276°
Posted 20 hours ago

SilverStone SST-DS380 - Case Storage Mini-ITX Computer Case, support 8x 3.5" or 2.5" Hot-Swap HDD Bays, lockable front door, black

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

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.

The front-panel shield helps prevent dust and other unwanted objects from entering the unit, but it also suffocates the drives slightly with less airflow. Cooling is a little hit and miss, especially considering there are three 120mm fan mount points. It's also pretty expensive. Bottom line We were bummed to find that the drive cages are not tool-less like those now used by Synology so the user must secure each drive using four screws. While that might seem like a minor inconvenience, it gets annoying fast when swapping drives in and out. Just having room for a lot of drives isn’t everything to a chassis, all those drives have to be cooled effectively as well. Silverstone took care of this with two 120mm fans on the side of the chassis blowing cold air in on the front mounted 3.5-inch drives and one 120mm rear exhaust fan to help get the hot air expelled. 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.The all-important power button is found here along with the reset button, though for a NAS you might not want to plug the reset button in. 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. So I got one to run low-power i3, C226 chipset mainboard and five HGST 3TB NAS drives. Unfortunately the cooling through the drives is pretty much non-existent. The two fans on the side draw air in but blow onto the hotswap chassis and nothing really draws air through it.

The last 4 drive bays are internal and only for 2.5-inch drives, which is perfect for a raid 10 setup as your system drive, or just another raid array at your disposal with smaller drives; there are almost endless possibilities with the Silverstone DS380. Really cheap fans, just replace with hi static pressure fans. I used Be Queit! Silent Wings3 high speed fans. While we're spoiled with cable management on cases now, I'm from the era of no cable management (early 2000s) and you did what you had (cut holes if you have to). This case to me was really cramped, tough to pass cables through (had to get extension cables for my short PSU cables). This considering there's many cables for the hard drives as well. Edit: I made some changes which have dropped the temps to around 40 degrees at idle (haven’t tested at load yet). The case has potential, but I still think it’s slightly too cramped and the airflow is not good enough. Rearranged the drives to leave a gap between each one, which basically limits the unit to 4 drives instead of 8I’ve replaced the case with my second choice Fractal Design NODE 304 and the drives at idle all sit at around 35 degrees.

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). x 3000 RPM Noctua 120mm NF-F12 industrialPPC IP52 PWM Fan (REAR OF CASE/HOT EXTRACTION). This fan's speed is set by the temp of the motherboard's chipset (not perfect, but seems to work). Plugged the rear and side fans directly into the PSU molex connector, rather than through mainboard and rear of hard drive chassisDesigned with poor air-flow that makes half the drives run overly hot (can be easily resolved by adding a small divider made of cardboard or plastic to direct the airflow. A simple search will offer plenty of how-to's. After adding the divider it kept consistently low temps even under heavy usage) With my components It is very silent even in a quiet room. You can only can hear it when it performs scrubs on the drives. Assembling your own NAS would net more performance as well because you'd be using a Celeron or Pentium over the Atom or other SoCs, while power shouldn't be a concern with Haswell using less than 30 watts at idle. As the cherry on top, open source software such as FreeNAS and enclosures like Silverstone's DS380 should make it less daunting to get started with your homebrewed eight-bay NAS server. The body of the Silverstone DS380 has been constructed of steel, while only the front door is made of aluminum. It measures 211mm wide, 285mm tall and 360mm long, giving it a 21.6L capacity. Although this is quite large compared to eight-bay models from QNAP and Synology, keep in mind they feature custom-built motherboards that take up considerably less space. Digital Cameras, camera lenses, Headsets, Speakers, Projectors, Home Entertainment (new and certified refurbished) 15 Days Returnable

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment