Sorry for the double posting, I really couldn't avoid it this time.
Speaking of the enclosure, I went with the Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 (Revision B) which was suggested by member
NeverDie in
posting #8.
It is huge. It is black. It is really well built and sports a lot of acoustic dampening. Oh, did I mention that it is black?
On the top you'll find a thing they call “air chimney" which is marketing speak for a vent you can open to help convection or mount fans or a radiator under.
Even when opened it is dust filtered and doesn't make a noticable change in sound emission. This is a totally unscientific emotion based on my own ear's impression. Your ears may vary.
It's got a big green LED circled power button on the front top. Storage access on the logic board SATA ports is signalled with blinking red LEDs in between. Certainly leaves no doubt that this thing is ON.
Directly behind that there is a small hatch which is a little fiddly to open.
It reveals access to the so called front-panel USB ports and 3.5mm audio jacks. Since my motherboard doesn't have any audio or USB 3.0 I only connected the two USB 2.0 ports and they work fine for connecting a keyboard or thumb drive during initial installation of your software.
The Nanoxia comes with huge amounts of accessories weighing in at almost 600 grams on my IKEA kitchen scale. It includes mounting material like cable ties…
…as well as a metric ton of mounting screws for pretty much anything you could want to mount inside. Motherboard standoffs for Mini-ITX, µATX, ATX, etc. The power supply screws weren't missing I only had the PSU already mounted when taking the photos and I was too lazy to take them out again. Of the depicted SATA cables (57.5cm) you get six. They all look the same, so extrapolate from the one on the pic.
If you want to mount a bunch of 2.5" disks or SSDs you get a separate cage.
That one snugly slides into a 3×3.5" cage. This seems to be a new addition in the
Revision B. model. All cages as well as the drive slides are black painted metal.
The mounted µATX motherboard, sans cabling looks like this and really easy to fit in. There is plenty of space.
With all the components inside and most of the cabling tucked away on the backside it looks like this. I went with 1m SFF-8087 multi SATA cables for the HBA. This is longer than necessary. You'll get by with 70cm just fine. There are enough through holes with rubber thingies to traverse. Between the power supply on the bottom left and the hard drives on the right hand side is space for another 3×3.5" cage in which you can also mount the 6×2.5" SSD cage. This works fine with a PSU that is a maximum of 160mm in length. The two dangling SATA cables are just spare so I can easily find them should I add two more drives there.
Top right hand are 3×5.25" bays for optical drives and you can swap one of the bezels for using a floppy drive or other externally accessible drive. Since that server will be tucked away out of sight I won't make use of that. If you like you could fit a 5×3.5" cage in that space as well.
How is cooling with so many drives you may ask yourselves by now. I haven't added any fans to the ones that came with the enclosure. That means 2×120mm front intake fans directly in fron of the hard drives and a single 140mm exhaust fan on the top backside. I just disregard the mini fan on the CPU. This is surprisingly silent and certainly usable in an office environment, especially when stashed away in a closet.
Harddrive Temperature is around 42°C with the fans connected to the built in fan-controller at it's lowest setting. The motherboard sensors for CPU, peripherals and RAM range between 29°C and 37°C. You can shave of a degree or two by setting the fans to their maximum setting which makes them noticable. All emitted sounds are rather low frequency. No need to fear scaring your cat. Probably unless you captivate her inside the case which I don't recommend.
Power Consumption is pretty much where I expected it to be. With 6×HGST 4TB NAS disks, 3 fans, the 8GB SATA DOM, LSI HBA and the motherboard I get a reading of around 70 Watts idle.
That idle reading fluctuates ±3 Watts.
Peak power consumption is during bootup when the drives spin up. This gives me a peak of just below 150W. I tried setting the LSI HBA to staggered spin up of the drives to reduce that peak which did not materialize in a relevant reduction. When adding the last 3 drives I expect that peak to rise to 180W which is still within 50% load of the power supply. A 250W to 300W power supply would have been sufficient for this build but I wasn't able to find a fanless model in that range.
Regarding performance, I'm very happy with my choice. I can watch 3 Full HD video streams that require live transcoding in Plex and get about 60% load. Your milage may vary by a large margin, but this certainly works fine for me.
I haven't done a lot of VM testing yet, but some Linux and Solaris machines are here to come. I'll surely give OS X Server a shot and maybe I'm able to retire that trusty Mac mini then.
Disk speed is way beyond my needs. With a 6 disk RAID-Z2 configuration I almost get 400MB/s read/write with bonnie++. Given that I'll be accessing this mostly over Gbit ethernet that is plenty of room. Just for fun I did try the 6 disk stripe and easily topped 950MB/s but of course that is a ridiculous setup nobody should use.
Conclusion:
I'm a happy camper with that performance, low noise levels and power consumption of this build. Did I mention that it's black?
Thanks a bunch for bearing with my prolonged ramblings. I hope this helps others in building their own boxes. You folks certainly did help me a lot with your suggestions and questioning of my choices.
MacLemon