This is basically a continuation of this thread, "Haswell vs Avoton for Mini-ITX NAS?". My goal was overall physical downsizing, and this is one piece in a bigger project. I took a lot of inspiration from this thread, "Nitro's - Condo=Home Data Center Replacement".
The old system was built into a SuperMicro SC836A-R1200B. No complaints with this case, other than the size. At the time I bought it, I thought I'd be forever growing my storage capacity... but I realized I don't need ridiculous amounts of storage, and can do what I need with six 3TB drives. So the case became serious overkill. Original CPU was an E3-1230 (v1/Sandy Bridge) and motherboard was a Supermicro X9SCF+-L. The board and CPU were great, but I had to replace them in the move to mini-ITX.
The use of the U-NAS NSC-800 chassis dictated the use of a mini-ITX motherboard. As per the Haswell vs Avoton thread I started, that ASRock C2750D4I motherboard looked perfect for my needs, but issues with the built-in Marvell SATA chipset scared me away. That left me looking for (1) a mini-ITX motherboard that (2) supported ECC memory and (3) had IPMI including IP-KVM. As far as I can tell, the ASRock E3C22xD4I boards are two of the very few that meet this criteria.
Full component list:
Since everyone loves pics... Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.
The obligatory shot of all the new gear still in packaging. Note that I recycled an IBM M1015 HBA, memory, 2x OS SSDs, and 3.5 data drives from the old system.
A few shots with just the motherboard mounted in the chassis. The official amount of clearance in this chassis is 47mm. I measured that myself, but confirmed it via email with U-NAS. The height of the Noctua NH-L9i with fan is advertised as 37mm. As you can see from the pics, there is very little room left over. And in fact, I don't think you'd want your fan to butt right up against the chassis anyway. The fan needs some empty space from which to draw air. My point is, unless you have a passive heat sink (e.g. ASRock C2750D4I), I wouldn't go any taller than the Noctua.
The NSC-800 ships with a mini-ITX sized sheet of plastic, complete with screw holes. The idea is to keep the bottom of the motherboard insulated from the chassis (i.e. avoid a potential short). The ATX power connector from the PSU wasn't long enough to reach the motherboard. I had an extender laying around. But it's one of those 24-pin to 20-pin converters. Based on my short observation period, the board seems perfectly stable on a 20-pin ATX power connection.
I used this thread, "ITX NAS - case review and build log", from OCAU as a guide and inspiration for my build. Like me, that poster had dual 2.5" drives in a case that was presumably only designed for one. I had this handy standoff kit from Parts Express already on-hand (dabbling with DIY audio amps is another hobby). You can see he used a piece of cardboard to protect his HBA from shorting against the bottom 2.5" drive. A ghetto solution by his own admission. I won't say my solution isn't ghetto, but I think it's a little cleaner: I coated the overlapping part of my bottom drive with electrical tape. (I think my drive's housing is probably plastic anyway, so the tape probably isn't necessary. But just to give an idea to others who might want to do a similar build.)
Oops, two widths of electrical tape would have been sufficient!
A couple shots of everything in place.
I finished putting all this together Saturday afternoon. It's been absolutely fine since. Hard drive temps have actually gone down since moving into this chassis: they all hover right around 30 degrees C. Idle CPU temps linger in the 30 to 35 degrees C range.
I ran prime95 for about 90 minutes. The hottest any CPU core got was 93 degrees C. A little too hot for my comfort, but I believe that's within spec (anyone know what the thermal limits are for Haswell Xeons?). A longer prime95 run and/or hotter ambient conditions certainly would have pushed the temperature higher still. I might disable a core just to be extra-safe. I have way more computing power than I need, and I can't conceive of a realistic situation where the CPU would ever enter 100% utilization for any prolonged period of time.
A few more AC power consumption numbers (again, measured with Kill-a-Watt, 120V mains):
Everything but data drives, idle CPU: 30-32 Watts (that is, motherboard, CPU, dual SSDs, M1015 HBA)
Everything including six 3.5" 5400 RPM drives, idle CPU, idle disks: 66-67 Watts
Same as above but running mprime, idle disks: 138 Watts
All in all, I'm pretty happy with this build.
