Juan Manuel Palacios
Contributor
- Joined
- May 29, 2017
- Messages
- 146
Hi everyone!
Yet another post from a total newbie, both on assembling hardware and on FreeNAS (but not on FreeBSD nor ZFS), looking for advice on building his first FreeNAS box, mostly centering around finding a suitable case.
I've come to settle on Supermicro's X11SSH-TF board, which is Micro-ATX, and I want a case for it that'll allow me to fit hot-swappable 3.5" drives, hopefully around 6 and hopefully front-mounted, plus SSDs (likely internally and non hot-swappable) for L2ARC and ZIL caching (and whatever else, e.g. onboard USB, for the boot drive).
I've been searching endlessly, though, and I just can't find a suitable option that'll meet the requirement of having at least 4 3.5" hot-swappable bays and the two internal bays (plus whatever for the boot drive). Neither Supermicro's, Fractal's, Lian-Li's, SilverStone's, nor any other of the usual suspects. SilverStone's DS380 is a pretty appealing option, but it's Mini-ITX; in summary, most cases I've found that'll allow a decent number of hot-swappable bays (to me, decent = 4+) have a strong tendency to be Mini-ITX, with most Micro-ATX cases almost always having no more than 2 hot-swappable bays.
So, questions: Am I not looking in the right place? Did I miss an obvious option out there that'll meet my requirements for a Micro-ATX case? Should I instead bite the bullet and go for a Mini-ITX board? And, if so to that last question, which would be a good Mini-ITX equivalent to Supermicro's X11SSH-TF (I'm really looking forward to that board's goodies, i.e. 64GB of ECC RAM, a XEON v5, two NICs, IPMI with a dedicated NIC, etc.)?
Thanks in advance for any pointers!
PS: Quick edit: I've also searched for U-NAS cases, with the NSC-810A coming pretty close to meeting all of my requirements (only caveat I can currently find is that it only offers one internal fixed bay, rather than 2 or 3 that I want), but the hardware guide (2016 R1e) warns about NAS-oriented cases usually not being too good on the cooling aspect. Do people here find that that advice stands? Should I indeed steer-clear of those boxes? Or have people here had good experiences with them? Thanks!
Yet another post from a total newbie, both on assembling hardware and on FreeNAS (but not on FreeBSD nor ZFS), looking for advice on building his first FreeNAS box, mostly centering around finding a suitable case.
I've come to settle on Supermicro's X11SSH-TF board, which is Micro-ATX, and I want a case for it that'll allow me to fit hot-swappable 3.5" drives, hopefully around 6 and hopefully front-mounted, plus SSDs (likely internally and non hot-swappable) for L2ARC and ZIL caching (and whatever else, e.g. onboard USB, for the boot drive).
I've been searching endlessly, though, and I just can't find a suitable option that'll meet the requirement of having at least 4 3.5" hot-swappable bays and the two internal bays (plus whatever for the boot drive). Neither Supermicro's, Fractal's, Lian-Li's, SilverStone's, nor any other of the usual suspects. SilverStone's DS380 is a pretty appealing option, but it's Mini-ITX; in summary, most cases I've found that'll allow a decent number of hot-swappable bays (to me, decent = 4+) have a strong tendency to be Mini-ITX, with most Micro-ATX cases almost always having no more than 2 hot-swappable bays.
So, questions: Am I not looking in the right place? Did I miss an obvious option out there that'll meet my requirements for a Micro-ATX case? Should I instead bite the bullet and go for a Mini-ITX board? And, if so to that last question, which would be a good Mini-ITX equivalent to Supermicro's X11SSH-TF (I'm really looking forward to that board's goodies, i.e. 64GB of ECC RAM, a XEON v5, two NICs, IPMI with a dedicated NIC, etc.)?
Thanks in advance for any pointers!
PS: Quick edit: I've also searched for U-NAS cases, with the NSC-810A coming pretty close to meeting all of my requirements (only caveat I can currently find is that it only offers one internal fixed bay, rather than 2 or 3 that I want), but the hardware guide (2016 R1e) warns about NAS-oriented cases usually not being too good on the cooling aspect. Do people here find that that advice stands? Should I indeed steer-clear of those boxes? Or have people here had good experiences with them? Thanks!
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