x 25.4mm for a volume of 376.77 cm 3. The smaller 2.5” hard drive form factor is 100mm x 69.85mm x 19mm for a volume of 132.72 cm 3. A 2.5” hard drive is roughly 35% the size of its bigger brother. When you multiply that savings in space across 8 HDDs, the amount of space saved adds up to something impressive. CPU & Motherboard 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. 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. Fans: 3x 120 mm @ front (3 included), 3x 120 mm @ middle (3 included), 2x 80 mm @ rear (2 included)

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 But aside from these two scenarios, you don’t need a GPU. A discrete card will only add more power consumption, noise, and heat to your system. It will also take up valuable PCIe slots and space on your rig. The DS380 will support DTX mobos, which in theory can have two slots, but after a lot of searching, it turned out that there actually aren't any such mobos in existence, let alone storage-oriented ones.The fans utilized are 3-pin units. We would have preferred here if the fans were 4-pin PWM units which allows easier control of the fan speed. In 2019, virtually every motherboard that one would use in this chassis has 4-pin fan headers. The enclosure of the CS280 comes in at 221.5mm (W) x 176.7mm (H) x 301mm (D) or 8.72” (W) x 6.96” (H) x 11.85” (D). As we can see by the above pictures there are ample cooling vents along the sides and top of the case. Here are the key specs: SilverStone CS280 Specifications Such compact cases with little space “behind” the PSU are a prime example of the one disadvantage modular PSUs have in such space-constrainted situations: A need for additional space for those plugs there. We don’t really recommend other form factors for a Network Attached Storage. Sure, you can go for an E-ATX motherboard, but that will be overkill.

A small detail, but never the less something I can appreciate -the simple design of the the door hinge. 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. Altogether, it used all 4 of the CPU core to make 4 passes of the 12 different testing algorithms types supported without any reported errors. Usually, I just like to leave the memory test running for day(s) on end while I work on other things, but the free version of PassMark’s Memtest86 is sadly limited to 4 passes, which should be more than enough to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the RAM installed. I got an especially warm and fuzzy feeling, as I had to do this several times as I tried to capture it in video for the blog.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. 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. More often than not, the bulk of your storage will be 3.5″ hard drives spinning away. Be sure to look at hard drive specifications for NAS usage – Seagate Ironwolf and WD Reds are standard choices. While the design might be tried and true, it does prove to be problematic a little later into the review. 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

The three pools in this one system represent the three NAS systems I had before the consolidation. For a home NAS, this chassis is huge, able to hold 48 data drives and two boot drives with a couple spaces internally for non-hot-swap drives... Due to this reason, decide early if you want a GPU or not. A standard option may be to choose an APU, such as the AMD Ryzen 3200G, with integrated graphics. This allows you to have the best of both worlds. Overall, I’ve come to expect that a typical DIY NAS built today should be readily able of saturating a gigabit link during the read test, and this year’s NAS did not disappoint in this regard. I enjoyed monitoring the sequential throughput test in both my desktop machine’s task manager, but also in the new dashboard in the latest version of FreeNAS: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. This is non-issue if you decide to go 100% SDD, which could prove quite costly given the current cost of NAND. Considering the small footprint was the primary objective in the design of this NAS, you can understand why I think the answer to both of those questions is yes. But aside from the footprint, I think I’d still be inclined to answer in the affirmative when considering these features: