Small case for file server

Scottland

Scottland

Scottland

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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North Wales
Hi there,

I'm upgrading my NAS solution to be using a small ITX (could go upto mATX) solution. What I'm looking for is a small case, preferably steel with accommodation for 4 3.5" drives and one 2.5" SSD. It also needs to be well suited to running 24/7 so reasonably decent cooling and very quiet as it will be situated in my office. I like the idea of having front mounted removable bays for the hard drives, but I'm not sure if this would compromise the acoustics or not?

Also for the PSU - would need to take a PSU big enough to power it all, so not sure if a picoPSU would be up to the task?


Thanks
 
PaulB said:
Unless you are particularly keen to build your own, an HP Microserver sounds pretty much a perfect fit.
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On the face of it yeah, but a friend of mine has one of these and it doesn't quite seem to have enough grunt to stream HD TV (via DVB-S2) to other clients.
 
Having just measured the space it needs to fit in, the Fractal 304 wont fit.

I have 25cm width max, which means in reality I only have 20cm to allow some room either side. 30cm depth, and 40cm height - so need to look at some tower type designs I think.
 
CFI A7879 Mini-ITX NAS/Server Case

I've got one, it has 4 removable drive trays behind a door on the front, each locks individually and the door itself locks too. PSU is perfectly fine for my i3, SSD and 4 3TB drives plus raid card.

It comes with a mounting bracket for an additional 2.5" drive internally, depending on the configuration of your motherboard you may be able to get a second 2.5" on the same bracket. I can't on mine because my RAM is too high to allow it to fit.

Depending on your processor you will probably need a low profile cooler, the stock one with my i3 was too tall to fit under the drive cages.
 
Thanks for that, it looks ideal. What is the PSU like noise wise?

Low profile cooler could be an issue as I'm looking at passive bay trail d motherboards.
 
The new ones would be fine I'd imagine, but they're not as attractively priced. If I recall, they're over 350? I think this build will be around 150 with case, motherboard and ram. I already have a spare SSD.
 
Scottland said:
On the face of it yeah, but a friend of mine has one of these and it doesn't quite seem to have enough grunt to stream HD TV (via DVB-S2) to other clients.
Click to expand...

if you are transcoding then it'll manage one, just about. If you are streaming to devices that will do the decoding themselves, totally different story.
 
Can't comment from personal experience, as I've not used it. But he tells me its not perfect and doesn't quite work well. So I'd rather build something with a bit of headroom.
 
Scottland said:
Thanks for that, it looks ideal. What is the PSU like noise wise?
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It's quiet enough, I used to have it sat next to a TV and I rarely noticed the sound. Certainly nothing that was ever distracting or anything.

Scottland said:
Low profile cooler could be an issue as I'm looking at passive bay trail d motherboards.
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You can't have everything, especially given that the NAS case market is so limited. In the space constraints you have you're not going to get a case big enough to allow full sized coolers, and even if you did with passive cooling you'd have airflow issues that might reduce the life of your drives.

Servers are usually hidden in server rooms for a reason! If you want to use this as a HTPC or something then you need to save up and buy a separate system for that, and put your server under the stairs or something.
 
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I dont think those celerons are any significant upgrade. Infact passmark benchmarks would suggest they are slower than the n54l microservers. Unless they are fantastic overclockers, i cant imagine a j1800 would give you any decent headroom over the N54L at all.. I would imagine something i3/i5 or equivalent based server would be more suitable, if a microserver isnt up to the job.

Also the j1800 boards seem rather limited on expandability as well - that gigabyte board only has two sata ports for example - you would need an pcie 4x port sata card if you want your 5x drives.
 
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Possibly if I went that route I would try to get a J1900 or preferably a J2900 but I'm also considering a Celeron 1037u board, as my HTPC uses one of these and I know it will work for my usage.

There seems to be limited stock (and no cashback) on the N54L microservers at the moment
 
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Scottland said:
Here's a pic of one of the boards in question:
http://m.gigabyte.com/fileupload/product/2/4881/9578.jpg
Click to expand...

Then you'd be fine with that, it's smaller than the low profile cooler I have on my i3 and that fits pretty well.

With the flat-lying laptop style RAM you should be able to fit a second 2.5" drive on the bracket if that floats your boat, you'll need a splitter for the extra SATA power though - the PSU only has enough connectors for 5 drives.
 
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