SilverStone Technology Silverstone CS280 Premium Mini-ITX NAS case with Eight 2.5" hot-swappable Bays, SST-CS280B,Black

Product Information

Here we have the SFX-SX500-G power supply installed for a test fitting. For final installation, we rotated the PSU so the cooling fan is facing down. Either position should work fine as there is space above the PSU. With cable management being a challenge with small form factor cases we needed to use the space above the PSU for extra power cables. That is why we rotated the PSU fan facing down. SilverStone CS280 PSU Installed 1 Great airflow to the internal components thanks to two well placed 80mm fans and a large intake vent.

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... The brushed aluminum front with the silk screened logo looks fantastic. The brushing is very smooth and the logo is extremely crisp.

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Thoughts? Please share them on the forums here and be sure to thank @Silverstone for making these products for our community. A small detail, but never the less something I can appreciate -the simple design of the the door hinge. The SilverStone EXB01 uses an empty case PCIe slot location, the CS280 includes two PCIe slots so we had a free slot that could be used for this. It would have been nice if Silverstone included a solution that one could mount either under the 8x drive bay cage or in the PCIe slot making for a more flexible solution. SilverStone CS280 EXB01 Installed Should you desire a little more horsepower for 4k transcoding, emulation, or the occasional gaming session, this is no longer a possibility. The three pools in this one system represent the three NAS systems I had before the consolidation. For a home NAS, this chassis is huge, able to hold 48 data drives and two boot drives with a couple spaces internally for non-hot-swap drives...

The size of your case is similarly variable. Larger cases will have more options for drives and cooling. Smaller cases will be easier to maintain and even carry around. The underside of the door has a large vent to allow for fresh airflow into the case. However, if you pay close attention to the design, you will notice that the airflow goes directly to 80mm fans, which push cold air directly to the internal components.

While the design might be tried and true, it does prove to be problematic a little later into the review. 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. My other alternative is using one of the very few mid-size case that still exist with top-to-bottom 5.25" bays (like the Sharkoon T9), and install three 5-into-3 or 4-into-3 hot-swap cages in them, but that ends up being fairly expensive, even using the cheapest cage ( from Rosewill). mATX and ATX motherboards will be larger but may come in cheap. They also often increase the number of available SATA ports. If your case has enough space and you are adding many drives, then these may be a better choice.

Each bay has LED indicators to let you know which ones have been occupied. This is also visible from the front the chassis though a little clear window -helpful if ever you have a drive failure. Under the 8-bay 2.5” cage is a single 2.5” drive cage for an OS SSD. This cage can be removed if space is needed underneath. Technically, this makes the unit a 9x 2.5″ chassis. SilverStone CS280 HDD Cage

SilverStone CS280 NAS Hardware Installation

Because the SG05 supports a GPU in this same exact position, the case has the “extra room” for the card to run (both vertically and horizontally). Unfortunately, this is just wasted space in the CS280. Had they not reused the SG05 chassis, this case should have been made much smaller.

Keeping your build cool is still a priority in a NAS rig. But how you do it may be a little different than usual. Of course, you can always buy a preconfigured NAS. But where’s the fun in that? Building a custom Network Attached Storage allows upgradability. It allows for greater flexibility in terms of hardware. And there’s the satisfaction you get from setting up a diy rig, too. What size and motherboard form factor is ideal for a NAS case is a diverse topic. On the one hand, a simple build unconcerned about graphics and peak performance will not make use of larger motherboards’ features. On the other hand, smaller motherboards may not have enough SATA ports, and often cost a lot more than say, ATX ones. 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 ITX-sized GPU (6.7″/170.18mm x 4.7″/119.38mm) wouldn’t fit into the PCIe slot due to the positioning of the hot-swap bay. 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! If I am to be perfectly honest with all of you. I was a little disappointed to discover that the SilverStone CS280 doesn’t support dedicated graphics cards. As a NAS user, if this case had supported a dedicated GPU for improved transcoding times, it would have been catapulted to the front of my list. As a result of this omission, I want to give the case a hard pass in the hopes that they will release a much improved version in the future. I was also looking at the DS380 originally, but once I saw than it supported mini-ITX mobos only, crossed it off my list -- I want more than one PCIe slot for future expansion.