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.

Really cheap fans, just replace with hi static pressure fans. I used Be Queit! Silent Wings3 high speed fans. When it comes right down to it, the towering cases of old are no longer a necessity. Powerful components are available in smaller and smaller form factors. Bigger is no longer always better. A smaller case might be an efficient and elegant solution to your PC needs, with some Mini-ITX cases rivalling the best PC cases available today. Thankfully the drive cages themselves are easy to remove using the squeeze and pull method, still not nearly as elaborate as what you will find from Synology, QNAP or even Thecus, but they do the job. Digital Cameras, camera lenses, Headsets, Speakers, Projectors, Home Entertainment (new and certified refurbished) 15 Days ReturnableNote: This isn't so much an actual tech review of the DS380B, more of a "why it didn't work out well" type review. You will note that ada0 and 1 both run significantly cooler with the new fans and NO air conditioning, than they did when the room was air conditioned with the old fans! Building your own NAS requires plenty of drive bays and little else, which is precisely what SilverStone offers with the DS380B. This chassis houses a total of 12 drive mounts with eight hot-swappable 3.5- or 2.5-inch and four fixed 2.5-inch drives. There are plenty of options for installing storage, depending on what you'll use the NAS for.

Note: The top and bottom drive slots are empty. My motherboard only supports 6 SATA drives and those positions were the hottest. 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. Some people invert the psu. I believe this would only help if the barrier is installed. I am never planned to use because my psu’s fan seldom runs (eco mode). Cut a hole for a Noctua 40mm NF-A4x10 FLX 4500RPM Fan (for extraction) in the upper rear of the case (there is a spot for it as-is but I want to remove the metal grill and add a proper fan grill for this). This is to keep hot air from dwelling up the top (hot air rises). I'm planning to put it in parallel with the 3000 RPM Noctua 120mm NF-F12 (same voltage (12v)) but will see what happens. 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 Be Quiet! fans are not too noisy, even at full speed. Eventually this NAS will reside in the basement where we won’t hear it at all, but for now it is very tolerable being on the first floor. 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. The Silverstone DS380 has a tiny footprint of just 211 x 360 mm and is 285 mm high. This isn’t much, but it still has room for a total of 12 drives, mITX motherboard, SFF PSU and three 120mm cooling fans. The rear fan area is even placed so it can accommodate AIO liquid cooling solutions such as the Silverstone TD03 and the three included fans have a maximum noise generation of 22dBA. Cut out the case "grill" for the extraction fan and replace with a proper metal grill for better airflow. 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.

Assembling your own NAS would net more performance as well because you'd be using a Celeron or Pentium over the Atom or other SoCs, while power shouldn't be a concern with Haswell using less than 30 watts at idle. As the cherry on top, open source software such as FreeNAS and enclosures like Silverstone's DS380 should make it less daunting to get started with your homebrewed eight-bay NAS server. 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.

Customer reviews

I was having the usual cooling issues with just 3 disks, trying to space them out optimally in the case. Disks would typically exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122F) on a summer's day. I wanted to add a 2 disk SATA controller and max the system out to 8 disks, but I needed to solve this heat issue first.

I have a Silverstone DS380B with the usual HDD heat issues, running FreeNAS 11 on a Gigabyte H270N-WIFI LGA 1151 Mini ITX Motherboard, Intel Core i5 7600K Quad Core LGA 1151 3.8 GHz CPU (6 x SATA ports), and 2 x Kingston 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 CL14 DIMM. While we're spoiled with cable management on cases now, I'm from the era of no cable management (early 2000s) and you did what you had (cut holes if you have to). This case to me was really cramped, tough to pass cables through (had to get extension cables for my short PSU cables). This considering there's many cables for the hard drives as well. Construction feels cheap with thin aluminium sides and plastic frontpieces. I was disheartened at this but it is surprisingly well constructed and solidly stable nevertheless. Just having room for a lot of drives isn’t everything to a chassis, all those drives have to be cooled effectively as well. Silverstone took care of this with two 120mm fans on the side of the chassis blowing cold air in on the front mounted 3.5-inch drives and one 120mm rear exhaust fan to help get the hot air expelled.The front-panel shield helps prevent dust and other unwanted objects from entering the unit, but it also suffocates the drives slightly with less airflow. Cooling is a little hit and miss, especially considering there are three 120mm fan mount points. It's also pretty expensive. Bottom line We were bummed to find that the drive cages are not tool-less like those now used by Synology so the user must secure each drive using four screws. While that might seem like a minor inconvenience, it gets annoying fast when swapping drives in and out. I'm not going to replace the intake filter with 2 grills just yet - I'll see how things go. I am planning to regularly wash that filter.