Custom Mini ITX NAS case

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tormentum

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 18, 2010
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207
So I've been looking for a decent NAS case for quite some time now that can push the limits on disk count. I've come across cases up to 8 drives or so, but these cases have a lot of wasted space internally, and are expensive, noisy and leave me wanting.

So, I've started putting together some ideas for a custom file storage focused case that can hold up to 16 3.5" drives. I'm a ZFS user and having 4 x 4 disk zvols in a quiet, compact form factor gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I've borrowed quite heavily from the backblaze concept of caddyless/trayless disk housing as I really don't see the need for mounting trays (too many screws for no real gain!).

My initial requirements are fairly straight forward:

  • Hold up to 16 regular 3.5" drives
  • Potentially hold 2 to 4 SSD drives for ZIL/Cache if needed. I have less of a need for this these days as my VM Host is SSD based and VM's no longer run off this platform.
  • House a Mini-ITX motherboard
  • Vertical "gravity assisted" drive bays
  • Use of SAS or SATA backplanes to make drive swap-out easy
  • Compact design that can fit on top of my IKEA Billy book case
  • Incorporate dust filters and a positive pressure design to reduce dust intake, reducing overall maintenance

The images below are an early attempt in sketchup, still tweaking and massaging the idea out of my brain. Looking to get some feedback and thoughts on possible modifications etc.

The design is far from complete, and is still in concept form. I'm aware I'm missing power supplies and there is no air-flow yet for the bottom compartment. Updates to come soon (I hope).



 
I think you'll need a little bit more room around the drives to pull them out when you swap them. You're not leaving enough space in there to get your fingers in.
 
Interesting idea. Some thoughts:

  • There's no room for the PCIe card that will probably be required to support 16-20 drives. AFAIK the most any mITX board supports is 12 (and those AsRock units use (IMHO) crappy Marvell controllers).
  • There also doesn't appear to be much room for a CPU heatsink.
  • As for supporting SSDs I'd go for some sort of SATA-to-mSATA/m.2 SATA adapter instead of 2.5" units. The latter are a waste of space (though, admittedly, often a little cheaper).
  • With that many drives vibration is going to be a bitch unless some sort of dampening is implemented.
  • That style of mounting also assumes a particular drive thickness. What if the drives used are thinner?
  • Looks like there may be room enough for a micro-ATX board if you shift it over to the other side of the case. Doing this could also allow for flipping a PCIe card on its side via a L-adapter.
  • Related to above, a micro-ATX PSU could probably be placed in front of the mainboard (Fractal Node 304 style). Flex-ATX might fit better, but with that little fan they can be loud as hell.
 
This is interesting to me. Ability to mount mini itx and microatx would be great along with 16 drives. Could you sneak in a external 5.25 at the mb level?

I think 1u power supply would be best. Seasonic makes some.
 
A couple years ago there was a link to a very small case holding 8 drives. Tiny motherobard. It was impressive. Perhaps someone remembers it and can provide a link.


It looks like you will have a problem running cables. Depending on what your mother board supports port multipliers might be useful
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
Interesting idea. Some thoughts:

  • There's no room for the PCIe card that will probably be required to support 16-20 drives. AFAIK the most any mITX board supports is 12 (and those AsRock units use (IMHO) crappy Marvell controllers).
Click to expand...


Just to try to hit the first point:
http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/P9AIC2550SAS4L/overview/
Mini-ITX and can handle 18 drives (16 drives handled by the SAS connector + 2 more via SATA)
It still uses a Marvell controller but it bumps up the number of drives some.

I like the idea of using an L-adaptor if possible too.

Would be cool to replace a 4020 or 4224 with something like this!
 
Ghent915 said:
Now...if you made this slightly larger to support this Asrock Rack board (expanded mITX), you'd have a winner on your hands I think.

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C224D4I-14S

I know Marvell controllers (as used on the above listed Asus board), can be slightly cranky with some visualization environments, and you're not able to get VT-D with Atom chips.

