21:24 Would a pair of Silverstone's ultra low profile (SST-CP11B-500) SATA Cables work for the two side slots? Or is the available clearance so minuscule it would require more Dremel work? That said, for all the headaches regarding this case, I'd probably go with a Silverstone NAS (CS380B-X V2.0) case for 40 bucks more as the saved juice ($) isn't worth the squeeze.
It seems that my previous post was deleted. I suggested that @CraftComputing, and random viewers/readers take a look at the "Silverstone DS380", I won't drop the link in case that was why my post was deleted, it's very easy to find. Positives: Well built, has a (SATA drive) compatible SAS backplane, can use SAS drives as well as SATA drives, uses SFX PSU's, uses full height cards and full height CPU coolers. Negatives: MUST use a SAS HBA card to connect to the backplane, SAS HBA cards are readily available second hand and inexpensive so do not panic, but do a bit of research before buying, doesn't have a nice looking mock-wood facia, costs more than the case in the video.
I'm picking up some of those "ADT" M.2 > PCIe x4 slot "extension cables" from Aliexpress for my Erying machines. That PCIe 3.0x4 M.2 hanging off the chipset seems like a great place to put a high-speed network card. PCIe 3.0x4 is ~30Gbit so you technically can't max out a 40Gbit card. But it should be MORE than good enough. This let's us keep the x16 slot for other stuff. Something like a ConnectX-3 card is only going to draw like 10W, so even a sketchy SATA>PCIe power adapter should be totally fine. The only thing I'm REALLY missing from these Erying boards (other than propper passthrough) is the ability to bifurcate that x16. The iGPU is great for transcoding, so you don't really need a dGPU if it's not going to be a gaming machine. But being able to slam in a $15 x4/x4/x4/x4 card full of cheap SSDs would make this a MUCH nicer NAS.
To be fair the first item on the Amazon "about" section of the chassis states: "There are three installation combinations of hard drives and power supplies: 8 HDD + FLEX Power Supply, 6 HDD + SFX-L/SFX Power Supply, 4 HDD + ATX Power Supply." and it's reiterated in the description section with all the pretty photos.
I've commented before about how you tend to leave out information about noise in your builds. Majority of folks out there don't have access to a rack in a garage. This is a refreshing change that seems much more relatable.
@@pharmdiddy5120 remember that you will still need an off-site backup for true redundancy. storage NOT at your property. you can have 1000 backups at your house, but if it catches fire, it's all gone.
@@pharmdiddy5120 Maybe not totally ditch... you could still use cloud options for data backup just in case, with the 3-2-1 rule adhered to, by safely enciphering and pushing your data to some glacial cloud speed storages/backup solutions, unless of course you can afford to have a clone of your base unit stored elsewhere, eg. with another member of a family or a friend, to sync content with...
Since watching your first video about the Erying Motherboard, I purchased an i9 version and have been running it as my daily driver for the past 4 months, zero problems and absolutely love the performance.
Edit: For anyone looking at this case look at the JONSBO N4. I just ordered this case and found this video when I was looking for a manual. Not to overly defend the manufacture but you should really use an HBA which would solve your PCIE low profile issue to begin with. I had a flex atx PSU from a supermicro nas (350w) which fit once I figure out I could just slide the mounting bracket down and screw 4 of the 6 screws in. (I wasn't happy about needing 4 molex). Once my mini-sas to sata cables were plugged I had no clearance issues with the fans. I have them as intake since i happened to have a perfect magnetic dust filter that fit over them. The motherboard you're using isn't standard M-atx from what I've delt with. I have an AMD AM4 Matx and it fit perfect with a small amount of space around for cable routing. no way to fit a PUS in with the motherboard though. I would have liked that with a board like yours (I need 4 ram slots though). It is neat you could fit 10 drives if you wanted as well. I downsized form a fractal node 804 so I can now relocate this someone else in the house. The 7200RPM disk are more much addible now. For the price this case should have come with some filters over the CPU and side panels I think. Also needing more than 2 Molex should be fixed as well imo. and No fans? I had too many pains with an ITX nas cases since I need an HBA and 10gig along with an a small GPU A2000
You could just use the motherboard's onboard SATA ports in place of the top two on the add on card. I have an add in card in one of my DIY NAS's and had to use some onboard ports and it works just fine in Proxmox, TrueNAS and xpenology. Then you'd be able to put that small cover on.
Came to say the same. If it had been a nice LSI RAID controller, sure I'd use only the ports on the card. For a basic SATA port, unless there was something wrong with the 4 onboard, use 2-4 of those and 4-6 from the AIC.
I'm not sure it would have helped. The low profile card sticks out of the top even without cables plugged in. I'd probably use a PCIe riser cable and lay the sata card down across the board, then fashion a metal bracket to hold it up.
Man, I was hoping that would work. Seemed like a cool idea for a demo machine. I think going the LSI route for the drives will be better in the long run.
@@Bixmyits got 8x 8tb seagate sas drives in Z2 with 2 for redundancy equaling about 42TB of storage. and then I'm using my old 4x8tb sata drives as a second z2 pool backup with like ~13tb of storage. I am fully saturating most of the pcie lanes on the whole computer. why you may ask? cuz I can lol. its a backup server for all of my things as well as a game server on a diff VM/vlan. even my gaming rig has like 9tb of storage(albeit SSD) im a storage whore lol
I picked up a 9207-8i SAS Host Bus Adapter off of Ebay for under $40, complete with 2 4-drive cables that attach to the end of the card. This would work beautifully in your case.
I was going to say exactly this. Just to add: make sure that the HBA is, or can be flashed to, IT mode; as some of them can do RAID, and that is not what you want for ZFS
The problem is, you can't put raid controllers like that or P420 in a PCIe x1 slots. My solution would be a PCIe x1 nvme card with a nvme to miniSAS card from IOCREST, or ditching one of the SSDs and using it for the card
I just rebuilt my homelab. It's a ryzen 9 3950x in an asrock x570 steel legend with 64gb nemix 2933 unbuffered ECC, 2x 500gb Crucial p3 plus in raid for boot, 8x8tb Seagate SAS drives plugged into an LSI board, all powered by a 650w EVGA G3 slammed into an old Cooler Master HAF 922. pretty lit. also love the video. can't say i recommend any of the stuff you chose though lol
I got this case a couple of years ago, 1 thing you'll find is that if your intention is to use it for anything relatively intense... There's no airflow in the top and no way to get airflow. You probably didn't experience it because you had the top off. There's just no way easy way to expel the heat without some small fans but it's not enough to do so without noise. Actually the same thing happens at the bottom for the drives, I tried to install fans in the front and back and it just didn't pull enough air to keep everything cool. It's also incredibly heavy, generally pretty hard to work in and gets dusty so fast with no included dust filters. Avoid this thing and just go a cheaper 6 bay and use zfs.
Three weeks ago i bought an other 8-Bay NAS enclosure from aliexpress. I received it this week an it was realy good quality but only supports flexATX, therefor four fullsize pci-slots and matx. I saw this one too but, thank god, i bought the other one.
Thanks for checking this case out. I’ve had it on a watch list on Amazon for over a year and was considering it for a more compact case than the full tower I’ve been using. Looks like I’ll be looking for something else. Might just shell out a bit more for the hot swap silverstone chassis like the CS381 or CS280, or perhaps a bit less for the fractal node 804.
I can vouch for the 804, the lack of the hotswap sucks but everything else is damn fine. I've actually got a 850W 80+ Ti in it with a full Noctua tower and a 1660 Super. I just had to make a deal with myself to swap a cold spare whenever I get a failure right then. Probably takes 15 minutes max total.
@@j_ferguson I was thinking of throwing 8x14TB Exos drives in Z2. With 2 x 2.5” SATA SSDs for boot. Then migrate my current NAS data over, add in my PCIe cache drive, and dual SFP+ 10Gb X520 card. Then reuse my older NAS drives for a steam cache in a much smaller case. Or maybe pop them in a small 1U case in my network rack.
@@catalystguitarguy big beefy spinning rust. I only have 4x 12tb Red Plus right now in Z1 with one as a cold spare. Eventual upgrade to 8. No need for 2.5's for me, nvme is cheap as dirt and doesn't use my limited SATA ports. All mobo, no need to worry about the card going balls up and pissing in my zpool.
@@j_ferguson nice. I have 8 x 4TB WD Reds, the CMR ones and 4 x 2TB seagate firecuda drives, along with 4 x 1TB patriot SATA SSDs, currently in my NAS. Wanting to condense the 3 separate pools into 1 much larger Pool in a much smaller chassis. My spinning drives have been running since about 2016, and I’d like to repurpose them before they start failing for a steam cache that’s less critical than my primary storage. I’ve got the really important stuff on a cold copy in an external drive I keep stored in a fireproof safe with a duplicate kept at my sister’s place across town. 3, 2, 1 is what I try to maintain.
There isn't a problem with this case. Its the cheap motherboard he chose that's caused all his problems. Also if he had used proper server sata cables the fans wouldn't have been an issue. He shot himself in the foot and blamed the gun.
I did a similar build a few years ago for my living room PC using the Fractal Design Node 804 case. I love the look of it but it's also so practical, fitting a standard ATX PSU and full height expansion cards. It also has movable motherboard standoffs!!!
I wish Silverstone would make their cases more available. I got a DS380B and it's been perfect for a tiny homelab. Sucks it only takes a mini ITX motherboards tho. This case had so much potential, hopefully you can tweak it to work!
I've also got a DS380B, but I've modified mine - since my Supermicro mini-ITX motherboard doesn't have USB 3.0, the front pane cabling has been removed. And, I filed a "V" in the bottom channel on the door, that sits over the pivot-post - so I can lift the door up a little and remove it from the case. For the OS, I'm using the NVME slot on the MB, and one of the MB SATA ports. For the NAS, I'm using 4 MB SATA ports, and the 4 ports on a low profile HBA card. I do have a bifurcation adapter for the MB, to allow several HBA cards, but that will have to wait until I move the MB into a different case (with more slots).
I've been running one of those i9 chinese garbage motherboards as my main and only pc for half a year (I bought one as soon as they became available), asking a lot from it, I put both nvme drives, a wifi card, 64gb of ram at 3200mhz and an rtx3070, it's been basically the best computer I've ever had, no random crashes, and it runs VERY cool, after 6 hours running nonstop at a room temp of 30° it's currently running the gpu at 55° and the cpu at 42°, if I run heavy games the gpu will run at 62° and the cpu a lot less, it's been one of the best purchases I've ever made and I think people bad mouth them because they didn't get to buy one for themselves
This was a fantastic video! The realism alone is beautiful. When you are building something like this there tends to always be issues like these that come up. I imagine many creators would have called this a loss and not made the video at all for any number of these issues. I am glad the video happened anyway, this may not even be a bad case if you go into it knowing it's a base for modification.
Jeff, I, like most storage hoarders, love removable drive bays. They make life easier. But, in the end, it's about having 8 bays in a home lab with an MATX board. That case was garbage for the purpose, and you did your best with it. Now, we don't have to bother. I would suggest an old standby... Introducing the Fractal Node 804. I've owned 3 and still have one. They can be had for around $160, have 8 3.5, up to 4 2.5 bays, etc. They are kind of chunky, but have a lot of space to work with. They will not support a huge heatsink either. Still, I have enjoyed using them because they aren't horrible to work with.
Not sure I agree with the PSU selection. I think you are underestimating the effects of 1) All 8 of those drives spinning up are going to put at least 100W of load on that supply, considering those drives have some mileage on them. 2) Those super-cheap PSU's aren't exactly put toghether well, crappy solder joints and capacitors are common. I don't expect them to last more than 8-10 months running 24/7.
When you first showed the case I thought it looked beautiful and with 8 bays and ATX PSU support it was great but alas, then the downsides came banging down the doors.
Its not really the downsides. The isn't a budget case and he tried to fit a budget build in it. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. You cant afford a Flex ATX, ok that cool but you have to sacrifice bays to build it cheaper, but then just use higher capacity drives. Buy an actual server motherboard and 99% of his problems go away.
@@SimpleEnigma331 True indeed, I just thought the case looked good and seeing as I can't spend a ton on a server and don't have a place to put it, something like this which looks good and could be standing in the livingroom without being an eye sore was right up my alley but yes, problems would be fewer if you use server hardware :)
I don't think it's fair to say there are no downsides with this case. It does seem to have a bunch of wasted space and it does seem to be fairly poorly thought out with things just not fitting.
@@dgan2304 I agree, there are too many downsides and I said as much too, maybe not in so many words and I apologize for any misunderstanding, english is not my primary language. Regardless I think the case looks good but yes, there are many downsides as you also point out.
$200 is budget for a server enclosure with hot-swap trays and backplane integrated. My criticism around the power supply was there is plenty of space up to to install an SFX without impacting drive trays.
Fun video to watch - I often share similar frustrations about hardware. On a $200 case I'd expect total reconfiguration of the internal layout possible. Sacrificing drive bays to fit a PSU is ridiculous. Thank you for sharing those pains. These little Erying boards are pretty neat, I'll have to take a look at them!
One reason I've always enjoyed your channel is you take some pretty obscure hardware and put it in the light. I'm actually kind of sick of seeing builds where it should very obviously work out perfectly & sparkle like Las Vegas. One thing TH-cam is useful for is having documented resources available for learning. Now less people are going to waste their time and money on this computer case. Thank you Jeff!
@CraftComputing I was looking at that case for a NAS. I am so glad i didn't choose it. I would have been so disappointed. Thank you so much for all you do for the community.
Good video. It's easy for us to pick apart mistakes after you already laid it all out like this for us. I'm not knocking your hardware choices, but your motherboard choice is what seemed to send it in the wrong direction. While most MATX boards don't have 8 SATA ports, nearly all will have at least 2. That would have fixed your cable issue and possibly your standoff issue. Amazon even has the Apevia PS-ITX300W for $34 or Silverstone FX350 for $109. I think you're supposed to have the fan mount flipped so that it protrudes from the back of the case. Looks odd and bulky, but I think it would help with airflow. The wasted room up top could come in handy for some 2.5" SSDs if you ended up going the HBA adapter route. I do agree this case has a lot of room for improvement and I look forward to someone else making a more well designed version of this.
My old Define R5 case that I used as my main PC case became my server enclosure. Can't be any happier with all the sound insulation or vent configuration and 3.5 bays or 5.25 bays it has. Sure it's huge but who cares. I don't put the server on display or something. I cram it in a corner and forget about it.
Jeff, I LOVED this video for not only the content, but because most of it you were just adlibbing. When you aren't reading from a prompt, your natural voice comes out and your videos don't feel like the news, but more like I'm just hanging out with you and learning something new or going over something I already knew but perhaps with a different spin.
I’ve been using an ERYING 0000 mainboard for my media/gaming PC. The only thing I would recommend is to apply conformal coating to the bottom of the custom CPU heat spreader (Aluminium part)- and use liquid metal instead of thermal paste between the copper slug and CPU die. Using thermal paste, my temps would get up to 100C on the CPU… With liquid metal, I get absolute max temps of 80C (and thats with using Furmark!)
Thank you for this suggestion. I just pulled the heat spreader off last weekend and applied new thermal paste. I haven't pushed it yet, but I have not seen much improvement with the thermals at idle and small server loads. I will have to keep liquid metal as an option.
I built one of the Erying mobos in a U-NAS 810A case about a week before that new Audheid case was released and have been wishing that I waited since then. The 4 half height slots for PCIe cards and 80mm of cooler clearance height sounds great compared to the 2 horizontal PCIe slots that require ribbon cable extenders and the 52mm max cooler height on the U-NAS chassis. I do like the build quality and the fit and finish, but I still wonder if the Audheid would be better. @CraftComputing hasn't quite convinced me that it would be a bad case to build in. Oh, and you have to get rid of the extra standoff in the U-NAS case as well for this motherboard.
I concur, I've bought excellent Antec Green 380W Bronze PSU's for only $15 each for my projects. High build quality, reliable, quiet, and sufficient output for such projects that don't stress it with no GPU. I have 3 PSUs running 24/7 no sweat, no fuss.
An accurate representation of the pitfalls and shortcomings involved with fitting so much appealing hardware in such a small space! Don't be frustrated, it was informative and entertaining!
I’ve watched this several times as I am working towards my own homelab build. I think I figured out why you were having so many problems. You made one crucial mistake. No beer. Rookie move.
I love how you knew that the build was really going to be "around" the case, and then definitely didn't do good enough research on the case to have it work as you envisaged it. IMO, your modification to the build should've started at "replace the case" before you changed up the PSU to a flex-ATX unit. I would recommend replacing the case with a good one.
I've got a Rosewill 4U rackmount case sitting on top of a wooden wardrobe. Heavy as can be! It is huge on the inside and has hot-swappable drive bays. The stock fans were a bit finicky, but it runs silent. My original purpose for it was to run GPUs, but it evolved into a TrueNAS box. This case now sells for 4 times as much as I paid for it 4 years ago.
Powerman power supplies! I sold a lot of those 15 years ago when I worked at a computer store. They are truly a solid low power output unit that will hold up for a very long time.
I managed to buy a define R4 off of someone for 25 euros. It might not be new or small, but it's so much nicer of an experience: Everything fits and was thought out properly 🎉
I have the same cas in white. Very wife approved, sitting in my living room I used an ebay 9200 sas card for 40 bucks with a used 10g intel x520 The backplane in this case supports SAS drives you just need a mini sas to 4 sata ports, the backplates have sata connections on the rear The flex psu issue bummed me out aswell, i used a 500w fsp power supply i got a good deal on and swapped the fan to a noctual on, stock fan on flex psus are supper loud The drives spinning are the same volume as the noctua fan i also put in 80mm fans on the top portion to help cool the sas and nic cards The fan cables for the rear, just fit in the gap, i didn't have to dremel anything
Those erling boards are fine and pretty rock solid. Also, nothing wrong with ES/QS or mobile cpus either, they work great when professionally soldiered to the MB. The only downside with the mobile cpu boards is the cpu is soldiered to the board (no socket) so there's no upgrading it but at the price point that's not really a issue.
