SilverStone CS380 Lets You Combine a Gaming PC with a Home NAS

[btarunr]

Want a compact gaming PC that doubles up as a home storage? The CS380 "Compact Storage" case could be worth checking out. This micro-ATX case features an aluminium door (with noise-dampening material), steel frame, and ABS front panel bits. Behind the door are eight 3.5-inch drive caddies, with SATA backplanes, which let you hot-swap drives; and a standard 5.25-inch drive bay. Apart from the eight 3.5-inch caddies, the case has two internal 2.5-inch drive bays (for OS drives).

The eight 3.5-inch caddies are split between two drive cages of four; which are separated by room meant for long graphics cards. Its ventilation includes two 92 mm front intakes (located in the space between the drive cages); two 120 mm side vents, two 120 mm top vents (which can hold on to a 240 mm radiator); and a 120 mm rear exhaust. The case measures 212 mm x 435 mm x 444 mm (WxHxD).



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[ZoneDymo]

that looks so ermm old

 

[Uplink10]

I have to say this are really weird looking backplane, one backplane has 8 SATA ports and on this backplane are only 4 SATA drives. Why couldn't they just use SATA "extender" because this is very unpractical (8 SATA ports in and 4 out) and backplanes usually work like a switch meaning one input and more outputs to connect SATA drives to.

It would be better if they would made totally modular case in which you could choose how much space you will use for HDDs or for graphic card, you could fit in about 12 drives instead of just 8, if you would not use it as a gaming system and not use ODD.

 

[Dr_b_]

I have to say this are really weird looking backplane, one backplane has 8 SATA ports and on this backplane are only 4 SATA drives..

Yes that is strange, why are there 2 SATA ports per drive on the backplane. Can you cram in 2 SSD's in each slot perhaps?

There are only 2 power connectors per backplane though, at least that is distributed, but not sure if you need both with 4 drives or how its wired up, see the decoupling Capacitors there (hope they are decent brand).

How does painting the interior affect the EM profile of the case?

Building a NAS so can't wait to get my hands on one of these and check it out.

 

[Uplink10]

Building a NAS so can't wait to get my hands on one of these and check it out.

I would not, because:

-these backplanes are very weird and usually one input means more outputs, the speed of SATA's 6 Gbps is divided between drives, but HDDs are not as fast as SSDs

-it is easier to replace your own backplane and probably even cheaper than replacing this backplane that comes with this case

-you can get motherboard with 8 SATA ports which means that if you will not need more than 8 drives you will not even need backplanes and if you do you can buy additonal PCIe-SATA card or 1 backplane

I would use this motherboard for NAS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130851
It has 8 SATA ports and it costs only 73$.

 

[ZeDestructor]

A little bit of necro, but for those (still?) wondering why two SATA ports per bay: it's for dual-ported SAS drives. One SATA port per SAS port per drive, assuming the traces were wired right.

I found a very clear picture of the front side of the backplane that shows the second SAS port pins routing to the second SATA port on the very similar DS380. If you have dual-port SAS drives, you have the option, otherwise, ignore it

 

[Dr_b_]

A little bit of necro, but for those (still?) wondering why two SATA ports per bay: it's for dual-ported SAS drives. One SATA port per SAS port per drive, assuming the traces were wired right.

I found a very clear picture of the front side of the backplane that shows the second SAS port pins routing to the second SATA port on the very similar DS380. If you have dual-port SAS drives, you have the option, otherwise, ignore it

Good info. Backplanes are great for NAS since its easier to add/remove drives from the front of a case.

Why an AMD board won't be good for a FreeNAS system: need ECC RAM, and loads of RAM, a mATX x99 board with Xeon and 32+GB RAM, 10Gb NIC, HBA adapter, will be more suited for that purpose.

 

[Uplink10]

Why an AMD board won't be good for a FreeNAS system: need ECC RAM, and loads of RAM, a mATX x99 board with Xeon and 32+GB RAM, 10Gb NIC, HBA adapter, will be more suited for that purpose.

