I think Chenbro is the OEM for Antec. They make some strong cases. I do missionary work at a medical clinic in the 3rd world. They are in the middle of nowhere but their medical clinic is fully electronic. When a new PC has to get there by jeep and/or donkey I use Antec/Chenbro.
You missed the popular though a bit old Fractal Design Node 304. Yes it's not a hot swappable case, but a small case for 6 bays, ATX PSU, ITX motherboard for less than 100€
I have one of those. I also have the define R5 as well. Now THAT is a fabulous server case. 8 Bays. Sound deadening case. Just a plain black case. Totally unobtrusive. You can mount the drives on the sleds. Theoritically you could easily install your own backplane if you so desired.
Great video! Amazon is a lot easier to deal with than Ali express. Would be great if you could do a video on replacement/ upgrade boards for qnap and Synology, when they get too old and slow, or have a mobo/backbone failure (a known for qnap systems)
Interesting that you show the book "Using SANs and NAS" by Curtis W. Preston alongside some of your cases there, especially the AUDHEID. I was a technical reviewer of that book, and I've been friends with Curtis ever since. He's done more recent books that you might also want to check out.
thers one issue thats not being spoken of and that the shipping and tax for those importing from outside the USA, prime example the RackChoice 12 bay M-ATX chassis you showed off may be a good price at $369.00 but once the $115 shipping and tax gets added on top its no longer competitive with simply buying a reconditioned enterpise unit that in a good chunk of situations will still include the mainboard and PSU.
I need a NAS to store all the movies and picture which are currently on several PC's and Lap-Tops in use by the family. I'm just not sure if I build or buy, I only want a 4 bay. Building might be more fun, but I have no real clue. Building a PC is no issue, but picking NAS parts is difficult, so thanks for all your recent videos.
I have the AUDHEID case and it's awesome. I wouldn't buy it though because the Jonsbo N4 black is available now and it's 100 dollars less and nearly identical and the differences are all upgrades unless you need 8 bays. I had a 1U psu to put into the AUDHEID and did a 6x8tb RaidZ2 with 2x250gb ssd for vms and M.2 for boot and 1 for Cache. It's hard to find all that in a prebuilt. Prior to this I had the Fractal 804 with 8x4tb which is also good but I had issues with hanging drives and the sata cables and it was just huge.
I want a case that can hold 8 x 2.5" SSDs. I have a VM server that has a NAS VM with the 8 SSDs that need a place to mount them. A mini JBOD NAS like enclosure would be perfect. The regular NAS enclosures are all so big, since they are built for Rust HDs.
@@MrRakushinYeah, seems like the industry just hasn't embraced 2.5" SSDs as NAS drives yet. Even the server drive trays I find are made to accommodate 2.5 hard drives, so they are needlessly wide for SSDs. I want as compact as possible. I personally don't even need room for a motherboard or anything else, since all my drives are wired into my server mobo.
@@makuru.42 Yes, exactly. I have been trying several of the PCIe M.2 adapter cards, everything from the $40 Amazon cards, that require bifurcation to be supported by the CPU and chipset, to the high dollar PIC based cards that have a chip to handle the PCIe lane bifurcation, on board.
I'm new to the whole NAS environment but from my short experience it seems we are in a transition period where the most efficient systems uses 4-8 Mechanical hard drives and 1 or 2 M2 SSDs acting as a cache. However, it seems we are moving towards all SSD systems. I'd like to find a NAS enclosure that switches the ratio to favor the M2 drives but still uses mechanical HDs. Something that has maybe 10-12 M2 bays and 6-8 mechanical HD bays. Have you seen anything like that out there?
I am in a similar boat to you. I thought I wanted a brand name but after a bit of research I'd rather spend the money on a more powerful open source system. I think I want a case with eight bays and an M2 drive for the OS. My big dilemma is I want to make sure I can support both a high-end graphics card and 10 GB networking should I want to upgrade in the future. I'm still researching mini ITX motherboards to find one that could support 2x16 PCIE slots and a case that can support that and a base with good cooling.
If I had the space, I'd go for a server rack case (whatever amount of Us you want - 1U to 4U) if you want flexibility in terms of storage, because apart of consumer HDDs and SATA SSDs and M.2 drives there are SAS drives (mechanical and not mechanical) as well as U.2 (and I believe U.3) drives as well as the new format I forgot (slightly bigger and thicker than a M.2 NVMe drive, but as fast or faster and enterprise grade). However: especially the latter drives are expensive. I personally would pick up SATA or SAS SSDs if you can find them at a reasonable price for storage (preferably modern, ideally enterprise grade, in good condition and with a lot of free TBW) and M.2 drives for boot and runtime data (e.g. containers and VMs in the context of Proxmox). In Unpaid you'd probably use the NVMe drives as cache for your cluster for faster access. In the server / enterprise space you probably could find some blade-like trays you can use in particular cases and chassis...es... Good luck! On another note: sometimes a semi-regular PC case gets the job done, too.