Have been running my ES Erying board since Mar 12th, only reason it has had ANY downtime is a 2 hour power outage this past weekend which was just too long for my UPS They are solid pieces of kit
The concern with the PSU is more of the startup surge when the drives spin up. If you have a way to stagger the disk spin up this would be less of an issue. Back in the day I ran quad wd raptors in a desktop that regularly went into standby, the PSU died in less than a year.
Not to mention, the $100-$150 price-point that he's claimed for a 500W PSU is actually more in lines for what you'd pay to get to get a 750W+ PSU that's at least semi-modular and has some kind of efficiency rating. He's not wrong that a higher quality PSU would cost much more than that $16 one, but the quality of PSU for the price he claimed is actually going to be better than he suggested.
@@gabest4 There are software solutions that let you or automatically spin up the drives one by one or in smaller groups so as not overburden the PSUs or limit noise, once spun up initially these drives can then be spinning down and spinning up only when called for, eg. in non-RAID setups, throughout the day, or they can be spinning all the time and the lowest speeds, if constantly accessed or kept from completely idling to the point of spinning down, and these both tend to allow even a picopsu or external laptop-like bricks to handle the loads. Without such optimisations, 8 drives spinning up constantly can easily take well over 10W each so with AiCs, memory, SSDs, USBs, CPU and mobo components you can have occasional spikes into 200W. If your PSU, whether pico-one or external, can handle those and they're not so recurrent, your PSU can last years, and if software allows the drives be handled more gently the 120W PSU could be enough for 5 drives and the rest of the platform. But if the software stack is not optimised you can end up with "regular" bursts into 200W+ range with 8 drives and even power-efficient rest of the gear, so a real PSU rated for less or with the efficiency bell curve outside of those bursts may not be the best choice in the long term... if you're less than lucky ;)
It’s not 1992, there is no big startup surge, they pull their spec’d wattage for a bit while they start, but it’s not like the old days when they’d brown out the 12v rail.
Just buy a PCI-E 1x riser cable, remove the bracket of the SATA controller and just put it at an angle. You could 3D print some kind of holder or just let it be since it's not like you will move that device that often.
Just a suggestion but if its only a matter of a few millimeters (11:02), you could remove the mounting lugs and install an insulated sheet on the plate under the motherboard.Then mark an tap mounting holes in the plate. Alternately fabricate a oblong black plastic surround to sit on top of the frame below the cover plates to give the required height.
That Erying i9 11900 motherboard has been fantastic. I had some hiccups in setting it up but after it was done. No trouble running my steam games at all. Good job! Love your channel.
Use the same HGST drives. Out of 25 or so drives only one has died and of course I bought spares. Totally worth it if you run Z2. Just hope the prices don't go up after this before I can buy more.
I just gotta say thank you for taking a look at this case. I considered importing it and going through all the trouble of figuring it out without any guidance. If you go through the usual Chinese channels, you can buy a screen that replaces the wood panel, which I thought was really awesome for a server monitoring display. Still might consider pulling the trigger on it though. I also want to thank you in general for representing this kinda middle-ground for homelabbers. I've mentioned this case on Reddit, and I was chastised for it. It's annoying that in some nooks of the community, you are only allowed to be either seen as a beginner with raspis/mini computers, or a professional with large server racks. Us scrappy guys who just want to answer the question "will this work" are rarely represented. Been really appreciative of your channel and Hardware Haven lately.
i really loved the way you have presented this video , while most of the youtubers out there only showing us the end result or only the successful part of their content you are explaining showing us all the negatives stuffs happen in technical side, and yeah i learnt alot form your video, hope you'll come up with more lessons in future
I think you installed the fan bracket backwards. The fans mount on the back side of the bracket in the system. Also, for a server, wouldn't something with ECC memory be a better choice or is that really not a needed option? Many of these "server" class systems may include the necessary SATA ports, but then will lack the NVME slots. I know everything will have tradeoffs.
9:00 I've had one of those pre-build provided power supplies and they just replaced it after Hardware info is showing 15 volts on the 12-volt 7 volts on the 5 volt 4.5 volts on 3.3 ( double checked with multimeter and confirmed the voltages were elevated) It served me well for the 7 years I've had it.
Commenting again since you've been up to 45Drives facility. I know there's only so much you're able to say, but I hope to god you used this case as an example of what they really should be making. This enclosure really only needs a few tweaks to be perfect. I also hope you can be the voice of reason with them and convince them to make sure what ever they make fits MATX boards and not just MITX. Those extra slots are worth it being just a little bit wider!! 45D being who they are I'd expect some 2.5" SSD mounting somewhere in there, and maybe even some cut outs for M.2 10Gig adapters! Maybe even find a way to sneak a 4060 OC low profile card in there.
I personally have a home Media Server/NAS, and I used a Silverstone case... I also modded it to have an internal IR receiver and programmed it to a Logitech Harmony One... works great. *my case is the Silverstone GD08
I like the focus on budget and buying used or cheap hardware here, something that so few youtubers seem to do. There's no end of videos with the best of everything and fancy hardware but this is what it's all about - a decent budget build with a purpose :) nice work Jeff
YES! I'm so happy you found the case I've been looking for...searching for years....wait what...that's no good....but surely I can use all 8 drives in this 8-bay case....WHAT...and there's more.....aaahhhh.....the search continues. At least I'm not the only one losing his mind.
XCP-NG also allows you to use the disks as storage repository for VMs. It just partions about 25G for root, log and some other stuff and allows the rest to be used as SR.
As some other people have pointed out, you could just use the internal SATA ports for the two ports that won't fit. One thing they tend to forget though, is that that solution won't always work with dual NVMe drives, since they tend to disable some, if not all onboard SATA ports. What would work best in this case is an 8I SAS HBA. But the problem with THAT is that those tend to use PCIe 8x slots as opposed to the current 1X you're using. Worst comes to worst, you could just use two cards that have 4 SATA ports each.
I picked up a u-nas nsc-810a hot swap case a couple of years ago because it supported mATX motherboards and up to 2 add-in cards (hba and 4-port ethernet nic). it all does fit but there is not a lot of room, and i think i paid around $300 for the case and flex atx power supply. i''ve had it running truenas for 3 years or so with no issues.
same MoBo 2.2GHz ES - 9mounts with unraid, 5 disks + NVMe cache - works like charm around 60W some idle - up to 100-120W with loaded VMs and 7-8 containers
This is exactly why I ended up with an enthoo 719. Just upgraded to a 5800x3d and downgraded the 5600x to the mini itx esxi host with HBA and up to 12 HDD.
I was thinking about doing this type of setup, but I had one less requirement of the noise since it will be going into my tech closet. But instead I went with a used R720 with 12 drive bays, 8 filled with 3 TB SAS drives, and 192 GB of RAM for under $600. The one thing that didn't come with it is a place to boot boot drives without taking from the bays up front. So I'm working with other options for having additional hard drives for the OS.
I feel like there's a sweet spot for this kind of case out there - something that's modern, with Micro-ATX support and a decent layout (maybe even room for a slim optical drive?). The Node 804 is probably as close as it gets. The Jonsbo N3 looks pretty interesting, though it's still a Mini-ITX case.
The sweet spot is not trying to build the cheapest possible build. Plenty of mATX MBs have 8 sata ports. He just chose to stick with this cheap MB thats lacking features.
Amazon listing describes the hdd and power supply options: There are three installation combinations of hard drives and power supplies: 8 HDD + FLEX Power Supply, 6 HDD + SFX-L/SFX Power Supply, 4 HDD + ATX Power Supply.
For the SATA ports, you could use a NVMe to SATA adapter card. It will cost you an NVMe slot of course, but they're low profile and will free up that full PCIe slot.
Jeff! The Dell H310. a.k.a. the LSI 2008. Two mini SAS out of the rear of the card, with breakout cables would give you 8 SATA ports, and it's half hight that will allow you to close the top of the case.
Were the mount screws in the way, or just a possible ground/short point if it connected. In those cases, when I was a younger sharper guy, I used a piece of electrical tape over the post. Then I forced the tape to the sides of the post and used a very small tie band to keep it there. Even on some screw holes on the old motherboards (that grounded out and stopped the board from working if not shorting it out) I did it, and drove the screw through it. It offered a little more support (and insulation if needed) when pushing and pulling cards in and out (mostly in). I called it the JP device. Yeah, not really a thing, but I thought of making a video lately (about 25 years later than I used it), just for fun. However it did save time and had a purpose back then. My 2¢
"No power supply will last forever" I have used a 500w evga power suppy across 15 builds over the last 15 years. It has been the only component I have not upgraded.
Hard to tell from a video (and without a manual), but i think the rear fans were meant to be mounted in a boot/trunk configuration, protruding from the back. if correct, that would also explain why there are no passthrough holes for the fan cables. I do like the idea of a cost effective nas though, hope you make more of these videos!
Seeing how the DIY NAS/Homelab is "mainstream" again (thanks to the competition in CPU market maybe?), I really hope sometime in the future Fractal (or someone else) will do a proper version of a case like this. Both node 304 and 804 are excellent cases, but I think now is the perfect time to release an update/successor to those (my 304 is at least 6 years old now). Since I live in an apartment and I don't have a garage (for a server rack, ofc), this kind of build would make more sense to me (oh god, I have to be strong and convince myself, that I don't need another home server... :'D), but at the same time, I also like the whole "used enterprise equipment" thingy. So keep up the good work, I really appreciate your content. Plus I really like that your builds do not always work as planned (sorry :D). ps: as a fellow craft enjoyer, I have to complain, that I miss the beer section of the video :'D It is always interesting to see what the craft industry makes on the other side of the world.
i have the luxury of hiding my enterprise level hardware away from the rest of my house, so i opted for an aged dell poweredge tower server with dual xeons in it. with a total of 12 cores, 24 threads, 72gb ddr3 ecc ram, and quad gigabit connectivity, and 8 bays that can each handle an 8tb drive (since i upgraded the raid controller) it's an incredible budget option with redundant 1200w platinum power supplies and insane air flow. 24 hours a day for 5 years so far, 0 downtime, and it was old when i got it!
I have a node 304 and I love it. Apart from the filter placement, but I just reversed the airflow, and so far so good. And in today's world, where sfx PSUs are cheap, they can make it probably mATX by widening it ever so slightly and using the empty space where the PSU cable is routed. Silversone also has nice cases in their DS line, but those include a backplane and thus are really expensive. They have consumer cases based on the same chassis usually, but they alter them to make sure you can't fit as many drives into them as the DS line variant.
The used enterprise stuff is great because you are giving the equipment a new life, and it's actually built for this. Everything made to be easy to service, all metal, redundant everything. Main downsides are noise, power, and size. So if you have the space for it, it's great. But I do think that the amazingly efficient more modern alternatives are better for most people.
@@nuvotion-live Totally agree but it's nice that the used enterprise stuff is out there as well. I have an ebay Epyc CPU/mobo combo I picked up that I'm going to try consolidating my current 2 servers into. Probably won't be much of a power savings overall but I get more unf and it will definitely run a lot quieter than my old venerable 1u NAS does right now. I could have gone with something more modern and all but having gobs of ram and lots of PCIE slots will make up for it.
A 2 port sas card is probably the way to go since you can get adapter cables that will turn one sas into 4 sata drives. Since they are for servers the ports will likely point the right way.
I've been looking at that case for nearly a whole year now! The company is translated as Warhead, they started on taobao and actually I think anywhere else would be "third party". The best part of the front fascia is that it can be replaced with a screen... by yourself. They even listed what screens to buy. But of course, it's pretty bad. I am going to go with a Inspur SAS cage with a external cover of sorts (in acrylic...)
Generally I find that this kind of random brand cases are very much a situation where you need to expect to dremel and modify things a lot to get even basic things to work. I got an ITX case from a random brand that theoretically was perfect for what I needed, I just needed to cut off a piece off the GPU's bracket, add long standoffs to the screwholes for the PSU to fit in the PSU cable, make my own dust filters from pantyhose and small bits of wood, cut some slice off a metal beam that was interfering with my CPU tower cooler, and then cut off some excess plastic from the front panel to fit a fan there. But after those modifications it was pretty good for a 3600X + 2060 -build
Till this day, Silverstone SG11 is still my favorite home lab case. It has 9x 2.5”, 3x 3.5” drive slots, and a 5.25” bay. With an icy dock enclosure, that’s another 8x 2.5” bays. And it actually supports proper ATX power supplies, even the big long ones
I bought the exact same case recently to try and minimize my current Define R5 setup, and immediately returned it like 2 days later. The Flex ATX mount only works with units, the fan mounts and wire management were just... bad, and everything about it felt so cheap and downgraded despite costing over $200. The Define R5, a case I picked up used for $70 is just so much better.
Have you ever considered having a case built that solves all the problems you encountered? The whole process of finding and working with a factory, getting a proof of concept built, testing it etc... could be interesting content for your channel. I would imagine that there would be some demand for a case that allows someone to build a nas on a budget. There might be some money to be made while solving a real problem.
For truenas scale, you can create a bootable usb of decent size, then copy that whole drive layout and contents to a ssd of choice, and create another partition, which we then add into another pool. So yes, there are 2+ pools using the same drive, but hey.. at least we can run applications on that second one now, as it can be selected as primary applications storage. Now, I'm not sure what happens if such a drive stops working, but in case of using 2 drives in mirror pool, it should probably result in both pools marking the defective drive as offline, and continuing to work from the fine one.
I've been dying for an 8 bay, 3.5", MATX compact/rack mountable NAS case for years. All of them have at least 1 thing super weird or super dumb. I've been sticking to the Node 804 for now. If you find something amazing, I would love a video!
This case is amazing. He just tried building a budget build in a high-end case. With the correct hardware, IE not cheap Chinese ones, none of the issues he had is valid.
Oh wow, I just learned about this case last week and spent all weekend contemplating a build for one! I absolutely love that wood panel! Shame you had so much trouble with it. The caveat about the PSU size is worded in the most akward way on the Amazon page, it really threw me off at first. And I've read reviews of the other Audheid cases that mention that the insides don't have great engineering and can be a hassle to build in. I've been eyeing an Asus Rack Ryzen mATX board that does have 8 SATA ports (and ECC support!). It's not cheap, but at least I shouldn't have to worry about space as much. It was great getting to watch you take the case apart, it answered a lot of questions I've had about it.
Sometimes the level of thrift you reach for really worries me, lol. But I love seeing the things you manage to find -- a few gems here and there. I'm quite happy with the Jonsbo N2 case that contains my little NAS/media box under the TV. It only has 5 drive bays (though they could easily have fit a 6th), but that's plenty for my setup -- but 5 drive bays does require a bit more thoughtfulness in picking drive sizes than an 8-bay case to get the capacity and redundancy you want.
could you tell me the specs of your please? Looking into building a 5bay NAS in that. Bought the chassis, the hdds, sfx-l psu and one of these erying boards, interested in extras like a sata controller you picked up for yours and a cooler.
I've been running the Er Ying 11980hk ES board with the older style VRM heatsink since the start of this year as my main PC. Has not failed me once! Mind you I'm also running Throttlestop to power limit my PL1 as I didn't like what the short turbo did to my temps. The only real complaint I have of the motherboard is mine doesn't seem to like it when i turn on Hyper-V so any VM's need to use different software.
You can also use a LSI second-hand SAS card with cables that go 4 SATA each, need only 2 of those then for 8 drives, and they go off the side, not off the top of the card
I'd like to see more builds like this. Finding an actually well thought out case with 8 drive bays and an ATX power supply, with the looks of this would have been awesome. Additionally, im abit disappointed with my beam, the air is great but im just getting so many issues with my deck
Thanks to Babbel for sponsoring today's video. Get 60% your subscription here! bit.ly/44RIGlY
Does Babble offer klingon?
21:24 Would a pair of Silverstone's ultra low profile (SST-CP11B-500) SATA Cables work for the two side slots? Or is the available clearance so minuscule it would require more Dremel work? That said, for all the headaches regarding this case, I'd probably go with a Silverstone NAS (CS380B-X V2.0) case for 40 bucks more as the saved juice ($) isn't worth the squeeze.
It seems that my previous post was deleted.
I suggested that @CraftComputing, and random viewers/readers take a look at the "Silverstone DS380", I won't drop the link in case that was why my post was deleted, it's very easy to find.
Positives: Well built, has a (SATA drive) compatible SAS backplane, can use SAS drives as well as SATA drives, uses SFX PSU's, uses full height cards and full height CPU coolers.
Negatives: MUST use a SAS HBA card to connect to the backplane, SAS HBA cards are readily available second hand and inexpensive so do not panic, but do a bit of research before buying, doesn't have a nice looking mock-wood facia, costs more than the case in the video.
I'm picking up some of those "ADT" M.2 > PCIe x4 slot "extension cables" from Aliexpress for my Erying machines.
That PCIe 3.0x4 M.2 hanging off the chipset seems like a great place to put a high-speed network card.
PCIe 3.0x4 is ~30Gbit so you technically can't max out a 40Gbit card. But it should be MORE than good enough.
This let's us keep the x16 slot for other stuff.
Something like a ConnectX-3 card is only going to draw like 10W, so even a sketchy SATA>PCIe power adapter should be totally fine.
The only thing I'm REALLY missing from these Erying boards (other than propper passthrough) is the ability to bifurcate that x16.
The iGPU is great for transcoding, so you don't really need a dGPU if it's not going to be a gaming machine.
But being able to slam in a $15 x4/x4/x4/x4 card full of cheap SSDs would make this a MUCH nicer NAS.
Thanks for making the advert entertaining. One question though: What about Klingon? 😂
To be fair the first item on the Amazon "about" section of the chassis states: "There are three installation combinations of hard drives and power supplies: 8 HDD + FLEX Power Supply, 6 HDD + SFX-L/SFX Power Supply, 4 HDD + ATX Power Supply." and it's reiterated in the description section with all the pretty photos.
