NAS case
Im in the market for a NAS solution. By NAS I don't mean running Jellyfin and some homepage thing for vibes, I mean your old-style "it just provides network attached storage".
I love the Jonsbo cases but I don't want to drop as much coin as building out a NAS based on one of them entails. I'm looking for an older office/home/gaming PC or case that has room for atleatst 4 3.5" HDD’s. Something around ten years old with maybe an i5 7th+ gen CPU. I don't need hardware RAID as I prefer ZFS anyway.
Ideas?
27 replies
My NAS is in a node 304 case from fractal design and I can recommend it.
The 304 is mini-ITX/DTX with space for 6 drives.
There is a bigger version for bigger motherboards and more drives, which I would assume is just as good as mine.
Can recommend the bigger case if you need more drives, I love mine
Same, I have over 100 TB of drives in an 804. In very happy.
I have a Fractal Define 6 with room for (i think) 12 HDDs. They have tons of great options for HDD storage.
Why not get an older desktop and fill it with drives?
If you go look for a used regular PC case, older model will typically have more 3.5" bays. By older, I mean +15yo.
If you have access to a 3D printer, you have options to make more drive bays on the cheap.
You will have to go for a modern power-supply still, in order to have enough SATA power plugs.
The Fractal Design Define R cases can house a lot of hard drives, but they are kind of big. My Define R6 can theoretically house 11 3.5" drives iirc in addition to 4x 2.5" but it does not come with that many drive sleds out of the box. For the 2.5" drives only 2 sleds are included. I think for the 3.5" it was about 6.
They can also look for older R models, used. I have an R2 Arc Mini that can do 6 drives and it's not too big.
You can also mount 2.5" drives into the 3.5: trays if you wanted. Ive had my R6 for years now and just bought a 2-pack of drive caddies as it filled up to the point that I now have enough to fill the whole case.
Not exactly cheaper to get than a Jonsbo case.
I like this idea but not keen to go as far as buying a 3D printer.
I might look for something that will hold 4 drives with potential for that kind of expansion later on though.
If you think you might need more, get one with more slots up-front. Trying to add more HDD to a case that wasn't designed for them sucks.
I had the same trouble when looking for a NAS case that did not cost a fortune.I ended up buying a Gemini nas case from Ali Express.
Other than waiting a couple of weeks for it to arrive the price was around $140 USD and it is actually a really good case and mine holds 8 drives.
I have a silverstone DS380. Its pretty good, but limits you to ITX, so finding 8 SATA is kinda hard.
I also have it, I find it quite tricky to work in it because of its compactness. In retrospect, I would have gone with a Fractal Design Define and some hack to enable drives hot swap.
+1 on the Fractal Define series. My Fractal Define 7 was a breeze to work in, even if it is a little expensive.
I have the same case. Wiring was once a bit of pain but after that I had no problems.
yeah but thats a like.. once, maybe twice task. I think I did it a second time after I swapped my Wifi module for a google coral.
OP I think using PCPartPicker might show you tons of options for cases with 4+ drive capacity. If you want an older case just search ebay for the options you find.
I had no idea you could narrow the filters down to 3.5" bays 😅. Cheers for that!
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Old workstations perhaps? Hp z440esq things? An example of such a project.
Perhaps even that is overkill though.
I've professionally rolled out 300 qnaps to various sites- they're pretty decent now
I got the jonsbo n3 and love it. But everyone saying get an old case and save money is right. I just got it cause I like how it looks
Dont blame you it they are very sexy
Thing look nice, I buy haha
I have an HP Proliant G2 tower server case from the early 2000s. Its got 9 drive bays (if you include the floppy drive bay).
Hilariously, it's ATX compatible, so I stuffed it with an older Asus motherboard (7th gen Intel + i7-7700T, w/NVME slot), 16GB DDR4 RAM, ~650W ATX PSU, and an LSI SAS card. Now I just need to migrate everything over to it from my older Mac Mini that's currently serving as the NAS...