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.
Here’s what I changed:
- Rearranged the drives to leave a gap between each one, which basically limits the unit to 4 drives instead of 8
- Inverted the PSU as per suggestion from Dan, so that it helps to draw air through the case. The default for the PSU is to draw air from outside and bypass the case.
- Plugged the rear and side fans directly into the PSU molex connector, rather than through mainboard and rear of hard drive chassis
So I’m building a NAS (running Fedora Server) and thought that the Silverstone DS380 case looked great. It has 8 hot-swappable SATA bays, claims decent cooling with filters, neat form factor.
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).
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.
As a result, many of the drives run around 65 degrees Celsius at idle (tested overnight) which is already outside of the drives’ recommended temperature range of 0-60 degrees.
I’ve replaced the case with my second choice Fractal Design NODE 304 and the drives at idle all sit at around 35 degrees.
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 only downside I’ve found so far is the lack of hot-swap, but my NAS isn’t mission-critical so that’s not a deal breaker for me.
Your mileage might vary, but I won’t buy the DS380 for a NAS again, unless it’s going to run full of SSDs or something (or I heavily mod the case). It’s OK for a small machine though without a bunch of disks (shame!) and that’s what I’ve re-purposed it for now.
-c
54 thoughts on “Building a Mini-ITX NAS? Don’t buy a Silverstone DS380 case.”
I have one of the DS380 cases with 5 disks loaded in the hot swap bays. Mine doesn’t seem to have this heat problem, the disks sit around 35-40 degrees (and that’s when the air temperature is around 30 degrees!).
There is a big rear fan which draws air outwards, plus I oriented the PSU so that it also exhausts air out of the top vent. I think the internals get decent airflow as a result.
Was your DS380 not configured that way?
I’ll have to check. Are you running the two side fans off the hot-swap chassis and back fan off the mainboard?
I haven’t had heat related problems (only running five drives). However, the case is very, very cramped. I wouldn’t recommend buying it based on that alone.
Yeah, I’d agree. It has lots of potential, if it was just slightly larger and had better cooling.
However, I re-arranged the drives to leave a gap between each one and also inverted the power supply so that it was also drawing air out of the case (instead of from outside which is the default) as per suggestion from Dan. This has reduced the temperatures to about 40 degrees at idle which is a huge improvement. I haven’t tested this under load, however.
Chris, try inserting a 5×10″ cardboard or stock paper barrier to force the intake air to blow directly over the drive cage. I had some HGST 7200RPM NAS drive that got HOT (45-48c) underload. Doing this ez mod fixed it. Temp down to 34-36C during load.
Put that on the side to stop the air bypassing the side of the cage? Got a photo? Thanks!
hello – I’ve been imagining if I might be able to put a PINE64 to good use around the home, and so far I’m predicting I’m going to need at least half a dozen of them! Sounds like a few fun weekends ahead…
what bout the ability/opportunity to use a PINE64 to run a small NAS operating system (and connect it up
to a few USB hard drives)? Or is this not a good use-case, perhaps because a SATA connection is needed?
I think you really need some sata to make it useful.
Hi Chris,
I’m having similar temperature issues with my build (DS380 with Asrock C2750D4I and 8x6TB WD Red Pro drives).
Did you ever figure out how to make the case any better?
R.
One of the best things I did was to run all three fans directly off a 12v molex connector and not off the mainboard or backplane of the SATA housing unit. You should also keep the case lid on to help it pull the air through. I also spaced out my drives so that there was a gap between each one. Even so it’s not great, but better than it was and mostly useable. I’m not sure what you can do if you have more than 4 or 5 drives – you probably need to replace the 120mm fans with ones that provide better airflow like maybe these:
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/27626/be-quiet-silent-wings-2-120mm-pwm-fan
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/6223/noctua-nf-p12-120mm-fan
The key is a good 120mm fan on extraction duties. I have a Noctua Industrial 3000RPM pwm fan doing this, silent most of the time, but if heat starts, it gets the job done.
Agreed. I have been looking at the Noctua and Be Silent! non-PWM fans. Given you said it automatically kicks in, I assume that you’re running the PWM version? How are you powering it, because I found I was better off going directly from 12v rather than through the mainboard. That’s why I was going to go for the manual version.
PWM straight into the motherboard and letting the motherboard decide.
Interesting, thanks I’ll check it out.
i have this case and had with busy drives hit the 60°C mark (8x 4TB Toshiba 7200rpm). idle ~40-45°, busy 50-60°C. real bad cage/airflow design.
put in some cardboard to direct the airflow of the 2 fans on the side through the cage and voila: now idle 30-35 / busy 34-37 (after 10 min copy from disk to disk)
cpu temps will rise since the airflow is not going sideways over the cpu anymore.
see picture where cardboard is located:
http://i.imgur.com/YIGlW4q.jpg
also heard people drilling more holes in the cage and removing the plastic for the pcie card to let more air vent through the hdd-cage.