I've commented before about how you tend to leave out information about noise in your builds.
Majority of folks out there don't have access to a rack in a garage.
This is a refreshing change that seems much more relatable.
My content goes in waves. I'm trying to focus on entry/rackless homelab for the rest of the year.
@@CraftComputing that might be an idea... Include a db reading in your reviews, i do not think anyone else does that....
@@CraftComputing that's my next project! We gotta ditch the "cloud" and keep our data ourselves
@@pharmdiddy5120 remember that you will still need an off-site backup for true redundancy. storage NOT at your property. you can have 1000 backups at your house, but if it catches fire, it's all gone.
@@pharmdiddy5120 Maybe not totally ditch... you could still use cloud options for data backup just in case, with the 3-2-1 rule adhered to, by safely enciphering and pushing your data to some glacial cloud speed storages/backup solutions, unless of course you can afford to have a clone of your base unit stored elsewhere, eg. with another member of a family or a friend, to sync content with...
As a German Trekkie and homelabber with too much screentime spent on TH-cam: The ad was great!
Sometimes you learn more by failing. If you build a PC/Server and everything works just fine did you learn anything or did you just put it together?
That's good one actually.
You learned that combo works
Currently dealing with the failing 😂
I’d say yes and no. You can learn A LOT just from taking the extra time to research and plan before you buy and build.
Depend on the final purpose, sometimes you need something working to focus on learn something different
Since watching your first video about the Erying Motherboard, I purchased an i9 version and have been running it as my daily driver for the past 4 months, zero problems and absolutely love the performance.
Edit: For anyone looking at this case look at the JONSBO N4.
I just ordered this case and found this video when I was looking for a manual. Not to overly defend the manufacture but you should really use an HBA which would solve your PCIE low profile issue to begin with. I had a flex atx PSU from a supermicro nas (350w) which fit once I figure out I could just slide the mounting bracket down and screw 4 of the 6 screws in. (I wasn't happy about needing 4 molex). Once my mini-sas to sata cables were plugged I had no clearance issues with the fans. I have them as intake since i happened to have a perfect magnetic dust filter that fit over them.
The motherboard you're using isn't standard M-atx from what I've delt with. I have an AMD AM4 Matx and it fit perfect with a small amount of space around for cable routing. no way to fit a PUS in with the motherboard though. I would have liked that with a board like yours (I need 4 ram slots though). It is neat you could fit 10 drives if you wanted as well.
I downsized form a fractal node 804 so I can now relocate this someone else in the house. The 7200RPM disk are more much addible now.
For the price this case should have come with some filters over the CPU and side panels I think. Also needing more than 2 Molex should be fixed as well imo. and No fans?
I had too many pains with an ITX nas cases since I need an HBA and 10gig along with an a small GPU A2000
You could just use the motherboard's onboard SATA ports in place of the top two on the add on card. I have an add in card in one of my DIY NAS's and had to use some onboard ports and it works just fine in Proxmox, TrueNAS and xpenology. Then you'd be able to put that small cover on.
Came to say the same. If it had been a nice LSI RAID controller, sure I'd use only the ports on the card. For a basic SATA port, unless there was something wrong with the 4 onboard, use 2-4 of those and 4-6 from the AIC.
I'm not sure it would have helped. The low profile card sticks out of the top even without cables plugged in.
I'd probably use a PCIe riser cable and lay the sata card down across the board, then fashion a metal bracket to hold it up.
@@T3hBeowulf There's always Dremel. 😉
Man, I was hoping that would work. Seemed like a cool idea for a demo machine. I think going the LSI route for the drives will be better in the long run.
LSI are pcie x4 so would have to use the x16 slot
@@djole02 the lsi i have is 8 lane. its a sas one though.
@@dookiemanethats kinda overkill for 8 of anything not datacenter grade 🤣🤣 no way you saturate that x8 right?
@@Bixmyits got 8x 8tb seagate sas drives in Z2 with 2 for redundancy equaling about 42TB of storage. and then I'm using my old 4x8tb sata drives as a second z2 pool backup with like ~13tb of storage. I am fully saturating most of the pcie lanes on the whole computer. why you may ask? cuz I can lol. its a backup server for all of my things as well as a game server on a diff VM/vlan. even my gaming rig has like 9tb of storage(albeit SSD) im a storage whore lol
I picked up a 9207-8i SAS Host Bus Adapter off of Ebay for under $40, complete with 2 4-drive cables that attach to the end of the card. This would work beautifully in your case.
I was going to say exactly this. Just to add: make sure that the HBA is, or can be flashed to, IT mode; as some of them can do RAID, and that is not what you want for ZFS
The problem is, you can't put raid controllers like that or P420 in a PCIe x1 slots.
My solution would be a PCIe x1 nvme card with a nvme to miniSAS card from IOCREST, or ditching one of the SSDs and using it for the card
I just rebuilt my homelab. It's a ryzen 9 3950x in an asrock x570 steel legend with 64gb nemix 2933 unbuffered ECC, 2x 500gb Crucial p3 plus in raid for boot, 8x8tb Seagate SAS drives plugged into an LSI board, all powered by a 650w EVGA G3 slammed into an old Cooler Master HAF 922.
pretty lit. also love the video. can't say i recommend any of the stuff you chose though lol
I got this case a couple of years ago, 1 thing you'll find is that if your intention is to use it for anything relatively intense... There's no airflow in the top and no way to get airflow. You probably didn't experience it because you had the top off. There's just no way easy way to expel the heat without some small fans but it's not enough to do so without noise. Actually the same thing happens at the bottom for the drives, I tried to install fans in the front and back and it just didn't pull enough air to keep everything cool.
It's also incredibly heavy, generally pretty hard to work in and gets dusty so fast with no included dust filters.
Avoid this thing and just go a cheaper 6 bay and use zfs.
Three weeks ago i bought an other 8-Bay NAS enclosure from aliexpress. I received it this week an it was realy good quality but only supports flexATX, therefor four fullsize pci-slots and matx.
I saw this one too but, thank god, i bought the other one.
Thanks for checking this case out. I’ve had it on a watch list on Amazon for over a year and was considering it for a more compact case than the full tower I’ve been using.
Looks like I’ll be looking for something else. Might just shell out a bit more for the hot swap silverstone chassis like the CS381 or CS280, or perhaps a bit less for the fractal node 804.
I can vouch for the 804, the lack of the hotswap sucks but everything else is damn fine. I've actually got a 850W 80+ Ti in it with a full Noctua tower and a 1660 Super. I just had to make a deal with myself to swap a cold spare whenever I get a failure right then. Probably takes 15 minutes max total.
@@j_ferguson I was thinking of throwing 8x14TB Exos drives in Z2. With 2 x 2.5” SATA SSDs for boot. Then migrate my current NAS data over, add in my PCIe cache drive, and dual SFP+ 10Gb X520 card.
Then reuse my older NAS drives for a steam cache in a much smaller case. Or maybe pop them in a small 1U case in my network rack.
@@catalystguitarguy big beefy spinning rust. I only have 4x 12tb Red Plus right now in Z1 with one as a cold spare. Eventual upgrade to 8. No need for 2.5's for me, nvme is cheap as dirt and doesn't use my limited SATA ports. All mobo, no need to worry about the card going balls up and pissing in my zpool.
@@j_ferguson nice. I have 8 x 4TB WD Reds, the CMR ones and 4 x 2TB seagate firecuda drives, along with 4 x 1TB patriot SATA SSDs, currently in my NAS. Wanting to condense the 3 separate pools into 1 much larger Pool in a much smaller chassis. My spinning drives have been running since about 2016, and I’d like to repurpose them before they start failing for a steam cache that’s less critical than my primary storage.
I’ve got the really important stuff on a cold copy in an external drive I keep stored in a fireproof safe with a duplicate kept at my sister’s place across town. 3, 2, 1 is what I try to maintain.
There isn't a problem with this case. Its the cheap motherboard he chose that's caused all his problems. Also if he had used proper server sata cables the fans wouldn't have been an issue. He shot himself in the foot and blamed the gun.
I did a similar build a few years ago for my living room PC using the Fractal Design Node 804 case. I love the look of it but it's also so practical, fitting a standard ATX PSU and full height expansion cards. It also has movable motherboard standoffs!!!
I also love my node 804. It's so well designed. Also after one year of uptime there's absolutely no dust inside.
Even though the 804's design is close to 10 years old now, it's still the best NAS case.
I wish Silverstone would make their cases more available. I got a DS380B and it's been perfect for a tiny homelab. Sucks it only takes a mini ITX motherboards tho.
This case had so much potential, hopefully you can tweak it to work!
I've also got a DS380B, but I've modified mine - since my Supermicro mini-ITX motherboard doesn't have USB 3.0, the front pane cabling has been removed. And, I filed a "V" in the bottom channel on the door, that sits over the pivot-post - so I can lift the door up a little and remove it from the case. For the OS, I'm using the NVME slot on the MB, and one of the MB SATA ports. For the NAS, I'm using 4 MB SATA ports, and the 4 ports on a low profile HBA card. I do have a bifurcation adapter for the MB, to allow several HBA cards, but that will have to wait until I move the MB into a different case (with more slots).
