NAS case with hot-plug disk bays

[ArdentAngel]

Hello everyone. I've been looking around for the case to move my hardware into for a more convenient NAS maintenance, but it's been a dud so far. (well, not a dedicated NAS, running proxmox with NAS virtualized, but that's beside the point)

 

No good PC cases have native hot-plug disk bays and those bays require 5.25" bays, which most modern cases don't have (in abundance). I guess my only reminaing option is to ask the community for help. I've seen a few SilverStone ones, but from I've gleamed, they aren't convenient to build in. Way too cramped for CPU fan (since I'm going for power-efficiency and low-idle power consumption, low profile cooler isn't an ideal option, because fans will be spun harder). I've also come across this one: S 4HE SUPERMICRO CSE-743TQ-903B-SQ, but not much is known about it  hence I'm hesitating to splurge for such an expensive unknown case.

 

Anyone heard of any good cases for NAS builds? Or at least any good cases with 6x 5.25" bays to moun 2 pcs 3x 5.25" internal HDD enclosure? I want space for 6 HDDs (though if I'm buying HDD enclosures separatly, I'll be going with space for 10 just because).

 

Or did anyone ever heard of mounting 5.25" components into fan mounts (probably front-facing ones)? Any brackets availably anywhere? I'm not too worried about temperature of the other components, since I'm going for power-efficiency build (in EU electricity ain't cheap).

 

As a food for though, I also wouldn't mind something like Define 7 requiring me to open a side-panel with those hot-swap HDD enclosures placed where it has mounting points for those HDD drive tray kits, if it would fit. As for hot-swap HDD enclosures, I was looking at something like: RackChoice Internal HDD Enclosure 5x2.5”/3.5”, ICY DOCK 5 x2.5”/3.5” SATA Hard Drive Backplane Cage (depending to which will be available at the time). If anyone knows of any others (even non-Amazon, used, whatever), I'd really like to know. These are way too hard to find! If anyone has any experience by re-purposing used cages from servers, I'm very interested as well, but those probably require specific vendor-locked PCIe card as well, which I'm not too much of a fan (again, idle power consumption - enterprise hardware normally doesn't pay too much heed to it).

 

And just to drop this here as well since I'm already opening this thread, anyone heard of any power-efficient (especiall when idle) AV1 hardware encoders/transcoder (probably ASIC)? My current setup (without disks) uses 17 W when idle, making that 40 W with HDDs (3x HDDs at the moment, but I plan to expand soon, when my case problem is solved, unless I can find a good answer to this drop-question here, about AV1 hardware encoder). And I don't want to add 15-20 W overhead simply for a whole graphic card which will be barely used (for a media center). I've seen there: NETINT Pricing, but kind of hard-to-get for a consumer build (meaning, single piece).

 

Thanks in advance.

[Alex Atkin UK]

45 minutes ago, ArdentAngel said:

I've seen a few SilverStone ones, but from I've gleamed, they aren't convenient to build in. Way too cramped for CPU fan (since I'm going for power-efficiency and low-idle power consumption, low profile cooler isn't an ideal option, because fans will be spun harder).

You confused me there, if you are going for power efficiency, you need less cooling.

 

I'm running an i5 12400 with the stock cooler in the SilverStone SST-CS381 and its no problem keeping things cool enough.  Its also designed to take a 240mm AIO should you really need better cooling.

 

Its just a PITA you have to remove the drive cages to access the RAM and mATX boards only can be a drawback for some.  Plus of course its kinda expensive.

[ArdentAngel]

I'm running Intel Core i5-13600K and didn't receive the stock cooler with it. I'm cooling it with ARCTIC Freezer 34, barely spinning, that's what I meant. Bigger cooler, less need for fans spinning on idle. At the moment, I even have them configured to spin down when temps are low enough. And because I'll need fans to keep HDDs temps down, those could help cool the bigger CPU cooler with ambient airflow themselves, so even less need for it to spin on itself.

