SilverStone DS380B Black Aluminum front door, SECC body NAS chassis Premium 8-bay Small Form Factor NAS Chassis SFX PSU (sold separately) Power Supply

Pros: 8 hot swap bays in a case of this size is amazing The case provides a locking front door and a switch to disable front power button to prevent children from accidentally switching the system off.

Cons: The SATA backblane needs a PSU that can supply more than 14 amps from the 5v rail. This results in Slverstones own S45SF-G SFX supply being flaky with this case. I could power on sometimes, but not reliably as the backplane would sometimes draw too much current during start up and trigger the PSU overcurrent protection. After replacing with an ST30SF PSU (which is not modular) that can supply 20a, all current issues were resolved. Because of the small size of the case, cable management is a bit tricky as the case provides no cable routing features. However, there is a convienent 'empty' spot at the top of the case above the top side fan where you can coil up the case cables and leftover PSU cables and using cable ties, I was able to keep the coil wedged between the PSU, side of the case, top of the fan, and edge of the motherboard. This worked fairly well to keep all the cables out of the fans and airflow areas. Airflow in the case is not good at all and HD temperatures vary a lot between different bay positions. At full load on the drives (using 16 dd processes to read from all 8 drives for 24+ hours), some drives reached 43c, while other drives remained at 37c. Under normal operation all drives did stay below 40c, but the load temperatures do concern me. The sata backplane connectors are not high quality and fairly flimsly. Even the soldering jobs on some of the capacitors for the backplane was very medicore, with one capacitor on mny backplane soldered at a very screw angle that exposes way too much lead from the capacitor. When trying to route longer sata cables and connect them to the backplane, due to the stiff nature of many sata cables, some plastic from the connector guard snapped off of one of the ports despite how careful I was trying to be. I strongly recommend buying very short sata cables to use with this case and getting the cables routed as much as possible before attempting to connect them to the backplane. The stock 120mm fans are only 3 pin, and spin at 1100 rpm. My CPU is passively cooled, the PSU fan shuts off when not needed, but I can't control the case fans to reduce their noise. I recommend replacing the stock case fans with 4pin fans that can be slowly ramped up by the motherboard or a fan like the Antec TrueQuiet 120 that can be switched to 600RPM.

Overall Review: I'm very happy with this case. Although I listed many more cons than pros for this case, none of the cons are critical enough to be deal breakers. If you build a NAS in this case, especially if you're trying to build a silent NAS with a passively cooled CPU, this case will work fine for you. Using 8 WD RED which are very quiet, a PSU who's fan shuts off when not needed, and replacment variable speed case fans controlled by the motherboard (ASROCK C2750D4I), the system is almost totally silent.

Pros: Good case. Fairly compact for what it is, and has capacitors on the drive bays to reduce load on the PSU which is a nice touch.

Cons: Seems a bit pricey for what you get. Not a fan (pun not intended) of how removing the magnetic filter on the side of the case COMPLETELY exposes the fans underneath, without any real fan grill to speak of... though this should be easy enough to fix one way or another.

Overall Review: A lot of reviewers give this case a poor rating, I guess without understanding how it should be used or how to build using a case like this. This is a case with perhaps not the best airflow and it's cramped, that much is very true. Depending on what you're looking for, the tradeoffs may be worth the reduction in size. All that one really needs to do is know how to plan out for unconventional builds such as this one -- proper cable management, getting the right length cables, right motherboard selection, fan selection, etc -- and you can build a very competent NAS. It seems most people jump in head first without fully understanding or planning out their build for this case.

Pros: Unit looks good Nice number of bays Nice set of cables included

Cons: Airflow is not routed through the drives, so they constantly overheat. I made a cardboard airflow shield that pushed air through the drives, replaced the fans with variable speed fans (and turned them up) and tried aggressive power saving settings. While these helped, in a temperature controlled room at 19C, the drives reported temperatures between 45-60C. The case is tight to work in. Removing the drive bay when full is very tricky.

Overall Review: The side mounted fans is an interesting idea, but would only work if the drives are mounted so that the fans push air through the drive enclosure. The drive bay is mounted opposite the fans, so there is very little airflow past the drives.

Pros: Can hold 12 drives!!! Best part is the drive bays can handle different types: 2.5, 3.5, SAS, etc Drive bay in the back that will hold 4 - 2.5 drives. Configurable backboard that let's you choose which bays will hold SAS drive or SATA drive. Tiny space inside, make sure measurements are taken before you pick your parts. Standing 90mm cpu cooler barely fits and will hit the drive bay and block the back case fan. Looked for a flat cpu cooler and ended up with the Silverstone Super Slim Profile CPU Cooler. So many drives but not enough connectors on the motherboard. Using GIGABYTE GA-H97N motherboard and SYBA SI-PEX40071 card.