@@dbaldock9 when i grew out of my DS380B, i scored a new old-stock 10th gen atx motherboard. my nas is an i3-10300.
I've been running one of those i9 chinese garbage motherboards as my main and only pc for half a year (I bought one as soon as they became available), asking a lot from it, I put both nvme drives, a wifi card, 64gb of ram at 3200mhz and an rtx3070, it's been basically the best computer I've ever had, no random crashes, and it runs VERY cool, after 6 hours running nonstop at a room temp of 30° it's currently running the gpu at 55° and the cpu at 42°, if I run heavy games the gpu will run at 62° and the cpu a lot less, it's been one of the best purchases I've ever made and I think people bad mouth them because they didn't get to buy one for themselves
This was a fantastic video! The realism alone is beautiful. When you are building something like this there tends to always be issues like these that come up. I imagine many creators would have called this a loss and not made the video at all for any number of these issues. I am glad the video happened anyway, this may not even be a bad case if you go into it knowing it's a base for modification.
Jeff, I, like most storage hoarders, love removable drive bays. They make life easier. But, in the end, it's about having 8 bays in a home lab with an MATX board. That case was garbage for the purpose, and you did your best with it. Now, we don't have to bother. I would suggest an old standby... Introducing the Fractal Node 804. I've owned 3 and still have one. They can be had for around $160, have 8 3.5, up to 4 2.5 bays, etc. They are kind of chunky, but have a lot of space to work with. They will not support a huge heatsink either. Still, I have enjoyed using them because they aren't horrible to work with.
Not sure I agree with the PSU selection. I think you are underestimating the effects of 1) All 8 of those drives spinning up are going to put at least 100W of load on that supply, considering those drives have some mileage on them. 2) Those super-cheap PSU's aren't exactly put toghether well, crappy solder joints and capacitors are common. I don't expect them to last more than 8-10 months running 24/7.
When you first showed the case I thought it looked beautiful and with 8 bays and ATX PSU support it was great but alas, then the downsides came banging down the doors.
Its not really the downsides. The isn't a budget case and he tried to fit a budget build in it. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. You cant afford a Flex ATX, ok that cool but you have to sacrifice bays to build it cheaper, but then just use higher capacity drives. Buy an actual server motherboard and 99% of his problems go away.
@@SimpleEnigma331 True indeed, I just thought the case looked good and seeing as I can't spend a ton on a server and don't have a place to put it, something like this which looks good and could be standing in the livingroom without being an eye sore was right up my alley but yes, problems would be fewer if you use server hardware :)
I don't think it's fair to say there are no downsides with this case. It does seem to have a bunch of wasted space and it does seem to be fairly poorly thought out with things just not fitting.
@@dgan2304 I agree, there are too many downsides and I said as much too, maybe not in so many words and I apologize for any misunderstanding, english is not my primary language.
Regardless I think the case looks good but yes, there are many downsides as you also point out.
$200 is budget for a server enclosure with hot-swap trays and backplane integrated. My criticism around the power supply was there is plenty of space up to to install an SFX without impacting drive trays.
Fun video to watch - I often share similar frustrations about hardware. On a $200 case I'd expect total reconfiguration of the internal layout possible. Sacrificing drive bays to fit a PSU is ridiculous. Thank you for sharing those pains. These little Erying boards are pretty neat, I'll have to take a look at them!
One reason I've always enjoyed your channel is you take some pretty obscure hardware and put it in the light. I'm actually kind of sick of seeing builds where it should very obviously work out perfectly & sparkle like Las Vegas. One thing TH-cam is useful for is having documented resources available for learning. Now less people are going to waste their time and money on this computer case. Thank you Jeff!
I bought the exact same case, found the same things. The fans I inverted the fan enclosure to outside instead of inside. :D
@CraftComputing I was looking at that case for a NAS. I am so glad i didn't choose it. I would have been so disappointed. Thank you so much for all you do for the community.
Good video. It's easy for us to pick apart mistakes after you already laid it all out like this for us. I'm not knocking your hardware choices, but your motherboard choice is what seemed to send it in the wrong direction. While most MATX boards don't have 8 SATA ports, nearly all will have at least 2. That would have fixed your cable issue and possibly your standoff issue. Amazon even has the Apevia PS-ITX300W for $34 or Silverstone FX350 for $109. I think you're supposed to have the fan mount flipped so that it protrudes from the back of the case. Looks odd and bulky, but I think it would help with airflow. The wasted room up top could come in handy for some 2.5" SSDs if you ended up going the HBA adapter route. I do agree this case has a lot of room for improvement and I look forward to someone else making a more well designed version of this.
My old Define R5 case that I used as my main PC case became my server enclosure. Can't be any happier with all the sound insulation or vent configuration and 3.5 bays or 5.25 bays it has. Sure it's huge but who cares. I don't put the server on display or something. I cram it in a corner and forget about it.
Jeff, I LOVED this video for not only the content, but because most of it you were just adlibbing. When you aren't reading from a prompt, your natural voice comes out and your videos don't feel like the news, but more like I'm just hanging out with you and learning something new or going over something I already knew but perhaps with a different spin.
I’ve been using an ERYING 0000 mainboard for my media/gaming PC. The only thing I would recommend is to apply conformal coating to the bottom of the custom CPU heat spreader (Aluminium part)- and use liquid metal instead of thermal paste between the copper slug and CPU die.
Using thermal paste, my temps would get up to 100C on the CPU…
With liquid metal, I get absolute max temps of 80C (and thats with using Furmark!)
Thank you for this suggestion. I just pulled the heat spreader off last weekend and applied new thermal paste. I haven't pushed it yet, but I have not seen much improvement with the thermals at idle and small server loads. I will have to keep liquid metal as an option.
@@jamesmcelfresh174 make sure to use conformal coating on the aluminium…if the liquid metal gets on there - it’s game over!
You should check out the U-NAS 800 or U-NAS 810 cases. They do what you’re looking for and they don’t suck.
All of the 8 bay unas cases are flex ATX psus only.
I built one of the Erying mobos in a U-NAS 810A case about a week before that new Audheid case was released and have been wishing that I waited since then. The 4 half height slots for PCIe cards and 80mm of cooler clearance height sounds great compared to the 2 horizontal PCIe slots that require ribbon cable extenders and the 52mm max cooler height on the U-NAS chassis. I do like the build quality and the fit and finish, but I still wonder if the Audheid would be better. @CraftComputing hasn't quite convinced me that it would be a bad case to build in. Oh, and you have to get rid of the extra standoff in the U-NAS case as well for this motherboard.
I concur, I've bought excellent Antec Green 380W Bronze PSU's for only $15 each for my projects. High build quality, reliable, quiet, and sufficient output for such projects that don't stress it with no GPU. I have 3 PSUs running 24/7 no sweat, no fuss.
An accurate representation of the pitfalls and shortcomings involved with fitting so much appealing hardware in such a small space! Don't be frustrated, it was informative and entertaining!
For a good case, Node 804 fits the bill. Matx, 8 drive bays, atx psu and does not require you to mess around with it.
I’ve watched this several times as I am working towards my own homelab build. I think I figured out why you were having so many problems.
You made one crucial mistake.
No beer. Rookie move.
I love how you knew that the build was really going to be "around" the case, and then definitely didn't do good enough research on the case to have it work as you envisaged it. IMO, your modification to the build should've started at "replace the case" before you changed up the PSU to a flex-ATX unit.
I would recommend replacing the case with a good one.
I've got a Rosewill 4U rackmount case sitting on top of a wooden wardrobe. Heavy as can be! It is huge on the inside and has hot-swappable drive bays. The stock fans were a bit finicky, but it runs silent. My original purpose for it was to run GPUs, but it evolved into a TrueNAS box. This case now sells for 4 times as much as I paid for it 4 years ago.
Since I work in IT I am usually running ESXi, but I have ran them all except XCP-ng. Just did a new build with it and I am loving it!
Powerman power supplies! I sold a lot of those 15 years ago when I worked at a computer store. They are truly a solid low power output unit that will hold up for a very long time.
I managed to buy a define R4 off of someone for 25 euros. It might not be new or small, but it's so much nicer of an experience: Everything fits and was thought out properly 🎉
I bought one of these erying boards back in feb I think? it's been the heart of my home unraid server since then and it's never given me an issue!
Been running two of them as my Proxmox servers, and they've been rock solid.
I have the same cas in white.
Very wife approved, sitting in my living room
I used an ebay 9200 sas card for 40 bucks with a used 10g intel x520
The backplane in this case supports SAS drives you just need a mini sas to 4 sata ports, the backplates have sata connections on the rear
The flex psu issue bummed me out aswell, i used a 500w fsp power supply i got a good deal on and swapped the fan to a noctual on, stock fan on flex psus are supper loud
The drives spinning are the same volume as the noctua fan
i also put in 80mm fans on the top portion to help cool the sas and nic cards
The fan cables for the rear, just fit in the gap, i didn't have to dremel anything
Those erling boards are fine and pretty rock solid. Also, nothing wrong with ES/QS or mobile cpus either, they work great when professionally soldiered to the MB. The only downside with the mobile cpu boards is the cpu is soldiered to the board (no socket) so there's no upgrading it but at the price point that's not really a issue.
