for a small backup server I am looking for a mini tower chassis with the following features:
4-8 hot-swappable drive bays 3.5"
Proper cooling of 7200 rpm drives in the drives bays (keep them below the 40°C)
Enough space above the CPU to place a CPU cooler. The chassis shall contain a Supermicro A2SDi-8C±HLN4F.
Not too noisy.
An integrated SAS/SATA backplane would be nice.
What I found so far:
Ablecom chassis are nice but hard to get in Germany, so I don’t consider them here in more detail. Or does someone here know where to get Ablecom chassis in Germany?
Has someone experience with the cooling of the harddrives in this chassis? The picture at Building Your Own NAS: Silverstone DS380 Chassis Tested, Reviewed show that there are no openings for the air flow on the backplane. It seems that the two big fans on the front left of the chassis blow the air from the left to the right over the harddrives. However, the picture don’t show any opening on the right side panel for the air to escape. I am a bit afraid that the drives get really hot in this chassis.
Now my spec is so I can run a lot of apps and VM’s. The wifi is useless and Truenas doesn’t support it. But it was cheaper than the non-wifi board at the time.
The case is good but more cramped than a standard mini tower. So it does take some planning and careful build. You really have to watch the disk temps and adjust airflow so it goes over the disks. It’s very easy to not have flow across the disks. So all internal fans push air out of the case in order to draw air from the front across the disks.
Now I manage about 43C on bad days with the disks. I could probably force more airflow across the disks by making sure the only draw is from the front and not leaks from around the case. The back IO could be better. Also the placement of the whole thing in the office would also bring down temps. Just a general airflow issue in the room.
If you don’t so much worry about noise levels then changing the fans for ones that can push more airflow is a good idea. I chose Noctua all around simple because I never want to hear the thing.
Now I still have room for a large graphics card if needed in the future. But I’ll probably extend the case at some point by attaching a JBOD for more disks and that slot will be for another SAS card.
The CSE-721 is not THAT good at cooling drives with a 120 mm fan behind a backplane. And the FlexATX PSU comes with a tiny 40 mm fan which might have or develop an unpleasant high pitch.
I’m afraid this is another case of “Pick any TWO”…
Backplanes are obstrusives, unless the drives are cooled from the side, as in Lian-Li PC-Q26 —but the backplane is not suitable for hot-swap (no capacitors) and… this wonderful case is no longer in production.
HIgh pressure fans make noise.
I’ve came across (the product page of) Inter-Tech NAS-8 but have no idea how good is drive cooling.