Cons: Cable management is very tight. Used zip ties to collect all the SATA cables and tried to hide some of the cables between the spaces. Power Supply connector is actually the lip of the drive casing. Have to bend the power supply cable safely and enough that it clears the drive case. Same goes for the USB 3.0 cable. It's what you pay for when working with a small computer case.

Overall Review: Great case and small enough to tuck away. So many drive bays. Can a mini-itx board have more than 6 SATA connectors?

Pros: The only ITX case that has 8 hot-swap cage. Very compaq and quiet. I team this up with a SilverStone ST45SF , total system power draw is about 100W. I'm running 8 x 2TB Seagate drives , + 2 x 256GB SSD. No complaint at all.

Cons: I wish it has a built-in 1U power supply.

Pros: 8 external drives + 4 SSD drive slots. 3 huge fans are nearly silent. Compact size for the amount of storage space Keeps the drives and MB very cool

Cons: Requires a separate power supply which adds to the cost Trays are cheap plastic rather then metal Fan filters are attached by cheap magnetics and can fall off quite easily

Overall Review: I've purchased two of these over the course of a month of so and I'm relatively happy. I have 8 3.5 drives plus 1 SSD boot drive with a fanless asrock mini-itx motherboard. Surprisingly, the system is very quite and the board stays very cool with the 3 huge fans. I took off an egg because of the cons which could have been easily fixed. I do realize that the better cases tend to require a separate supply since the manufacturer doesn't really know what your requirements are. I did not test the hot swap capability of the case.

Pros: - Solid build (outer case, drive cage, etc.) - Hot-swappable feature - Dust filter (no need to air-torch the inside yearly)

Cons: - While being such a small form factor, it's hard to work in there with your hands. Careful not to touch the capacitors behind the drive cage! - HEAT issues! - HEAT issues! - HEAT issues! I've had this case for over 2 years now at the time of this writing. My NAS consists of 7 drives now, each averaging 39C on idle or light use, except bay 2 and 3 from the bottom, which are 45-49C (for unknown reasons). I've tried everything from changing out the 3 case fans, cardboard mod (look it up online), and even drilling 80+ holes through the drive cage. This case is a heat machine! The design works well on paper, but struggles in real life application because the drives are stacked on top of each other vertically. Heat rises up! Also the drive cage was designed for sturdiness, not meant for cooling. Instead of the flat aluminum design on the fan side (left), replace that with a structure with air-flow grills. Or move the two fans to the front, and hot-swappable drives to the side. This way, the airflow is straight through the case instead of bending.

Overall Review: - Would not recommend for full 8-bay NAS, maybe 4 (divided evenly) - Please, if SilverStone is listening, please make a similar 8-bay case with improved cooling. Perhaps a flat design where the case does not stand tall, with drives laid horizontally (like a true NAS).

Pros: You can cram 12 drive in it (8 hot swappable 3.5" drives, 4 2.5" drives) so it makes for a great NAS in small space, if you really wanted to you could put around 35 TB in it.

Cons: - Extremely cramped, which leads to next to no space for cable management so you just have to cram the cables in there out of the way of the fans. - There is a gap between the side intake fans and the drive cage so it's ineffective at cooling the drives since it takes the path of least resistance and blows out through the gap, instead of across the HDDs, you need to place something in the gap to force the air across the cage, but there it has no place to go since there are no vents on the side of the case. - After a year of 24/7 usage, one of the intake fans started grinding, then a few days later the backplane died while I was swapping out the fans, which meant I couldn't use the SFX PSU anymore since it didn't have enough SATA Power cables on it. - If you want to do ANY work on ANYTHING you have to remove the drive cage, which means removing all HDDs, disconnecting the power cables for the backplane, disconnecting all the SATA/SAS cables from the backplane, removing the SATA cables from the 2.5" cage, then unscrewing 4 screws to finally be able to remove the cage.

Overall Review: The AsRock C2750-D4I is apparently the "perfect" motherboard for this case, the problem is that it has an integrated CPU and doesn't have a fan for the heatsink, so it leaves little room to attach one bigger than 80mm. I also put an Intel HBA card in the PCI slot and had to slice out some of the plastic on the removeable plastic piece in one of the drive bays to make the card fit, but also allow me to still use the drive bay. Also there's only one PCI-E slot so you have to choose from either an HBA or a video card, and the integrated video leaves something to be desired. All in all it's a great little case if you just assemble everything and don't plan on changing anything, it's an exercise in frustration if you plan of changing stuff occasionally though. If Silverstone made specific short sata and power cables (the short cable set on their site isn't short enough) for this case it would be great, but otherwise it's a mess of cables with nowhere to put them. The SFF-8087 breakout cable I have in there is huge (19 inches?) and there are two of them, so I have to coil them up.