@NASCompares Can you test ds923+ with four sata ssd in raid5 and 10 gigabit card? I wonder if it will be possible to achieve a stable 1200 Mbps in SMB or iSCSI? Will the processor handle it? Also, is an nvme cache needed for this build, a lot of things to figure out. Should be interesting.
Wonderful! I would love it if you could review the NSC-410, it is a very interesting case in my opinion. Maybe you can compare it to the Jonsbo N2? Thank you for informative and entertaining content as always.
I've been looking for a bit and I can't find any NAS cases from Chenming, only some rackmount servers. Did they abandon the computer case and small NAS type case market? Anybody know anything about this? They used to be the goto supplier when you wanted to build small servers with hot swap capability. They also had a huge selection of 5.25" drop in HDD cages and such. But now i can't find anything. Now InWin used to be decent quality at decent price. I remember that they had the first case with a slide out MB tray that I saw. This was back in the AT age, or more specifically the Baby AT formfactor, so predating ATX. They have chassis with 4 or 8 hot swappable HDD bays. Now I haven't used them, but I'm guessing that they are still of decent quality. And if you need larger then they have a quite nice range of rackmount cases, as well as drop in HDD bays. Only problem is it's hard to find decent cases with a lot of 5.25" bays today. It seems every manufacturer has stopped producing those to instead make more RGB puke loaded cases with less airflow and huge glass panels. If it sounds as if I don't like this trend then that's not very observant. I hate it!
Hello, could you please tell me if it makes sense to build a NAS with 2.5" SSD SATA drives? I'm particularly interested in RAID 6, which would require a case that can accommodate a motherboard and 6 drives. I understand that there are solutions like the DS620slim, but it only has 2GB of RAM (600€), and I would like to be able to run virtual machines and similar tasks alongside the NAS. Alternatively, are there any adapters from 3.5" to 2.5" that would allow me to use the Jonsbo N3 case?
I really can't get my head around all these new cases and how cheap they're finally getting. It used to be just getting the drive base or like over $100 and now you can almost get them for nothing which is really nice. One thing that causes me pause and a bit of caution is that when you're using these kinds of cases they usually don't have status LEDs up front which can be a problem when you have a lot of drives and you need to swap them out. preferably, I would love to see the comeback of a LCD in front of the actual drive itself That would be wonderful Let me tell you. Wouldn't really cost too much to do either and they make those really many displays and that would be really cool to put one of those on the front of it. I still think it's a better idea to go with a professional solution as in something from the server market that is no longer the top of the line anymore but will fit your needs perfectly. and with the way that they come configured it's really easy to manage as well once you understand the hardware software scenario. The only bummer is they really do take a bit of power a bit of weight and they're kind of large but in order for them to have the amount of data redundancy that you need this is kind of required.
Noticeably absent in the DIY Enclosure / NAS market? Any kind of small case for SSDs only. Everything out there is just absolutely GIGANTIC. If you want to have an all-flash NAS that sits unobtrusively on the corner of your desk? Out of luck. Want to have a desktop-sized NAS? Here's 3.2 million options to choose from. Frustrating as all get-out.
A good option would have been the fractal design R5 define. It's what I'm using right now. It has sound deadening panels. It's plain black. Totally unobtrusive. Absolutely SILENT when you're running it. Comes with EIGHT HDD bays, on sleds. ATX case. So you can use all kinds of PCIE cards. It even has 5.25 drive bays for Tape Backup. Just stick it in a corner and forget about it. It's NOT hot swappable, but for the love of God, hot swap is overkill for a home server/NAS
Hot Swap Bays in a home server/NAS is totaly overkill. The vast majority of users simply won't have 'spare' drives ready to hot swap into. They will purchase a replacement as and when a drive fails. If it's mission critical you have spare drives knocking around, then you certainly shouldn't be rolling your own NAS machine.
I think Chenbro is the OEM for Antec. They make some strong cases. I do missionary work at a medical clinic in the 3rd world. They are in the middle of nowhere but their medical clinic is fully electronic. When a new PC has to get there by jeep and/or donkey I use Antec/Chenbro.
Chenbro have been round for literally decades. The first i heard of them was in 2001.
You missed the popular though a bit old Fractal Design Node 304. Yes it's not a hot swappable case, but a small case for 6 bays, ATX PSU, ITX motherboard for less than 100€
I have one of those.
I also have the define R5 as well.
Now THAT is a fabulous server case.
8 Bays. Sound deadening case.
Just a plain black case. Totally unobtrusive.
You can mount the drives on the sleds. Theoritically you could easily install your own backplane if you so desired.
if only there was a 20 bay version…
@@majorgear1021 The Define XL has 18 bays…
@ Watch the LTT video, you aren’t limited to just the bays. You can mount
hard drives other places.
Great video! Amazon is a lot easier to deal with than Ali express.
Would be great if you could do a video on replacement/ upgrade boards for qnap and Synology, when they get too old and slow, or have a mobo/backbone failure (a known for qnap systems)
Hi, what do you think about using SAN-Enclosures and SAS-Controllers for building an NAS?
Interesting that you show the book "Using SANs and NAS" by Curtis W. Preston alongside some of your cases there, especially the AUDHEID. I was a technical reviewer of that book, and I've been friends with Curtis ever since. He's done more recent books that you might also want to check out.
The Jonsbo N3 is shipping in the us as of today. Yesterday it was preorder for oct 10.
thers one issue thats not being spoken of and that the shipping and tax for those importing from outside the USA, prime example the RackChoice 12 bay M-ATX chassis you showed off may be a good price at $369.00 but once the $115 shipping and tax gets added on top its no longer competitive with simply buying a reconditioned enterpise unit that in a good chunk of situations will still include the mainboard and PSU.
I need a NAS to store all the movies and picture which are currently on several PC's and Lap-Tops in use by the family. I'm just not sure if I build or buy, I only want a 4 bay. Building might be more fun, but I have no real clue. Building a PC is no issue, but picking NAS parts is difficult, so thanks for all your recent videos.
Yeah I love U-Nas but they never seem to be in stock UGH!
I have the AUDHEID case and it's awesome. I wouldn't buy it though because the Jonsbo N4 black is available now and it's 100 dollars less and nearly identical and the differences are all upgrades unless you need 8 bays.
I had a 1U psu to put into the AUDHEID and did a 6x8tb RaidZ2 with 2x250gb ssd for vms and M.2 for boot and 1 for Cache. It's hard to find all that in a prebuilt.
Prior to this I had the Fractal 804 with 8x4tb which is also good but I had issues with hanging drives and the sata cables and it was just huge.
There'are any case swap 4-Bay MATX under 60$?
I want a case that can hold 8 x 2.5" SSDs. I have a VM server that has a NAS VM with the 8 SSDs that need a place to mount them. A mini JBOD NAS like enclosure would be perfect. The regular NAS enclosures are all so big, since they are built for Rust HDs.
same problem, looking for case for 6-8 2.5" SSD's and itx/m-atx MB, but can't find anything ;(
@@MrRakushinYeah, seems like the industry just hasn't embraced 2.5" SSDs as NAS drives yet. Even the server drive trays I find are made to accommodate 2.5 hard drives, so they are needlessly wide for SSDs. I want as compact as possible. I personally don't even need room for a motherboard or anything else, since all my drives are wired into my server mobo.
Maybe try pcie x16 to m.2 pcie modules, PCIe SSDs cost almost the same and are a lot quicker.
@@makuru.42 Yes, exactly. I have been trying several of the PCIe M.2 adapter cards, everything from the $40 Amazon cards, that require bifurcation to be supported by the CPU and chipset, to the high dollar PIC based cards that have a chip to handle the PCIe lane bifurcation, on board.
I'm new to the whole NAS environment but from my short experience it seems we are in a transition period where the most efficient systems uses 4-8 Mechanical hard drives and 1 or 2 M2 SSDs acting as a cache.
However, it seems we are moving towards all SSD systems.
I'd like to find a NAS enclosure that switches the ratio to favor the M2 drives but still uses mechanical HDs.
Something that has maybe 10-12 M2 bays and 6-8 mechanical HD bays.
Have you seen anything like that out there?
I am in a similar boat to you. I thought I wanted a brand name but after a bit of research I'd rather spend the money on a more powerful open source system. I think I want a case with eight bays and an M2 drive for the OS. My big dilemma is I want to make sure I can support both a high-end graphics card and 10 GB networking should I want to upgrade in the future. I'm still researching mini ITX motherboards to find one that could support 2x16 PCIE slots and a case that can support that and a base with good cooling.
If I had the space, I'd go for a server rack case (whatever amount of Us you want - 1U to 4U) if you want flexibility in terms of storage, because apart of consumer HDDs and SATA SSDs and M.2 drives there are SAS drives (mechanical and not mechanical) as well as U.2 (and I believe U.3) drives as well as the new format I forgot (slightly bigger and thicker than a M.2 NVMe drive, but as fast or faster and enterprise grade).
However: especially the latter drives are expensive.
I personally would pick up SATA or SAS SSDs if you can find them at a reasonable price for storage (preferably modern, ideally enterprise grade, in good condition and with a lot of free TBW) and M.2 drives for boot and runtime data (e.g. containers and VMs in the context of Proxmox). In Unpaid you'd probably use the NVMe drives as cache for your cluster for faster access.