Nice, thanks! It would be really good if Silverstone listened to this though and released a fixed version – people shouldn’t have to fix up their poor design like this. Out of the box, the case really isn’t suitable for that it’s advertising.
For NAS that sit e.g. in a basement or closet where sound is less of an issue, you should really consider some Orion Fans or similar industrial type fans. They have a whole product line of fans specially designed for high static pressure operations, perfect for forcing air through filters and cramped drive cages. You can get most of them either for 110AC power(!) OR various DC levels, and you can get filters and filter cages etc. The bigger high static pressure fans are NOT silent, but holy shait they move air at pressures that other fans cannot touch.
Not sure I can embed links here, but orionfans has a decent webpage for their products, just look for high static pressure.
http://orionfans.com/products/high-static-pressure
There are many places you can order them, such as Mouser.com.
Thanks. Unfortunately it sits next to me on the desktop, so I’ve looking at some silent fan options that still move lots of air like maybe Noctua.
Hi Chris, check out my build with this case at https://pcpartpicker.com/b/KyGfrH.
I have 4 HDD in there at the moment with the typical layout, no gaps (from bottom to top), and the temperatures do get pretty hot as well–42deg C average (idle) with upwards of 54deg C. These are WD green/blue, so they do they get hot. But for my WL drive, it’s a lot cooler at the range of 35deg C and 50deg C tops. Might pick up a UNAS-800 in the future and see how it performs compare to this case.
Nice. One of the things that helped a lot was turning the PSU around so that it was drawing the air through the case (instead of bypassing it). Good luck with the case!
Thanks, Chris. When you say “drawing air through the case”, that means all my fans are pushing air inside. Where would it exhaust in this case? Wouldn’t that build up heat?
By drawing a through, I mean you have fans at the front which suck air into the case from outside, and fans at the back which blow the air from the inside to the outside. Thus, air is drawn through the case from outside the front, through the case and out the back.
The PSU is designed to bypass the case. You are meant to put the PSU in upside-down, so that it does not draw air from inside the case, but from outside it. If you look, there are holes on the top of the case and the intake side of the PSU sits up against this so that the fan draws air from directly outside, through the PSU and out the back of the PSU. If you turn the PSU up the other way so that the intake is inside the case, the fan will draw air from inside the case and then out through the PSU.
This will help your machine to draw air through the case at the cost of the PSU drawing slightly warmer air through it.
That makes more sense now. It appears my configuration is already like that. Two 120mm side-fans blowing into the drive cage; One 120mm fan blowing out to the rear; and the PSU is blowing upwards and outside of the chassis. I am thinking about doing an extra mod for extra measures, which will include drilling large holes (or many small holes) on the drive cage (fan side) for the air to enter the cage. Just in case here are my current temps (at a kind of idle stage).
http://i.imgur.com/Zx9YkDz.png
Also, might want to check out this new CS280: http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=668&area=en
Maybe Silverstone is listening to us consumers…
Yikes, wish I can edit my post. Looks like the CS280 is for 2.5″ drives. :/
Hehe, all good. Thanks for the link all the same! 🙂
I built a FreeNAS box with a DS380 and 8 x WD Red Pro 6TB drives and am finding it impossible to keep the drives cool.
When I first built it, the drives got stupidly hot (> 70C) so I got better fans and set them full-speed all the time, and also did the cardboard case mod. This improved things, but the drives still run hot, particularly the ones in the middle.
Sample disk temperatures:
ada8: 41
ada7: 44
ada5: 43
ada4: 43
ada3: 49
ada2: 51
ada1: 49
ada0: 45
I’m currently shopping for a case with better airflow.
R.
i have same case… very difficult to install 10GbE card
very regret to having this case.
I have yet to find one 8-bay that has the look and built of the DS380. Two alternatives are U-NAS NSC-800 and Norco ITX-S8, but they have their own problems as well. If not, full rack servers are the way to go.
So I took an hour and drilled holes (40 pinky-size) through the drive cage on the double-fan side. Very bad idea. Not only does it weakens the structure of the drive cage a little more, there is no benefit that I can tell. The holes I drilled are blocked by the side of the plastic HDD brackets, so air is pretty much hitting a wall still. Also the holes made it more difficult to swap HDDs because the creases hit the plastic HDD brackets. TL;DR, do not drill holes.
A working solution is the cardboard method as done here, http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31967.msg364791#msg364791. The idea is to direct the airflow straight to the drive cage using a cardboard as a wall, as air tries to escape through gap between the double-fans and drive cage.
I have 5 HDD in there, a mix of WL, and WD RED, GREEN, BLUE drives. the temps were 43-47C on idle, 51C at max use. The GREEN and BLUE drives are the main source of the heat. With the mod, I was able to bring them down to 39-44C on idle. This is with the double-fans using the Noctua low-noise adapters. I think I can bring down the temps by taking out the low-noise adapters, but it will be noisier.