Have been running my ES Erying board since Mar 12th, only reason it has had ANY downtime is a 2 hour power outage this past weekend which was just too long for my UPS
They are solid pieces of kit
The concern with the PSU is more of the startup surge when the drives spin up. If you have a way to stagger the disk spin up this would be less of an issue. Back in the day I ran quad wd raptors in a desktop that regularly went into standby, the PSU died in less than a year.
I run 5x14TB on a picopsu clone and a 120W brick. 8 should be easy for a real PSU.
Not to mention, the $100-$150 price-point that he's claimed for a 500W PSU is actually more in lines for what you'd pay to get to get a 750W+ PSU that's at least semi-modular and has some kind of efficiency rating. He's not wrong that a higher quality PSU would cost much more than that $16 one, but the quality of PSU for the price he claimed is actually going to be better than he suggested.
@@gabest4 Not a concern of if you can but rather for how long? Things like how often the drives spin up/down matter.
@@gabest4 There are software solutions that let you or automatically spin up the drives one by one or in smaller groups so as not overburden the PSUs or limit noise, once spun up initially these drives can then be spinning down and spinning up only when called for, eg. in non-RAID setups, throughout the day, or they can be spinning all the time and the lowest speeds, if constantly accessed or kept from completely idling to the point of spinning down, and these both tend to allow even a picopsu or external laptop-like bricks to handle the loads. Without such optimisations, 8 drives spinning up constantly can easily take well over 10W each so with AiCs, memory, SSDs, USBs, CPU and mobo components you can have occasional spikes into 200W. If your PSU, whether pico-one or external, can handle those and they're not so recurrent, your PSU can last years, and if software allows the drives be handled more gently the 120W PSU could be enough for 5 drives and the rest of the platform. But if the software stack is not optimised you can end up with "regular" bursts into 200W+ range with 8 drives and even power-efficient rest of the gear, so a real PSU rated for less or with the efficiency bell curve outside of those bursts may not be the best choice in the long term... if you're less than lucky ;)
It’s not 1992, there is no big startup surge, they pull their spec’d wattage for a bit while they start, but it’s not like the old days when they’d brown out the 12v rail.
Just buy a PCI-E 1x riser cable, remove the bracket of the SATA controller and just put it at an angle. You could 3D print some kind of holder or just let it be since it's not like you will move that device that often.
After your first video on that mobo I was looking to upgrade my home server. I got one and it's been 100% uptime without any issues since it arrived.
Just a suggestion but if its only a matter of a few millimeters (11:02), you could remove the mounting lugs and install an insulated sheet on the plate under the motherboard.Then mark an tap mounting holes in the plate. Alternately fabricate a oblong black plastic surround to sit on top of the frame below the cover plates to give the required height.
Node 804 is what you are looking for. My only complaint is the microATX limitation.
That Erying i9 11900 motherboard has been fantastic. I had some hiccups in setting it up but after it was done. No trouble running my steam games at all. Good job! Love your channel.
Use the same HGST drives. Out of 25 or so drives only one has died and of course I bought spares. Totally worth it if you run Z2. Just hope the prices don't go up after this before I can buy more.
I just gotta say thank you for taking a look at this case. I considered importing it and going through all the trouble of figuring it out without any guidance. If you go through the usual Chinese channels, you can buy a screen that replaces the wood panel, which I thought was really awesome for a server monitoring display. Still might consider pulling the trigger on it though.
I also want to thank you in general for representing this kinda middle-ground for homelabbers. I've mentioned this case on Reddit, and I was chastised for it. It's annoying that in some nooks of the community, you are only allowed to be either seen as a beginner with raspis/mini computers, or a professional with large server racks. Us scrappy guys who just want to answer the question "will this work" are rarely represented. Been really appreciative of your channel and Hardware Haven lately.
I'm so glad you took the plunge on this case. I've been wanting to do the same, and with all the issues you have, I'll be looking for something else
i really loved the way you have presented this video , while most of the youtubers out there only showing us the end result or only the successful part of their content you are explaining showing us all the negatives stuffs happen in technical side, and yeah i learnt alot form your video, hope you'll come up with more lessons in future
I think you installed the fan bracket backwards. The fans mount on the back side of the bracket in the system.
Also, for a server, wouldn't something with ECC memory be a better choice or is that really not a needed option? Many of these "server" class systems may include the necessary SATA ports, but then will lack the NVME slots. I know everything will have tradeoffs.
9:00 I've had one of those pre-build provided power supplies and they just replaced it after Hardware info is showing
15 volts on the 12-volt
7 volts on the 5 volt
4.5 volts on 3.3
( double checked with multimeter and confirmed the voltages were elevated)
It served me well for the 7 years I've had it.
Commenting again since you've been up to 45Drives facility. I know there's only so much you're able to say, but I hope to god you used this case as an example of what they really should be making. This enclosure really only needs a few tweaks to be perfect. I also hope you can be the voice of reason with them and convince them to make sure what ever they make fits MATX boards and not just MITX. Those extra slots are worth it being just a little bit wider!! 45D being who they are I'd expect some 2.5" SSD mounting somewhere in there, and maybe even some cut outs for M.2 10Gig adapters! Maybe even find a way to sneak a 4060 OC low profile card in there.
I personally have a home Media Server/NAS, and I used a Silverstone case... I also modded it to have an internal IR receiver and programmed it to a Logitech Harmony One... works great.
*my case is the Silverstone GD08
I like the focus on budget and buying used or cheap hardware here, something that so few youtubers seem to do. There's no end of videos with the best of everything and fancy hardware but this is what it's all about - a decent budget build with a purpose :) nice work Jeff
I do appreciate you showing failures or less than expected results. Similar to I bought one so you don't have to.
You're a very detail oriented person. The thing looks beautiful, despite all your fitment issues.
YES! I'm so happy you found the case I've been looking for...searching for years....wait what...that's no good....but surely I can use all 8 drives in this 8-bay case....WHAT...and there's more.....aaahhhh.....the search continues. At least I'm not the only one losing his mind.
I am glad someone has to take the hit for experimenting like this. I will pour one out for you...
XCP-NG also allows you to use the disks as storage repository for VMs. It just partions about 25G for root, log and some other stuff and allows the rest to be used as SR.
As some other people have pointed out, you could just use the internal SATA ports for the two ports that won't fit. One thing they tend to forget though, is that that solution won't always work with dual NVMe drives, since they tend to disable some, if not all onboard SATA ports. What would work best in this case is an 8I SAS HBA. But the problem with THAT is that those tend to use PCIe 8x slots as opposed to the current 1X you're using. Worst comes to worst, you could just use two cards that have 4 SATA ports each.
I picked up a u-nas nsc-810a hot swap case a couple of years ago because it supported mATX motherboards and up to 2 add-in cards (hba and 4-port ethernet nic). it all does fit but there is not a lot of room, and i think i paid around $300 for the case and flex atx power supply. i''ve had it running truenas for 3 years or so with no issues.
same MoBo 2.2GHz ES - 9mounts with unraid, 5 disks + NVMe cache - works like charm around 60W some idle - up to 100-120W with loaded VMs and 7-8 containers
This is exactly why I ended up with an enthoo 719. Just upgraded to a 5800x3d and downgraded the 5600x to the mini itx esxi host with HBA and up to 12 HDD.
I was thinking about doing this type of setup, but I had one less requirement of the noise since it will be going into my tech closet. But instead I went with a used R720 with 12 drive bays, 8 filled with 3 TB SAS drives, and 192 GB of RAM for under $600. The one thing that didn't come with it is a place to boot boot drives without taking from the bays up front. So I'm working with other options for having additional hard drives for the OS.
I feel like there's a sweet spot for this kind of case out there - something that's modern, with Micro-ATX support and a decent layout (maybe even room for a slim optical drive?). The Node 804 is probably as close as it gets.
The Jonsbo N3 looks pretty interesting, though it's still a Mini-ITX case.
The sweet spot is not trying to build the cheapest possible build. Plenty of mATX MBs have 8 sata ports. He just chose to stick with this cheap MB thats lacking features.
Amazon listing describes the hdd and power supply options: There are three installation combinations of hard drives and power supplies: 8 HDD + FLEX Power Supply, 6 HDD + SFX-L/SFX Power Supply, 4 HDD + ATX Power Supply.
For the SATA ports, you could use a NVMe to SATA adapter card. It will cost you an NVMe slot of course, but they're low profile and will free up that full PCIe slot.
RE: power supply, I completely agree. Use the minimal with what you expect.
Surprisingly enjoyable, because of all the hurdles you had to overcome
Jeff! The Dell H310. a.k.a. the LSI 2008. Two mini SAS out of the rear of the card, with breakout cables would give you 8 SATA ports, and it's half hight that will allow you to close the top of the case.
cheap is more expensive. NIce educetional build. Absolutly to forget for any productivity purpose.