FreeNAS supports only ZFS and 8 GB of memory is a minium but that 1 GB RAM per 1 TB is I think half true. If only one person is going to use FreeNAS and will just be copying files once in a while and watching movies from FreenNAS then I presume you do not need to follow 1 GB RAM per 1 TB rule. But if you want to saturate the full speed and potential of the HDDs then I think you need to follow that rule.

Good info. Backplanes are great for NAS since its easier to add/remove drives from the front of a case.

Trouble will be getting new backplanes for this case because only the ones from SilverStone fit. And they better use quality backplanes and not cheap ones.

 

[Dr_b_]

FreeNAS supports only ZFS and 8 GB of memory is a minium but that 1 GB RAM per 1 TB is I think half true. If only one person is going to use FreeNAS and will just be copying files once in a while and watching movies from FreenNAS then I presume you do not need to follow 1 GB RAM per 1 TB rule. But if you want to saturate the full speed and potential of the HDDs then I think you need to follow that rule.


Trouble will be getting new backplanes for this case because only the ones from SilverStone fit. And they better use quality backplanes and not cheap ones.

From reading up on it, ZFS also benefits with more RAM for data-deduplication if you enable that feature.

 

[ZeDestructor]

Good info. Backplanes are great for NAS since its easier to add/remove drives from the front of a case.

Why an AMD board won't be good for a FreeNAS system: need ECC RAM, and loads of RAM, a mATX x99 board with Xeon and 32+GB RAM, 10Gb NIC, HBA adapter, will be more suited for that purpose.

AMD boards do support ECC (usually only unbuffered), it's just an undocumented feature so if you're going non-Opteron AMD, you'll spend a lot of time checking various forums for mobo compatibility (i.e: did they cheap out and skip tracing in the ECC lines from the DIMMs to the CPU or did they do it right?

On the subject of performance :

FreeNAS supports only ZFS and 8 GB of memory is a minium but that 1 GB RAM per 1 TB is I think half true. If only one person is going to use FreeNAS and will just be copying files once in a while and watching movies from FreenNAS then I presume you do not need to follow 1 GB RAM per 1 TB rule. But if you want to saturate the full speed and potential of the HDDs then I think you need to follow that rule.

Yup. If you only have very light usage (<10 clients), you can get away with a lot less. Of course, some slowdowns during writes will probably be apparent, but it's a home NAS... how much do you write?

From reading up on it, ZFS also benefits with more RAM for data-deduplication if you enable that feature.

Affects mostly writes. if you have very low writes (like in the case of a home NAS), you can ignore that - remember, a lot of the FreeNAS folks are building SANs for stuff like VM storage or centralised network storage for office.

Trouble will be getting new backplanes for this case because only the ones from SilverStone fit. And they better use quality backplanes and not cheap ones.

Shouldn't be an issue for harddrives (it's not like a phone's USB port where you plug in every day for charging...) They're usually designed for 100-200 mating cycles, which is plenty for a hotswap bay. Being simple side-locking plastic trays on the other hand is the iffier part... pulling a drive will wiggle it a bit (something you don't generally want to do), but then again, the only time you'd pull a drive is to swap a failing/decomissioned disk, so it's less of an issue than one would expect.

EDIT: If you want to do it real cheap and still have shittons of power (like I am), an old Dual 6-core Westmere server combined with am external HBA and enclosure is the best option. My DL380G6 already has dual X5675 (3.06GHz 6-core) CPUs and 48GB of RAM, next is to add an HBA and enclosure to NAS things up. It runs ESXi, so I can be scrimpy with FreeBSD (I plan to run mine straight with commandline management, none of that WebUI trash) and give it very little RAM (where 8GiB is very little...) and go from there. No dedup for me.. I'm usually very good with that...

 

[Dr_b_]

Finally built the NAS but went with ITX and a lian-li case. http://m34t.net/NAS it required a lot of custom cable work, and cabling and fitting everything in that case is very tight and difficult to work with. The guts are the X10SDV-8C-TLN4F from supermicro, with 128GB ECC RAM, and 8 HGST HDDs connected to a LSI 12GB HBA. Running BTRFS, ontop of dmcrypt in a raid10. So far so good.