Apparently replacing the grill is the biggest improvement for decreasing the drive temps:
– [DIY NAS: 2017 Edition – Brian’s Blog](https://blog.brianmoses.net/2017/03/diy-nas-2017-edition.html)
I use this Case and have no Temp issue.
I use only 5400 RPM Drives. If you use High Professional with 7200 RPM my Temps would exceed +40°C.
My 5400 RPM have idle Temp of 28-29°C on 22°C Roomtemp. On usage the Drives get arround 31-33°C. The Airflow is pretty OK for this kind of Drives. I use the WD RED None PRO with 5400 RPM.
In my other Server I use the WD Red PRO with 7200 RPM they have 40°C on idle or use I don’t get them any cooler cause of the high RPM!
Cool, fully populated with 8 drives?
-c
I have just used the cardboard baffle to drop my temps by avg 15degs. Was super hot doing parity check on my UnRaid server.
Now full blast all 8 drives spinning and r/w operations for 12 hours results in temps maintaining at 35degs for 7200rpm seagates, 5400rpm seagtaes at 30degs, 7200rpm Samusungs at 30 degs.
Idle/Streaming <25 degs
Very happy with this
I have a DIY builder friend building SilverStone DS380 with AsRock C2750D4I and two other friends using this setup with 6-to-8 SSD drives. As I understand from the comments, excessive temp complaints are generally because of rotating HDDs. I know it will be quite an investment but if the people complaining of high HDD temp can try SSD drives, IMHO problem will be solved.
Awesome, although I kinda wish Silverstone would just fix it in a new release…
Just want to update:
I took out the large side dust filter and put in two 120mm standard fan grill. My HDD temperatures are now hovering at 36-41. Also didn’t need the cardboard mod anymore. This is with 6 HDD in there (one RED failed few weeks ago). Temperatures used to be 46+.
Hallo i have the silverstone DS380 and it works very good for me my set is an Asrock C2550I with 2x8GB Kingston ecc reg and i have 4 wd red 4TB and 2 seagate Iron Wolf 6TB and 1 Samsung Evo 240Gb System is Windows Server 2016 essential it works Fine all HDD will have 24C*-44C* cpu 26C* Mainboard 39C* in use is the 3 default Fan and one Slot Fan and a small cpu Fan
The only trouble i have Why the mainboard have 39C* and the cpu 26C*
The mainboard chips probably run hotter than the CPU with its heatsink and fan. Seems fine to me.
I’ve been looking for a decent NAS chassis and came across this thread. Great info. I went to the Silverstone website and found they now have a CS380. It looks like it has fixed all the issues mentioned here! Looks great. Notice that the HDD fans are now mounted directly to the HDD bays instead of to the case, fixing the directional airflow issue. It comes at a great price too! Very excited to try it.
https://silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=709&area=en
Hi Tim, cool, although that new case looks much bigger though?
The CS380 also (obviously) supports ATX motherboards and PSUs. Awesome! I can keep my old intel ATX board working for a while longer. I can get it for $130, which is cheaper than a single 4 x 3.5 drive hotswap bay for 3 x 5.25 bay I was eyeing off from icycool. Bargain!
Hi Chris. Yeah you’re right. If you need the smaller form factor, this won’t do. Size isn’t an issue for me luckily. I just want an economical way to get an 8 x 3.5inch hotswap backplane. The Icycool 4 bay backplanes cost $140 each, and you need a case with 6 x 5.25 inch bays to fit them into.
Having the flexibility to repurpose old ATX gear is great too. Not many ITX boards or SFX PSUs lying around without a purpose, but plenty of ATX stuff.
I have the DS380 case and have gone through periods of hating it but now I think it’s freaking awesome. Cable management is a mess and you need to be really careful about trying to squeeze a large CPU cooler in there.
I have a quad core xeon with an arctic passive cooler. I set up the two side fans (replaced with Noctua PWM) to ramp up based on CPU load. Under load my CPU gets to 55-60°c.
When Freenas is being read/written it heats the CPU up, (because of compression) which triggers the cooling fans which blows onto the 8 hard drives. It’s a bit of a hack but it appears to be working.
Nice. What are your HDD temps like though? The main problem for me didn’t seem to be CPU heat, but the fact that the air flow across the drives is trying to be blow into the side of the HDD cage, which doesn’t really work…
Have you tried a water cooler? Made a huge difference on my hd’s temps.
No I didn’t try one, I thought it’d be too small a space for that radiator.
Well, I gotta say that with all the operational knowledge and solution “hacks” about this case, I’m excited to purchase it this week despite the title of this fine article to “Don’t buy it” 🙂
Right now, I’d rather buy a SFF case that has been well-tested by the community than gamble with a case that has just a few reviews.
At least I know what to expect and I’ll be able to refer to these comments for tech support.
I also found the air duct mod on Thingiverse, as a 3D-printed alternative to the cardboard wall:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2182572
If we going to use a raid card how do we power the backplane first time and seeing all the sata power and molex I know from reading I plug in sata on the right side but do I also need to plug in molex?