SilverStone Technology Silverstone CS280 Premium Mini-ITX NAS case with Eight 2.5" hot-swappable Bays, SST-CS280B,Black

Product Information

Over the years, I’ve tried to test throughput using a number of different methods— crudely timing large file transfers early on and in most recent years using tools likely IOMeter. Each of the different NAS builds has been unique in its own way, but I like using the throughput to compare the builds from the past to the builds of today. I started off with the results from last year’s benchmarks, but omitted the 10Gb results since the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F only contains the four Gigabit interfaces. I have two primary concerns with regards to the performance of my NAS: throughput and power consumption. The throughput of the machine determines how useable it winds up being, and the power consumption typically determines how much it’s going to wind up costing me on a recurring basis. Naturally, there are untold other possible metrics that could be of interest; these are just the two that wind up of the most interest to me. Are there any benchmarks that I’ve overlooked? Please leave a comment for any metrics you’d like to see in future NAS builds. Power Consumption But for a Network Attached Storage, you want your cooling to be focused on your drives, especially if they’re HDDs. This is a small letdown. Be aware that premature failure is possible if you don’t get your thermals right. This is non-issue if you decide to go 100% SDD, which could prove quite costly given the current cost of NAND. The design of the Node 804 is based on the two-compartment cube design. It also competes with the Thermaltake Cores and the Corsair Carbide Air in that category. But it outshines them for a NAS build, with the ability to house 10 3.5″ drives. The hallmark Fractal attention-to-detail is present here, which sets it apart from the rest of our list. For beginners building their first NAS, this case is very forgiving.

While I opted for the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F, I liked that the Supermicro family of motherboards contained several bigger, badder versions of the motherboard also available for DIY NAS builders: At this point, some of our eagle-eyed viewers might recognize that the Silverstone CS280 is using the exact same platform as the Silverstone SG05/SG13. I was also looking at the DS380 originally, but once I saw than it supported mini-ITX mobos only, crossed it off my list -- I want more than one PCIe slot for future expansion. The brushed aluminum front with the silk screened logo looks fantastic. The brushing is very smooth and the logo is extremely crisp. I really enjoyed using the new user interface. I didn’t have any issues or concerns about FreeNAS’ legacy interface, but it was quite dated. Among the biggest improvements of the new UI is the improved dashboard. Being able to log into the DIY NAS: 2019 Edition and get a live peek at what was going on with the NAS was really helpful in the creation of this blog.

This one was built in 2018, but I reused the name from a previous build. This is the 8th FreeNAS unit I have built for home. Eight systems in ten years... I made some mistakes along the way, learned some and I try to share some of those lessons learned experiences here in the forum. I have even put together some hardware just to test things out a time or two...

Cable clearance is very tight but everything fits. The fully modular power supply is almost a must here. SilverStone CS280 Cable Clearance Because the SG05 supports a GPU in this same exact position, the case has the “extra room” for the card to run (both vertically and horizontally). Unfortunately, this is just wasted space in the CS280. Had they not reused the SG05 chassis, this case should have been made much smaller. Get CP11 sata cables for this case. It’s worth the investment. (Editor Note: I wish Silverstone would include a bunch to aid user experience!) And of course, the newer, weaker CPU would have a harder time running multiple VMs while doing NAS duties, so it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. If ever the metal-on-metal starts to become a squeaky nuisance, an issue that plagues a my old Lian-Li cases, it’s nice to know that this hinge can be lubricated.If I am to be perfectly honest with all of you. I was a little disappointed to discover that the SilverStone CS280 doesn’t support dedicated graphics cards. As a NAS user, if this case had supported a dedicated GPU for improved transcoding times, it would have been catapulted to the front of my list. As a result of this omission, I want to give the case a hard pass in the hopes that they will release a much improved version in the future. With the use of Silverstone’s SX500-G SFX PSU ( reviewed here), the installation of 5x 2.5″ HDDs wasn’t any easier. So what did I wind up deciding to do in 2019? Make it even smaller! I’ve always preferred making my NAS builds diminutive on account of my limited desk space. Additionally, what I saw as one of the biggest advantages in comparing a DIY NAS build to the off-the-shelf NAS offerings from folks like Drobo, QNAP, Synology, et al. is the fact that the off-the-shelf NAS machines are nearly always compact. In building my own NAS, I wanted to demonstrate that a DIY builder could do it better!

Also i3 or G46XX the difference between 2133 and 2400 ram is about 7-15% under load. It's not noticeable on higher end CPU's but on these it is. For a while I had three systems, all at once, at home but I am making some hardware changes right now and only one NAS is online. However, with a little bit of tenacity and a lot of elbow grease, installing these cables was a walk in the park by comparison. I’ve routinely built my NAS machines with around the bare minimum recommended amount of RAM, and I’ve yet to wish that I hadn’t. Last year’s NAS wound up being an exception because I wanted the machine to be able to host and power virtual machines. For this year’s NAS, I chose to buy 8GB of Crucial 2666Mhz ECC DDR4 RAM. While I’ve long advocated the use of non-ECC RAM in the building of DIY NAS machines, it made sense to use ECC since I’d already chosen to pay the premium of an enterprise-grade motherboard. Had I gone a different route with the motherboard, I would’ve been more than happy to use non-ECC RAM. Case, Power Supply, and Cables

Best NAS Cases – The Roundup

While the design might be tried and true, it does prove to be problematic a little later into the review. Cable clearance is very tight but everything fits. The fully modular power supply is almost a must here. Speaking of the proximity of the power supply and the drive cage, I also wound up deciding that instead of stretching and tugging power cables across the already crowded space in the drive cage, that I’d buy a SATA-to-Molex Power Adapter for providing power to the drive cage. This allowed me to route two of the separate accessories’ power cables from the power supply to either side of the case and keep the drive cage clear for just the SATA cables.