build log thing Scratch Built NAS Case

[frokes]

Hi!

 

I have been thinking of building a NAS/renderserver for a few years and with COVID making me work more from home since march/april I finally got an excuse to do so! This build has been done for more than a month but I still wanted to share my journey and experience. One of the reasons I've never really gotten around to assembling a NAS has been the endless search for a compact case that still allows me to expand in future. Another factor was the overall look and size of the case as I live in a quite small apartment where I can't really hide the server anywhere. So I decided to build my own case!

 

Server requirements and budget:

• Storage expandability (4 - 6 bays), my initial storage requirement was only 4tb but my storage delta is increasing each year
• VM Capable CPU to run rendering nodes in the future
• Decent cooling to handle summer temps and rendering workload
• Silence, as silent as reasonable for the price
• Use as little floor space as possible
• UPS as I do have 2 - 4 major powerouts each year
• Preferably less than 1000€

 

Initially I wanted to go for an ITX build but the lack of SATA ports and only having one PCI-e on ITX made me choose an M-ATX board instead.

During the initial planning phase, a friend of mine mentioned the idea of theming the entire case around the IronWolf HDDs that I was looking at buying for the build. Things kinda snowballed from there, leading me to spend more time than I should have on making a mockup in blender for the entire case. Including lighting and material properties...xP

 

 

I should mention that one of the reasons I even had the idea to build this case is that I have access to a complete maker space at uni with wood, metal and rapid prototyping tools. The primary tools used for this build was the laser cutter and most parts are made out of PMMA with only the backplate/wall mount and brackets being made out of 2.5mm/1mm steel. All of the parts were drawn in CAD and then exported to either paper for the metal parts or vector graphics for the laser cut parts.

 

Having the layout and dimensions of the case I finally settled on the following components:

 - Ryzen 3 3200G

 - Asus Prime-B450-A

 - 2x HyperX 4gb ddr4 3200MHz

 - 2x Seagate IronWolf 4tb

 - Corsair SF450 (bought prior to recall but RMA was painless)

 - Noctua NH-L9a

 - Noctua A20 FLX

 - Kingston 64gb SSD (random ssd I had lying around from an older build, to be used as cache drive)

 

While waiting on shipping I started lasercutting some of the parts to build some physical mockups out of plywood. Once the parts arrived I assembled them onto the plywood parts to double check my spacing and parts placement.

 

 

I'm really glad that I did this as a few of the cable slots were a bit too small and kind akwardly placed. Those were ofc tweaked before the final manufacture.

I also tried to "blue" the metal brackets a bit as they looked kinda boring before but because I used mild steel instead of stainless they kinda look a bit meh but I mostly did it to learn as they really aren't visible in the end anyway.

 

        

 

Being nervous as f*** I started cutting the final parts out of PMMA and started soldering the RGB strips. Putting RGB on a Noctua might not be the most "correct" thing to do but in the end I think it worked quite well. I threw some more RGB into the GPU slot as I had not decided on a card at that point (I just bought a used RTX 2080 that's probably gonna end up in here, yes RTX 3000 is coming but honestly I don't think this build has the power or cooling to support those cards) and I think it looks quite alright in the end. RGB is handled by an Arduino running the FastLED library and in the end I settled for a super slow, very slight pulsing between white and slightly blue as the unicorn puke I had programmed earlier was distracting AF.

 

Build wise that's it!

Regarding software I ended up using Unraid after being very impressed by it during the trial and so far I've had no problems.

 

Costs :

• Hardware : ~700€ (300€ for the Ironwolf disks alone)
• Material cost : ~100€ (I used mostly left overs, only the coverplate and baseplate were bought for this project)
• UPS : ~100€

Total : ~900€

 

I hope this was interesting to read and see and if nothing else inspires you to build a case yourself!

 

 

 

[Tech_Dreamer]

Holy smokes that's good. didnt think you'd pull it off as good as it is from the initial planning layout. it looks even better. Nice Job m8.

[frokes]

6 hours ago, Tech_Dreamer said:

Holy smokes that's good. didnt think you'd pull it off as good as it is from the initial planning layout. it looks even better. Nice Job m8.

Thank you!

[Jason 57]

This is REALLY impressive!!

 

I think it turned out really well. Who wouldn't love to have that on their wall!