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Like everyone has mentioned, the heat generated for the hard drives are really bad, and unacceptable. While i'm planning to jimmy-rig fans on the non-fan side, i've noticed the temps of my hard drive went down once i left the front door open (Dropped from an unacceptable and damaging mid-50s to a reasonable mid-30s to low 40s). Ironically, i'm running a Core i7-6700k, and the temps have been pretty tame (so it's a non-issue). I also (like someone else noted) the Capacitors on the hard drive PCB are on the worst placement, that it's very easy to accidentally push/pull on a capacitor (easy to break). Also, The disk trays are made of flexible plastic. While it's too early to tell, i can totally imagine these being dried out with time/dust and turning brittle. They're not like the ones in a solid server. There are three important aspects to consider when selecting an NAS enclosure for your DIY build. You’ll want as small a size with as small a footprint as possible, you’ll want an efficient design with space for all your drives and other parts, and finally you’ll want it all to be well cooled since it will be running 24/7. With this in mind, it sure looks like Silverstone hit a triple home run with their DS380 NAS Chassis. It has two smaller fans at the front to bring air directly over the drives and a larger one at the rear, with a manual L/M/H speed controller for all three on the rear of the case. As a bonus, it uses a standard ATX power supply and has plenty of room for it.
Your mileage might vary, but I won’t buy the DS380 for a NAS again, unless it’s going to run full of SSDs or something (or I heavily mod the case). It’s OK for a small machine though without a bunch of disks (shame!) and that’s what I’ve re-purposed it for now. Oddly the drive cages are broken up by a divider on the third cage from the top – not a big deal, just not sure why Silverstone did that. It is easy to look past that quirk, but the drive cages themselves are a bit disappointing. I'm not going to replace the intake filter with 2 grills just yet - I'll see how things go. I am planning to regularly wash that filter. The Silverstone DS380 has a tiny footprint of just 211 x 360 mm and is 285 mm high. This isn’t much, but it still has room for a total of 12 drives, mITX motherboard, SFF PSU and three 120mm cooling fans. The rear fan area is even placed so it can accommodate AIO liquid cooling solutions such as the Silverstone TD03 and the three included fans have a maximum noise generation of 22dBA. Cooling: 3x Internal 120mm 1200rpm 22dBA system fans are included (2x intake fans; 1x exhaust fan); Can accomodate an entry-level liquid CPU cooling system (can handle systems with CPU of 95W TDP or above); Externally removable (magnetic) filters on the top and side panels.Naturally, that cash buys a purpose-built box which installs fast, runs quiet, sips power and saves space, at least compared to repurposing an old PC, yet the inner DIYer in us is itching to build a NAS. Going that route seems like an easy way to save some cash considering a small desktop could be used as a four or eight-bay server, and there is plenty to value in the extra flexibility and expansion of a custom setup.
If we’ll couple those 12 possible drives and think current 6TB 3.5-inch drives and 2TB 2.5-inch drives, we can get a total capacity up to 56GB possible storage inside this chassis and depending on setup more with external connections via eSATA or USB, or even iSCSI targets.
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I also added the "cardboard duct" modification that directs all injected air onto the drives and doesn't splash it into the rear, per https://blog.briancmoses.com/2017/04/creating-a-cooling-duct-for-the-silverstone-ds380.html Inverted the PSU as per suggestion from Dan, so that it helps to draw air through the case. The default for the PSU is to draw air from outside and bypass the case. The Be Quiet! fans are not too noisy, even at full speed. Eventually this NAS will reside in the basement where we won’t hear it at all, but for now it is very tolerable being on the first floor. It requires an SFX PSU, but there are some that have enough juice on the 12v rail (although avoid the SilverStone SX500-LG, it’s slightly too long) so that it’s not a major problem (although I would prefer standard ATX). Construction feels cheap with thin aluminium sides and plastic frontpieces. I was disheartened at this but it is surprisingly well constructed and solidly stable nevertheless.
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