Joined in 2023 
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This one was built in 2018, but I reused the name from a previous build. This is the 8th FreeNAS unit I have built for home. Eight systems in ten years... I made some mistakes along the way, learned some and I try to share some of those lessons learned experiences here in the forum. I have even put together some hardware just to test things out a time or two... mini-ITX is a common choice for smaller builds, especially ones also meant to be on display. Gaming ITX motherboards can and do have a premium price. There are some cheap ITX boards out there, but finding one with more than 4 SATA ports may be challenging.
Fans: 3x 120 mm @ front (3 included), 3x 120 mm @ middle (3 included), 2x 80 mm @ rear (2 included) I personally felt like this was a missed opportunity to a case that I was genuinely excited to work with. I was very interested in building the most compact DIY NAS as I could reasonably achieve, but I was almost nearly as interested in evaluating the latest release of FreeNAS, FreeNAS-11.2-U2. The DIY NAS blogs wind up being an excellent way for me to tinker with the latest version of FreeNAS, before deciding to upgrade my own NAS. The release notes from the FreeNAS 11.2-Release r talk extensively about the new Anuglar-based UI, which has been something I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.
SilverStone CS280 NAS Hardware Installation
Overall, I’ve come to expect that a typical DIY NAS built today should be readily able of saturating a gigabit link during the read test, and this year’s NAS did not disappoint in this regard. I enjoyed monitoring the sequential throughput test in both my desktop machine’s task manager, but also in the new dashboard in the latest version of FreeNAS: The functionality of the hot-swap bays are very smooth and not janky. They don’t feel cheap at all. So what did I wind up deciding to do in 2019? Make it even smaller! I’ve always preferred making my NAS builds diminutive on account of my limited desk space. Additionally, what I saw as one of the biggest advantages in comparing a DIY NAS build to the off-the-shelf NAS offerings from folks like Drobo, QNAP, Synology, et al. is the fact that the off-the-shelf NAS machines are nearly always compact. In building my own NAS, I wanted to demonstrate that a DIY builder could do it better! Speaking of the proximity of the power supply and the drive cage, I also wound up deciding that instead of stretching and tugging power cables across the already crowded space in the drive cage, that I’d buy a SATA-to-Molex Power Adapter for providing power to the drive cage. This allowed me to route two of the separate accessories’ power cables from the power supply to either side of the case and keep the drive cage clear for just the SATA cables. The hardware in this year’s NAS compared to last year’s DIY NAS build are a bit less powerful, and that shows up in the benchmarks. The performance over the Gigabit in the sequential write, random read, and random write tests were all lower than both last year’s NAS and my own NAS. Given the amount of money spent, I expected this year’s NAS to have a hard time competing against last year’s NAS. The fact that this year’s NAS didn’t outperform my own was a bit disappointing. FreeNAS-11.2-U2
For a while I had three systems, all at once, at home but I am making some hardware changes right now and only one NAS is online.Increasingly, there are 2.5″ hard drives available, which changes the scene a bit. These can run hot and offer smaller storage than their larger counterparts. But the reduction in size is a definite advantage. Is a SSD for SLOG worthwhile? Will any vendor's SSD work (aside from reliability or read/writes per minute), or are there potential driver issues with Samsung versus Intel? This took some serious patience and planing to make it all fit but in the end I proved that it was possible to install with off-the-shelf SATA cables A small detail, but never the less something I can appreciate -the simple design of the the door hinge.
One feature that we find a big plus is the removable air filter at the front of the two 80mm cooling fans built into the case. We also like the removable dust filter in front of the two cooling fans, this greatly aids in keeping inside the case dust free and allows for removal and cleaning.Everything installed fine, with one small exception. We needed to remove the 2.5” SSD cage below the main 8-bay HDD cage to give clearance to the CPU heat sink. SATADOMs and Velcro are good solutions to adding a boot SSD anyway. SilverStone CS280 PSU Installed 2
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