[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Alex Carver]

That case is guaranteed not to be quiet.  The power supply fans are too
small.  I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with very
large diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing as
silent as possible.  My current daily driver computer has three 120 mm
fans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU heat
pipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in the power
supply.  All of this is in a mid-tower case.  I almost never hear the
machine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my ear up
next to it.  That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as well since
they'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence using 5400
RPM drives).  The case doesn't have to be small, I have plenty of
physical space for a big tower.  I just need low power, near silence,
and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists individual
indicators for drive activity/health.

On 2018-12-02 10:52, Phil Turmel via Ale wrote:
> You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
> of iTX mobos.  Cheap and power-efficient.  I ran one like that for
> several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case.  In that one, I populated the
> single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
> could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.
> 
> It was this enclosure:
> 
> http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm
> 
> On 12/1/18 10:30 PM, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
>> and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go.  So they're
>> yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
>> DIY.  A hybrid of the two options.  The case is nice, though, and has
>> activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
>> hard to find with ordinary cases.  They're using a fanless motherboard
>> so there's at least a little noise reduction.  Looks like possibly an
>> Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
>> populated with eight drives.  The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
>> bay is $1,350.
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