SilverStone TechnologyPremium Mini-ITX/DTX Small Form Factor NAS Computer Case, Black (DS380B)

I purchased this case as part of my FreeNAS build. The case is a wonder; 8 standard HDD hot swap drive bays and 4 fixed SSD bays in a compact mini-ITX form factor. Because of the compact size space gets tight when building, but since this case is meant for server boards with little or no add-in cards it was fairly easy, even for a guy like me with fat butcher's fingers.A couple of notes:1. Be careful when removing the main hot-swap drive cage; the small screws along the top can stick, meaning they don't protrude when you unscrew them from the frame. It's crazy easy to strip them if you keep trying to unscrew them once they have released and are rotating freely. Have a needle-nose pliers ready to pull them out. I would have liked to see the case come with a few backup screws to accommodate this.2. Be careful when pulling out the drive cage. The back of the cage has a bunch of capacitors and other semi-fragile electronics exposed (parts of the hot-swap hardware) and you can bend or break them very easily if you grip it wrong. Since the drives in this cage are not meant to be connected directly to the SATA data and power cables, and are not directly exposed from the back, this could be a game over-case destroyer.3. Secure your cables carefully! The tight space means that unsecured cables can rub against the fans, creating noise and potentially bad things.4. The magnetic screen on the side is irritating when picking the case up; it slides off very easily and is placed in a position where you naturally grip when lifting, causing it to slide around in your grip; I'd suggest removing it when moving and re-attaching after you set it down.5. The manufacturers site lists their CPU water cooling as compatible. You could probably remove the front fan and install the radiator+fans there but it would be a TIGHT fit and I don't think I'd recommend it. Also, many server boards that you might buy with this form factor are SoC and have their cooling systems soldered onto the board, making it impossible to use an external cooling system: double check before buying to avoid wasting your money.6. One weird thing I discovered: for each HDD drive bay on the hot-swap back-plane there appear to be two SATA ports. I'm not sure why, my wild guess would be for redundancy or something along those lines, but what I found was that the system did not recognize the drives unless the SATA cables were plugged into the port on the left. So for each bay, plug the cable into the left SATA port. This may very much be a YMMV situation, since I really have no idea what the second port on each bay is for.All of this is pretty minor. For a NAS build this box is as close to perfect as I've seen. Once built this thing is a dream: small, powerful, and fairly quiet. I highly recommend it.

This project has been in the works for about a month now. The end goal was to have a single server that could backup all our media files and be expandable in the future.What I started with.1 SilverStone Technology Premium Mini-ITX / DTX Small Form Factor NAS Computer Case, Black this case1 SilverStone Technology 450W SFX Form Factor 80 PLUS GOLD Full Modular Power Supply with +12V single rail, Active PFC (ST45SF-G)1 ASRock Rack Mini ITX DDR3 1333 Motherboards C2550D4I4 HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)1 60 GB SSD used4 2 GB DDR3 ram sticks from the pile around the house5 SATA Cables used.Picture 1.Unboxing The Case looks nice and is really compact. It has a silly little plastic lock on the front door that will keep out anyone unable to use a screwdriver. There are lots of large fans and they are covered with dust filters held on with fairly small magnets. While this might be a issue if the case is going to be moved I think they will be fine as long as the case sits undisturbed.picture 11.The Motherboard was wrapped in foam which made it easy to handle without worrying about ESD. I went ahead and preloaded FreeNAS on the SSD because like anything used I wanted to make sure it functioned.Picture 3.The drives in their cages just simple plastic rails really four screws and they are done.Picture 2.Disassembly, Note all the huge capacitors on the drive backplane it would be really easy to bump them and damage them. The two drive cages come out easily the 2.5 has two small black screws up top and 2 more on the back of the case I removed it first to give me room. The 3.5 cage is only slightly more difficult first empty all the Hard Drive bays already done in this shot. Then there are 4 small black screws on the side and 2 silver case screws on the bottom that have to be removed. Then slide the cage back and lift it out being careful of the aforementioned capacitors.Picture 4Look at ALL that room..yea this is a tight build.Pictures 5 and 6.The first thing I do at this stage is put ram into sockets, that’s when I noticed that ASRock only put latches on one side of their ram slots..the manual says they have two but this looks like how it was designed not someone snapping latches off ..Not sure how well this will work but this appears to be how it was designed.Picture 7.Next I plug in all the front panel connectors and that is when I discover this. This is Silverstone’s USB 3.0 connection for the front needless to say it doesn’t match anything on the motherboard and there is no adapter to plug it into the standard USB 2.0 pinout on the board. So no front USB for this machine. After that screwing it into the case was anti-climatic four screws and you’re done.I went ahead and installed the PSU at this point as well the only thing I have to say about it is that the way Silverstone designed the PSU it blocks the vent at the top of the Silverstone case instead of taking advantage of it.Pictures 13 and 14.Cage prep, I decided to plug everything into the cages before I put them back into the case. The top four SATA bays were wired with the black SATA Cables that came with the motherboard the bottom four with the red cables. This let me be sure that I could tell which cables were going into which SATA controller on the motherboard. The unused bays were plugged into the SATA 2.0 controller, and of course the used ones found a home in the SATA 3.0 controller. As you can tell things are starting to get tight in the case. At this point you might be tempted to put the 3.5 drive bay back into the case but don’t. Unless you have tiny hands and rubber wrist joints you will need the extra room.Picture 8.The 2.5 drive bay is fairly straightforward but I encountered a couple of issues as I installed the SSD. First the top slot is not ideal for this setup the SATA Power cable comes in upside down. You can make it fit but no matter which power port you pick it would put a lot of strain on the cable. You will want to put any drives in the lower slots. Issue 2 is that installing the drive bay blocks access to the PSU make sure you have everything plugged in first.For the SSD I picked out a sparkly blue SATA Cable and plugged it into one of the SATA 2.0 controllers. Not ideal but it will still be faster than booting off a USB2.0 thumbdrive.Picture 12.Finally everything is in place and I can start screwing things down and tying up cables. Which wasn’t as effective as I would hope. There just isn’t that much room.Sealing up.This is simply a matter of putting the side panel back on and slipping the drives into the bays ..on and finding out where that dust filter you accidentally knocked off got to. Time to boot it up and give it a smoke test.ProsThis is an amazing case for the moneyyou can cram a total of 12 drives in there12!ConsThe capacitors on the backplate of the 3.5 cage are just a accident waiting to happen.no usb 3.0 to 2.0 MB adapterDone..