The old system was built into a SuperMicro SC836A-R1200B. No complaints with this case, other than the size. At the time I bought it, I thought I'd be forever growing my storage capacity... but I realized I don't need ridiculous amounts of storage, and can do what I need with six 3TB drives. So the case became serious overkill. Original CPU was an E3-1230 (v1/Sandy Bridge) and motherboard was a Supermicro X9SCF+-L. The board and CPU were great, but I had to replace them in the move to mini-ITX.
The use of the U-NAS NSC-800 chassis dictated the use of a mini-ITX motherboard. As per the Haswell vs Avoton thread I started, that ASRock C2750D4I motherboard looked perfect for my needs, but issues with the built-in Marvell SATA chipset scared me away. That left me looking for (1) a mini-ITX motherboard that (2) supported ECC memory and (3) had IPMI including IP-KVM. As far as I can tell, the ASRock E3C22xD4I boards are two of the very few that meet this criteria.
Full component list:
- Motherbard: ASRock E3C224D4I
- CPU: E3-1230v3
- PSU: Seasonic SS-300M1U
- OS drives: two Intel SSDs
- HBA: IBM M1015
- HSF: Noctua NH-L9i
- RAM: 2x4GB Kingston 1.5V ECC
- Data drives: six total 3TB 3.5" 5400 RPM (three each WD Red and Hitachi)
- Case fans: replaced stock with Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E, and a Scythe Gentle Typhoon (forget the exact model number)
Since everyone loves pics... Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.
The obligatory shot of all the new gear still in packaging. Note that I recycled an IBM M1015 HBA, memory, 2x OS SSDs, and 3.5 data drives from the old system.
A few shots with just the motherboard mounted in the chassis. The official amount of clearance in this chassis is 47mm. I measured that myself, but confirmed it via email with U-NAS. The height of the Noctua NH-L9i with fan is advertised as 37mm. As you can see from the pics, there is very little room left over. And in fact, I don't think you'd want your fan to butt right up against the chassis anyway. The fan needs some empty space from which to draw air. My point is, unless you have a passive heat sink (e.g. ASRock C2750D4I), I wouldn't go any taller than the Noctua.
The NSC-800 ships with a mini-ITX sized sheet of plastic, complete with screw holes. The idea is to keep the bottom of the motherboard insulated from the chassis (i.e. avoid a potential short). The ATX power connector from the PSU wasn't long enough to reach the motherboard. I had an extender laying around. But it's one of those 24-pin to 20-pin converters. Based on my short observation period, the board seems perfectly stable on a 20-pin ATX power connection.
I used this thread, "ITX NAS - case review and build log", from OCAU as a guide and inspiration for my build. Like me, that poster had dual 2.5" drives in a case that was presumably only designed for one. I had this handy standoff kit from Parts Express already on-hand (dabbling with DIY audio amps is another hobby). You can see he used a piece of cardboard to protect his HBA from shorting against the bottom 2.5" drive. A ghetto solution by his own admission. I won't say my solution isn't ghetto, but I think it's a little cleaner: I coated the overlapping part of my bottom drive with electrical tape. (I think my drive's housing is probably plastic anyway, so the tape probably isn't necessary. But just to give an idea to others who might want to do a similar build.)
Oops, two widths of electrical tape would have been sufficient!
A couple shots of everything in place.
I finished putting all this together Saturday afternoon. It's been absolutely fine since. Hard drive temps have actually gone down since moving into this chassis: they all hover right around 30 degrees C. Idle CPU temps linger in the 30 to 35 degrees C range.
I ran prime95 for about 90 minutes. The hottest any CPU core got was 93 degrees C. A little too hot for my comfort, but I believe that's within spec (anyone know what the thermal limits are for Haswell Xeons?). A longer prime95 run and/or hotter ambient conditions certainly would have pushed the temperature higher still. I might disable a core just to be extra-safe. I have way more computing power than I need, and I can't conceive of a realistic situation where the CPU would ever enter 100% utilization for any prolonged period of time.
A few more AC power consumption numbers (again, measured with Kill-a-Watt, 120V mains):
Everything but data drives, idle CPU: 30-32 Watts (that is, motherboard, CPU, dual SSDs, M1015 HBA)
Everything including six 3.5" 5400 RPM drives, idle CPU, idle disks: 66-67 Watts
Same as above but running mprime, idle disks: 138 Watts
All in all, I'm pretty happy with this build.