Small/quiet case needed for Atom D525 NAS

[alexellisuk]

This is my first thread, so hi to everyone at Overclockers. I'm looking for some help with my PC build.

I have built a PC to act as a Network Attached Storage server which I intend to run most of the day and possibly some of the night. It will be on a landing by bedrooms, so it must be very quiet.

The computer is currently housed in an old (large) ATX tower case with a noisy 300W PSU.

Here are the rough specifications:

• The board is a Gigabyte Intel Atom D525 which has a small CPU fan.
• I have two 5200rpm Samsung 2TB drives which will run in a RAID 1 array.
• The boot drive at the moment is a 7200rpm 250GB drive which I may replace with a 2.5" 5200rpm drive.

Current noise levels:

• The hard disks are quite noisy on spin-up, but settle after booting. Spin up is under 70W, idle/load ranges between 40-60W.
• The CPU fan is a bit whiny, but I don't think there's much I can do about that.
• As mentioned above the current PSU (from an old Dell P4) is noisy.

What I'd like to do is to find a case which would be as small and quiet as possible and still be able to house my 3 drives. An optical drive isn't important.

Has anyone built a similar quiet system?
Can anyone offer advice?

Thanks in advance,

Alex

 

[alexellisuk]

So, the million dollar question is, does it meet the sound level requirements? I've already looked at that case, but couldn't find any information on the sound levels.