 

Guess I'm aiming for lower noise as well?

[RevGAM]

3 hours ago, ArdentAngel said:

I'm running Intel Core i5-13600K and didn't receive the stock cooler with it. I'm cooling it with ARCTIC Freezer 34, barely spinning, that's what I meant. Bigger cooler, less need for fans spinning on idle. At the moment, I even have them configured to spin down when temps are low enough. And because I'll need fans to keep HDDs temps down, those could help cool the bigger CPU cooler with ambient airflow themselves, so even less need for it to spin on itself.

 

Guess I'm aiming for lower noise as well?

Why not replace the HDDs with SATA SSDs? Cheaper, less noise and less heat. 

[ArdentAngel]

@RevGAM Price per GB.

 

Currently I'm running 3x20TB equaling ~36.21 TiB usable capacity (1 parity drive) for which I paid 900 EUR. For same RAW capacity, I'd need to pay 2.505 EUR for SSD (Samsung 870 QVO SATA 2.5" 8TB SSD). Considering I'm now thinking of expanding this capacity further to 6 drives (2 parity drives), that'd make 1.800 EUR for HDD and 5.000 EUR for SSD, meaning: 3.200 EUR difference.

 

Maybe I could optimize this a bit after researching the requirements for needed number of parity drives for SSDs due to difference in tech so if anyone has more experience with SSDs in a pool I'm all ears. But I'd still be needing a hot-swap cage (with backplane) and a case to put them to. I guess in this case I can find a 5.25" cage with holding capacity for 6x 2.5" SSDs, so the space needed does get reduced. And price for capacity would still more than double! (at the moment it is 177% increase)

 

I guess I could always rethink my hoarding ways, but I highly doubt I'd manage to change them drastically...

[RevGAM]

11 hours ago, ArdentAngel said:

@RevGAM Price per GB.

 

Currently I'm running 3x20TB equaling ~36.21 TiB usable capacity (1 parity drive) for which I paid 900 EUR. For same RAW capacity, I'd need to pay 2.505 EUR for SSD (Samsung 870 QVO SATA 2.5" 8TB SSD). Considering I'm now thinking of expanding this capacity further to 6 drives (2 parity drives), that'd make 1.800 EUR for HDD and 5.000 EUR for SSD, meaning: 3.200 EUR difference.

 

Maybe I could optimize this a bit after researching the requirements for needed number of parity drives for SSDs due to difference in tech so if anyone has more experience with SSDs in a pool I'm all ears. But I'd still be needing a hot-swap cage (with backplane) and a case to put them to. I guess in this case I can find a 5.25" cage with holding capacity for 6x 2.5" SSDs, so the space needed does get reduced. And price for capacity would still more than double! (at the moment it is 177% increase)

 

I guess I could always rethink my hoarding ways, but I highly doubt I'd manage to change them drastically...

I see your point. I'm assuming you're talking about high- capacity SSDs since you're using 20TB HDDs. Given the cost of electricity, how many years until you achieve ROI due to the decreased heat and power usage of SSDs?

 

I'm not familiar enough with NAS and hot swap bays to make suggestions on how you could bring down the cost, but some people here would definitely know. 

[ArdentAngel]

@RevGAM Way too long. With my current setup, idle power consumption (~45W) would amount to ~5 EUR/month, meaning 60 EUR/year, 300 EUR/5 years. The only reason to go this route would be resiliency of SSD (since I'm using it pretty much as an archive to mostly read data off of - uploaded once, then read only). So SSD degradation would be neglible. And SSDs wouldn't fail as soon once a single disk dies and I need to replace it during the resilvering process, since the failure rates for such reades are far less prone to happen than on a mechanical drive.

 

But anyway, my original topis was about a NAS case & HDD hot-swap bays, that's what I'm mostly interested in (and potentially low idle power AV1 hardware encoder/transcoder).