Were the mount screws in the way, or just a possible ground/short point if it connected. In those cases, when I was a younger sharper guy, I used a piece of electrical tape over the post. Then I forced the tape to the sides of the post and used a very small tie band to keep it there. Even on some screw holes on the old motherboards (that grounded out and stopped the board from working if not shorting it out) I did it, and drove the screw through it. It offered a little more support (and insulation if needed) when pushing and pulling cards in and out (mostly in). I called it the JP device. Yeah, not really a thing, but I thought of making a video lately (about 25 years later than I used it), just for fun. However it did save time and had a purpose back then. My 2¢
"No power supply will last forever" I have used a 500w evga power suppy across 15 builds over the last 15 years. It has been the only component I have not upgraded.
I was looking at this case a lot recently and instead went with the node 304. Very happy
Hard to tell from a video (and without a manual), but i think the rear fans were meant to be mounted in a boot/trunk configuration, protruding from the back. if correct, that would also explain why there are no passthrough holes for the fan cables.
I do like the idea of a cost effective nas though, hope you make more of these videos!
That ad read has a power level of OVER 9000!!!!!
Seeing how the DIY NAS/Homelab is "mainstream" again (thanks to the competition in CPU market maybe?), I really hope sometime in the future Fractal (or someone else) will do a proper version of a case like this. Both node 304 and 804 are excellent cases, but I think now is the perfect time to release an update/successor to those (my 304 is at least 6 years old now).
Since I live in an apartment and I don't have a garage (for a server rack, ofc), this kind of build would make more sense to me (oh god, I have to be strong and convince myself, that I don't need another home server... :'D), but at the same time, I also like the whole "used enterprise equipment" thingy. So keep up the good work, I really appreciate your content. Plus I really like that your builds do not always work as planned (sorry :D).
ps: as a fellow craft enjoyer, I have to complain, that I miss the beer section of the video :'D It is always interesting to see what the craft industry makes on the other side of the world.
i have the luxury of hiding my enterprise level hardware away from the rest of my house, so i opted for an aged dell poweredge tower server with dual xeons in it. with a total of 12 cores, 24 threads, 72gb ddr3 ecc ram, and quad gigabit connectivity, and 8 bays that can each handle an 8tb drive (since i upgraded the raid controller) it's an incredible budget option with redundant 1200w platinum power supplies and insane air flow. 24 hours a day for 5 years so far, 0 downtime, and it was old when i got it!
@@ghomerhusthow many days uptime?
I have a node 304 and I love it. Apart from the filter placement, but I just reversed the airflow, and so far so good.
And in today's world, where sfx PSUs are cheap, they can make it probably mATX by widening it ever so slightly and using the empty space where the PSU cable is routed.
Silversone also has nice cases in their DS line, but those include a backplane and thus are really expensive. They have consumer cases based on the same chassis usually, but they alter them to make sure you can't fit as many drives into them as the DS line variant.
The used enterprise stuff is great because you are giving the equipment a new life, and it's actually built for this. Everything made to be easy to service, all metal, redundant everything. Main downsides are noise, power, and size. So if you have the space for it, it's great. But I do think that the amazingly efficient more modern alternatives are better for most people.
@@nuvotion-live Totally agree but it's nice that the used enterprise stuff is out there as well. I have an ebay Epyc CPU/mobo combo I picked up that I'm going to try consolidating my current 2 servers into. Probably won't be much of a power savings overall but I get more unf and it will definitely run a lot quieter than my old venerable 1u NAS does right now. I could have gone with something more modern and all but having gobs of ram and lots of PCIE slots will make up for it.
A 2 port sas card is probably the way to go since you can get adapter cables that will turn one sas into 4 sata drives. Since they are for servers the ports will likely point the right way.
I've been looking at that case for nearly a whole year now!
The company is translated as Warhead, they started on taobao and actually I think anywhere else would be "third party".
The best part of the front fascia is that it can be replaced with a screen... by yourself. They even listed what screens to buy.
But of course, it's pretty bad. I am going to go with a Inspur SAS cage with a external cover of sorts (in acrylic...)
Where are you finding these accessories for this case?
@@SimpleEnigma331 From their official store, but really not recommended. Jonsbo N3 would be a better bet
Generally I find that this kind of random brand cases are very much a situation where you need to expect to dremel and modify things a lot to get even basic things to work. I got an ITX case from a random brand that theoretically was perfect for what I needed, I just needed to cut off a piece off the GPU's bracket, add long standoffs to the screwholes for the PSU to fit in the PSU cable, make my own dust filters from pantyhose and small bits of wood, cut some slice off a metal beam that was interfering with my CPU tower cooler, and then cut off some excess plastic from the front panel to fit a fan there. But after those modifications it was pretty good for a 3600X + 2060 -build
Till this day, Silverstone SG11 is still my favorite home lab case. It has 9x 2.5”, 3x 3.5” drive slots, and a 5.25” bay. With an icy dock enclosure, that’s another 8x 2.5” bays. And it actually supports proper ATX power supplies, even the big long ones
which icydock? internal? where does that fit in sg11, bro??
I bought the exact same case recently to try and minimize my current Define R5 setup, and immediately returned it like 2 days later. The Flex ATX mount only works with units, the fan mounts and wire management were just... bad, and everything about it felt so cheap and downgraded despite costing over $200.
The Define R5, a case I picked up used for $70 is just so much better.
Thanks for taking one for the team on this one. At least we know what case not to buy.
Have you ever considered having a case built that solves all the problems you encountered? The whole process of finding and working with a factory, getting a proof of concept built, testing it etc... could be interesting content for your channel. I would imagine that there would be some demand for a case that allows someone to build a nas on a budget. There might be some money to be made while solving a real problem.
I, too, use my rack servers as leaf blowers once they're restricted to outside use.
For truenas scale, you can create a bootable usb of decent size, then copy that whole drive layout and contents to a ssd of choice, and create another partition, which we then add into another pool. So yes, there are 2+ pools using the same drive, but hey.. at least we can run applications on that second one now, as it can be selected as primary applications storage.
Now, I'm not sure what happens if such a drive stops working, but in case of using 2 drives in mirror pool, it should probably result in both pools marking the defective drive as offline, and continuing to work from the fine one.
I've been dying for an 8 bay, 3.5", MATX compact/rack mountable NAS case for years. All of them have at least 1 thing super weird or super dumb. I've been sticking to the Node 804 for now. If you find something amazing, I would love a video!
This case is amazing. He just tried building a budget build in a high-end case. With the correct hardware, IE not cheap Chinese ones, none of the issues he had is valid.
I love that we get to see to probloms you have. Glad to know it's not just me with these builds.
Oh wow, I just learned about this case last week and spent all weekend contemplating a build for one! I absolutely love that wood panel! Shame you had so much trouble with it. The caveat about the PSU size is worded in the most akward way on the Amazon page, it really threw me off at first. And I've read reviews of the other Audheid cases that mention that the insides don't have great engineering and can be a hassle to build in.
I've been eyeing an Asus Rack Ryzen mATX board that does have 8 SATA ports (and ECC support!). It's not cheap, but at least I shouldn't have to worry about space as much. It was great getting to watch you take the case apart, it answered a lot of questions I've had about it.
Sometimes the level of thrift you reach for really worries me, lol. But I love seeing the things you manage to find -- a few gems here and there.
I'm quite happy with the Jonsbo N2 case that contains my little NAS/media box under the TV. It only has 5 drive bays (though they could easily have fit a 6th), but that's plenty for my setup -- but 5 drive bays does require a bit more thoughtfulness in picking drive sizes than an 8-bay case to get the capacity and redundancy you want.
could you tell me the specs of your please? Looking into building a 5bay NAS in that. Bought the chassis, the hdds, sfx-l psu and one of these erying boards, interested in extras like a sata controller you picked up for yours and a cooler.
@@archief1 I got a 6-port SATA card with ASM1166 controller chip, and used a ThermalTake low profile CPU cooler.
I've been running the Er Ying 11980hk ES board with the older style VRM heatsink since the start of this year as my main PC. Has not failed me once! Mind you I'm also running Throttlestop to power limit my PL1 as I didn't like what the short turbo did to my temps. The only real complaint I have of the motherboard is mine doesn't seem to like it when i turn on Hyper-V so any VM's need to use different software.
You can also use a LSI second-hand SAS card with cables that go 4 SATA each, need only 2 of those then for 8 drives, and they go off the side, not off the top of the card
For multiple sata drives always buy sas expansion card with sas to SATA cables... Much easier cable management.
You should mod the case, use acrylic on the top, maybe forge your own psu mounts and try maybe fitting 2 more drive bays on tne bottom
just have to say i love the LTX custom yellow and green LTT screw driver you made
I'd like to see more builds like this. Finding an actually well thought out case with 8 drive bays and an ATX power supply, with the looks of this would have been awesome. Additionally, im abit disappointed with my beam, the air is great but im just getting so many issues with my deck