is someone of you using a Inter-Tech NAS-8 chassis and could provide some pictures about the inside with an installed motherboard, especially about the wiring of the power cable from the power supply to the motherboard as it seems that the cable goes through the rectangular opening directly under the motherboard PCB?
I am also interested in any experiences about the cooling of the harddrives via the two 120mm fans. On the picture https://www.inter-tech.de/files/images/ipc/88887392/NAS-8_schr%C3%A4g_hinten1.jpg I can see the mesh at the front of the chassis below the drive bays. How is it ensured that the 120mm fans pull the air through the drive bays and not simply through the mesh which may provide less resistance?
Does anyone know if the drives stay below 40°C in this chassis?
Does anyone know about a website with a test of the chassis and some more details? On the Inter-Tech website there is not much information and the Inter-Tech support answers really fast, but only the colleague from sales and not the technical experts.
Does someone know if additional drive bay trays could be purchased?
The motherboard is upside down, slots up. Cables from the PSU come through the large square hole, close to where a typical ATX motherboard would have its 24-pin connector. The ATX standoffs show that the lower part of this hole extends beyond an ATX motherboard.
My guess: Not at all. One may want to tape a piece of cardboard between the lower fan and the bottom of the drive cage to force air through the cage.
Isn’t that a typical question for the sales team?
I don’t know anything about the enclosure you refer to but FWIW, i do have an Inter-Tech 2404S chassis which houses my TrueNAS Core server and i am very happy with it. Good build quality for a good price. Pretty sure you can buy the trays seperately but as already mentioned, better to ask their sales contact.
Now I took the picture of the chassis and added a motherboard image, aligned by the four screw holes. You are right that the hole is exactly at the ATX connector of the motherboard, however, the space for the cable seems a bit “tight” to me.
For my new system I bought the Inter-Tech NAS-8 and it arrived today.
The chassis is really nice, small, not too heavy and I really like it.
However, there are some minor points I recognized so far which should be optimized on a future version of this chassis:
The screws which are used to mount the side panels have a plastic knob on the screw. I know other manufacturer where the complete screw is made from metal.
The drive-bay trays have no kind of locking mechanism to avoid an inadvertently press of the release button. To be fair, the button press alone only releases the handle, but the drive will still be in its position.
The three 80mm fans on the front of the motherboard side are mounted on a metal plate which is a bit thin. When I had removed the plate it happened that I inadvertently deformed the plate a bit.
The same plate is mounted by three screws on the inner side of the chassis and by two smaller screws on the outer side. The inner three screws cannot be reached, anymore, if the fans are in place and if the fans are mounted on the side of the metal plate which directs towards the motherboard. Another option would be to mount the fans on the opposite side of the plate, but there might only fit fans with 14mm thickness and not the larger fans with 25mm thickness.
The chassis has no Reset switch.
The package does not contain any further documentation beside the documents that can be downloaded on the Inter-Tech website. Thies means that there is absolutely no documentation about the pinning of the Audio connector, for example.
Thanks for the report. This fits with my limited experirence (one 1U chassis) that Inter-Tech products are “fit enough” but that elegance and attention to details are not on the cards.
How is one supposed to put back the mounting plate once the fans are fitted?
If using screws there might be no chance. Therefore, I decided to take such Noctua silicon pins which I first mounted on the metal plate, then I mounted the metal plate back into the chassis and, afterwards, I attached the fans to the silicon pins. Removing the fans is also possible by simply pulling them from the silicon pins.
But this is definitely a point the manufacturer could have found out if the would have used the chassis for a test .
Some further issues with the Inter-Tech NAS-8 came up.
When installing the harddrives I recognized that the drive bays have some metall bars located directly on top of electronic parts of the harddrives (Seagate Exos X16 16TB).
I had to attach some tape to the harddrives as well as drive bays to avoid electric shorts.
Furthermore, after attaching the drives into the Inter-Tech NAS-8 the chassis started to chatter when the drives move their heads. The reason is that the side panels are only fixed on the top and bottom as well as on the backside. On the front there is around 1.5 mm space which is the root cause of the chatter. I have ordered some sealing tape and will try to stop the chattering.
However, the next problem with this chassis occured when I started the burn-in tests of the harddrives. The temperatures of the drives went up to around 40-46 °C, even with two “Noctua NF-F12 INDUSTRIALPPC-2000 PWM” (121,8m³ - 3,94 mm H2O) installed at the back of the drive bays. The air flow from the two fans coming out of the chassis is really strong, but the drive cooling is bad. After some more digging my assumption is, that the SFX Power Supply provides a shortcut of the air flow. The strong fans do not suck the air through the drive bays, but instead in reverse direction through the power supply.
In the attached pictures you can see the green arrows which show how the air flow should be and the red arrows shows the real airflow (as the power supply is only slightly loaded its internal fan is off and lets the air flow into the reverse direction).
I was already in contact with Seasonic about their “FOCUS SPX 650” which is currently mounted with the air intake facing upwards (as proposed for the power supply). Seasonic told me that I could mount the “FOCUS SPX 650” with its air intake facing downwards if there is at least around 50mm free space below the power supply. However, the Inter-Tech NAS-8 has only around 22mm free space below the power supply.
A perfect solution would be to have an SFX power supply which takes the air from its front and releases it on its back, as shown by the yellow arrow. So far, I was not able to find any power supply which is designed for such an airflow.
Does anyone here have an idea on how I could solve the cooling issue without changing the chassis?
Can you force the PSU fan to be always on?
Or put some plastic sheet to mostly isolate the fans and backplane section from the PSU area, cutting your red arrow.
I don’t think this exists, and even if it did, having two reverse airflows (green: front to back; yellow: back to front) in the same volume would likely not play well.
The idea was to have a power supply that blows the air into the same direction as the green arrows (the yellow arrow has the same direction as the green arrows).
.