In the server / enterprise space you probably could find some blade-like trays you can use in particular cases and chassis...es...
Good luck!
On another note: sometimes a semi-regular PC case gets the job done, too.
@NASCompares Can you test ds923+ with four sata ssd in raid5 and 10 gigabit card? I wonder if it will be possible to achieve a stable 1200 Mbps in SMB or iSCSI?
Will the processor handle it? Also, is an nvme cache needed for this build, a lot of things to figure out. Should be interesting.
The audheid case is nice but be careful with the sharp edge can cut you or expose your power supply wires.
Wonderful! I would love it if you could review the NSC-410, it is a very interesting case in my opinion. Maybe you can compare it to the Jonsbo N2?
Thank you for informative and entertaining content as always.
I've been looking for a bit and I can't find any NAS cases from Chenming, only some rackmount servers. Did they abandon the computer case and small NAS type case market? Anybody know anything about this? They used to be the goto supplier when you wanted to build small servers with hot swap capability. They also had a huge selection of 5.25" drop in HDD cages and such. But now i can't find anything.
Now InWin used to be decent quality at decent price. I remember that they had the first case with a slide out MB tray that I saw. This was back in the AT age, or more specifically the Baby AT formfactor, so predating ATX. They have chassis with 4 or 8 hot swappable HDD bays. Now I haven't used them, but I'm guessing that they are still of decent quality. And if you need larger then they have a quite nice range of rackmount cases, as well as drop in HDD bays. Only problem is it's hard to find decent cases with a lot of 5.25" bays today. It seems every manufacturer has stopped producing those to instead make more RGB puke loaded cases with less airflow and huge glass panels.
If it sounds as if I don't like this trend then that's not very observant. I hate it!
Hello, could you please tell me if it makes sense to build a NAS with 2.5" SSD SATA drives? I'm particularly interested in RAID 6, which would require a case that can accommodate a motherboard and 6 drives. I understand that there are solutions like the DS620slim, but it only has 2GB of RAM (600€), and I would like to be able to run virtual machines and similar tasks alongside the NAS. Alternatively, are there any adapters from 3.5" to 2.5" that would allow me to use the Jonsbo N3 case?
I really can't get my head around all these new cases and how cheap they're finally getting. It used to be just getting the drive base or like over $100 and now you can almost get them for nothing which is really nice.
One thing that causes me pause and a bit of caution is that when you're using these kinds of cases they usually don't have status LEDs up front which can be a problem when you have a lot of drives and you need to swap them out.
preferably, I would love to see the comeback of a LCD in front of the actual drive itself That would be wonderful Let me tell you. Wouldn't really cost too much to do either and they make those really many displays and that would be really cool to put one of those on the front of it.
I still think it's a better idea to go with a professional solution as in something from the server market that is no longer the top of the line anymore but will fit your needs perfectly.
and with the way that they come configured it's really easy to manage as well once you understand the hardware software scenario.
The only bummer is they really do take a bit of power a bit of weight and they're kind of large but in order for them to have the amount of data redundancy that you need this is kind of required.
The first in win case is the same price on Newegg with a power supply.
U-Nas has a goofy way to use pci-e cards, a riser cable is needed
I KNOW RIGHT!!!
Norco 4224 going strong for a decade.
antec p101s is goodenough
Hello, what is the best program NAS to use in my old PC?
Noticeably absent in the DIY Enclosure / NAS market? Any kind of small case for SSDs only. Everything out there is just absolutely GIGANTIC. If you want to have an all-flash NAS that sits unobtrusively on the corner of your desk? Out of luck. Want to have a desktop-sized NAS? Here's 3.2 million options to choose from. Frustrating as all get-out.
U-NAS is interesting .... but a pain to import :|
Does anybody else think that every one of these cases should have a big handle built-in?
You remind me of Tim Curry
Unas is always out of stock
A good option would have been the fractal design R5 define.
It's what I'm using right now.
It has sound deadening panels.
It's plain black.
Totally unobtrusive.
Absolutely SILENT when you're running it.
Comes with EIGHT HDD bays, on sleds.
ATX case.
So you can use all kinds of PCIE cards.
It even has 5.25 drive bays for Tape Backup.
Just stick it in a corner and forget about it.
It's NOT hot swappable, but for the love of God, hot swap is overkill for a home server/NAS
I was interested in the R5, could you share your build (mobo+cpu, etc) with me? Much appreciated!
Hot Swap Bays in a home server/NAS is totaly overkill.
The vast majority of users simply won't have 'spare' drives ready to hot swap into.
They will purchase a replacement as and when a drive fails.
If it's mission critical you have spare drives knocking around, then you certainly shouldn't be rolling your own NAS machine.