recommendations for silent nas chassis - 10+ drives?

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Jannis Jacobsen

Active Member
Mar 19, 2016
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Preferably if I had the funds, I’d need 12x sas ssd’s for io performance, or even epyc powered nvme chassis filled with nvme drives

I’m not using this for filestorage, but shared iscsi storage for vm’s.
And config manager +++ likes io :)

-j
 

Ixian

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Oct 26, 2018
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Following on from my purchase of the rather lovely MS08 (8 hot-swap bays, mATX) I noticed that InWin had expanded their tower chassis lineup with some bigger and beefier models supporting up to 12x3.5" HDDs (plus room for 2.5" SSDs)

InWin IW-PLV Tower
Looks like a nice chassis. Though on the large size, especially if you are looking for an mATX build. The IW-PLV reminds me a little of the SM SC-743 I have, which fits 13 3.5/2.5 drives with the 5-drive bay addon. The problem with these "desktop" chassis is they are essentially 4u servers turned on their side with a top plate and bottom feet added. In other words, they are pretty deep. Fairly narrow set of use cases out there where you can fit a 4u server but only if it is vertical. Not no use cases, just few.

Personally I'd never go back to a non-hot-swap chassis ever again, mostly due to Fun had with identifying and/or replacing hard drives.
I'd still argue that hot-swap isn't really necessary (whether you want it is another thing) for most home-server use cases and the problem you describe is easily and cheaply remedied with a label maker :) Heck I even labeled my drives on the server I have with hot-swap (the above mentioned 743). Saves you a lot of grief. Or even just use masking tape and a Sharpie, doesn't have to be fancy, just legible. Put the labels where you can easily read them with the case open and you are done.

As for downtime, if zero down time is that critical for you (in a home?) then you have bigger considerations besides hot-swap for drives to account for. Myself, I can't think of a time in my house where I couldn't schedule down time for 15-30 minutes some weekend morning, etc. if I needed to, and I run all kinds of everyday-use stuff on my servers.

I think taking a few minutes to label your drives (I use the last 5 digits of the serial+dev id) and finding a case that isn't a complete pain to work with is all I need. I'm the opposite of you, in my house I may never buy hot-swap again :)
 
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ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
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Santa Monica, CA
If you want to consider the Fractal Design R5, it fits 8 x 3.5". Some homelabbers bought spare 5 x drive cages and were able to stuff 15 drives. Personally I feel iffy about putting a drive cage where the 5.25" cage or bottom 140mm fan goes since there's no cooling. You can however buy a 140mm fan to 4 x 3.5" bracket from Mountain Mods and mount it in the bottom 140mm fan location to bring your total to 12 x 3.5" drives.

The Fractal Design R6 can fit 11 x 3.5" drives with extra drive sleds you can buy from the Fractal Design spare parts store. It can actually fit 12 sleds but the 12th sled doesn't have enough clearance for a 3.5" drive to be actually mounted. You'd want to make sure your PSU is shorter than 170mm or so or your PSU cables are going to be crammed if you use the bottom 140mm fan mount for drives. Good thing there are plenty of quality 150mm PSUs at a reasonable price. The nice thing about the R5 is that it has 2 x 5.25" Flexbays so you can mount 8 more 2.5" drives there.

Supposedly you can fit 12 x 3.5" drives with extra sleds in the Fractal Design S2. The S2 is just a stripped down R6 so you'd be converting it back to drive tower layout... you'd need to buy the R6 sleds though. I'm looking at the S2 for my next home NAS build, but I haven't gotten confirmation from anyone who has actually tried fitting 12 sleds with drives.
 
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madbrain

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Jan 5, 2019
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For $70 there is this one :
COOLER MASTER HAF series RC-912-KKN1 Black ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Newegg.com
Will handle 6 x 3.5 internally, 1 x 3.5 in the front, plus 3 x 3.5 also in the front, by converting the 5.25 bays with cheap brackets . That's 10 x 3.5 . Also has space for 2 internal SSDs.
You could cram a couple more drives if you get an internal SATA backplane in the 5.25 drive bays, but that will cost more than the case itself.

You can use 120mm fans, so low RPM. Will be very quiet. I have a similar HAF XM (no longer available).