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

Product Information

Cable clearance is very tight but everything fits. The fully modular power supply is almost a must here.

The DS380 will support DTX mobos, which in theory can have two slots, but after a lot of searching, it turned out that there actually aren't any such mobos in existence, let alone storage-oriented ones. I’m not sure how detectable it is in the assembly’s video, but I ran into two problems immediately in the BIOS and then on the next boot. 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. The brushed aluminum front with the silk screened logo looks fantastic. The brushing is very smooth and the logo is extremely crisp. With the door open, we can see the 8x 2.5″ hot-swap bays, the front i/o, and a removable dust filter for the 2x 80mm fans.

SilverStone CS280 Overview

The ITX-sized GPU (6.7″/170.18mm x 4.7″/119.38mm) wouldn’t fit into the PCIe slot due to the positioning of the hot-swap bay. 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: Here we have the SFX-SX500-G power supply installed for a test fitting. For final installation, we rotated the PSU so the cooling fan is facing down. Either position should work fine as there is space above the PSU. With cable management being a challenge with small form factor cases we needed to use the space above the PSU for extra power cables. That is why we rotated the PSU fan facing down. SilverStone CS280 PSU Installed 1

Two key specifications to look at here is the limitation of 65mm CPU Cooler height. At this size, a standard Intel Xeon E3/ Xeon E heatsink will work fine, but it is a tight fit for any aftermarket coolers. Next, is the PSU depth specification at 100mm, this falls into the SFX PSU size. Thoughts? Please share them on the forums here and be sure to thank @Silverstone for making these products for our community. It’s a pretty clean look and the little SATA cables are so much easier to manage in both flexibility and organization.Should you desire a little more horsepower for 4k transcoding, emulation, or the occasional gaming session, this is no longer a possibility.

To buy a computer case suitable for a Network Attached Storage, you first need to consider the form factor you’re looking for. Depending on the number of drives and how long you plan to use the rig, you’ll want to consider cooling options thoroughly. As the drives are the focal point of your build, the one features you will be most concerned about are the drive bays. Form FactorOf course, you can always buy a preconfigured NAS. But where’s the fun in that? Building a custom Network Attached Storage allows upgradability. It allows for greater flexibility in terms of hardware. And there’s the satisfaction you get from setting up a diy rig, too. Without supporting a dedicated GPU, I guess this case could work for APU fans that are looking for a half-decent NAS chassis to stuff a 2200G or 2400G into. Even then, if the case was specifically designed for the use of an APU, it could have been even smaller.

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! mATX and ATX motherboards will be larger but may come in cheap. They also often increase the number of available SATA ports. If your case has enough space and you are adding many drives, then these may be a better choice. Overall, I’ve come to expect that a typical DIY NAS built today should be readily able of saturating a gigabit link during the read test, and this year’s NAS did not disappoint in this regard. I enjoyed monitoring the sequential throughput test in both my desktop machine’s task manager, but also in the new dashboard in the latest version of FreeNAS: There's also a good chance that I'll be able to completely eliminate a computer from the home inventory: I'm thinking of running OS X in emulation, which will allow me to avoid replacing my current MacBook Pro with another physical Mac (I've been less and less happy with Apple's HW offerings for years, and they've now crossed my red lines). The design of the case is largely unchanged with a well fitted hot-swap bay mounted to the front of the chassis as seen through the rear the case.

But aside from these two scenarios, you don’t need a GPU. A discrete card will only add more power consumption, noise, and heat to your system. It will also take up valuable PCIe slots and space on your rig. Sitting next to the Silverstone CS280 is my ugly betty, the Cooler Master Elite 110. It’s used as a Plex transcoding server and with an MSI GTX 760 ITX GPU and it doubles as a light gaming rig when guests come over for the occasional LAN party. Since we want to use all eight bays we used an LSI / Broadcom SAS 9300-8i RAID controller/ HBA card in the PCIe slot. SilverStone CS280 LSI SAS9300 8i Installed 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. 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