Hell...I wish Backblaze would sell their rack system for average folks like me...It'd be a great option compared to Norco/Supermicro/Etc chassis now.
Click to expand...

Interesting board, that might be exactly what i'm looking for, though it would only support 8 disks natively. I'm curious what that extra SFF-8087 port is (there appears to be 3 on that board?). Intel VT-D is not really an issue. I plan to make this a native ZFS box. I already have a dedicated ESXi environment.
 
nsxdemon said:
Just to try to hit the first point:
http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/P9AIC2550SAS4L/overview/
Mini-ITX and can handle 18 drives (16 drives handled by the SAS connector + 2 more via SATA)
It still uses a Marvell controller but it bumps up the number of drives some.

I like the idea of using an L-adaptor if possible too.

Would be cool to replace a 4020 or 4224 with something like this!
Click to expand...

I have looked at this board, and kind of designed this case with this board in mind. It's an awesome board; 4 x SFF-8087 connectors on a Mini-ITX board? Sweet!

However I've subsequently discovered hardware driver compatibility issues with Illumos based distros and FreeNAS that make this board less appealing for now. For now I suspect i'll have to factor in some room for a PCIe LSI card of some kind to facilitate all the drives i'd like to run.

I've got some vertical hight to play with so not really an issue. I'm trying to keep the power on the low side as well though. I'm putting together a list of hardware for me to purchase and test prior to final build of the case. This will ensure the gear i'm putting in will function as designed.
 
GeorgeHR said:
A couple years ago there was a link to a very small case holding 8 drives. Tiny motherobard. It was impressive. Perhaps someone remembers it and can provide a link.


It looks like you will have a problem running cables. Depending on what your mother board supports port multipliers might be useful
Click to expand...

Cables are not part of the design just yet. I'm still trying to figure out if I go with backplane technology or if I go the same route as Backblaze with SATA fan out cables. Once I've decided this, i'll have a better idea on what cabling requirements I have.
 
TGK said:
This is interesting to me. Ability to mount mini itx and microatx would be great along with 16 drives. Could you sneak in a external 5.25 at the mb level?

I think 1u power supply would be best. Seasonic makes some.
Click to expand...

Power supply wise, assuming Mini ITX i'll probably go with a PicoPSU-160-XT and a custom 12v/5v 300W power supply. I'm trying to keep the cabling to a minimum here. An alternative would be some of the 300/350W MiniITX power supplised (FSP for example).

I'm open to ideas from the community as to what they've worked with in the past.

I do already use the PicoPSU's on my Hyper-V and ESXi MiniITX clusters, and they work really well. The reason to go that route with those builds was I was trying to reduce the physical powersupply requirement. I can power 4 boards using PicoPSU's and then plug them all into a single power supply upstream. I do not have that requirement here as it's a single board.
 
Phelptwan said:
I think you'll need a little bit more room around the drives to pull them out when you swap them. You're not leaving enough space in there to get your fingers in.
Click to expand...

Haha, possibly. At the moment i'm not too worried about that. There is 10mm clearance on each side of the drive and my fingers aren't that fat (yet). Depending on the final dimensions of the case, I might be able to push that to 15mm each side.
 
Interesting board, that might be exactly what i'm looking for, though it would only support 8 disks natively. I'm curious what that extra SFF-8087 port is (there appears to be 3 on that board?). Intel VT-D is not really an issue. I plan to make this a native ZFS box. I already have a dedicated ESXi environment.
Click to expand...

2x of the SFF-8087 connectors are for the LSI Controller. The third is for SATA ports off of the Intel chipset.

Between chipset, and the LSI, you have 14 total SATA connections.
LSI2308: 8x SAS2 6gpbs (from 2x SFF-8087 connectors)
Intel C224: 4x SATA3 6gbps (from 1x SFF-8087 connector), 2x SATA2 3gbps.
 
Ghent915 said:
And if you want to stick with an Atom based system, Supermicro has a proprietary board that incorporates an Atom 2750 with an LSI2116 controller on board.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SA7-2750F.cfm

16 LSI controlled SATA/SAS ports, 1x SoC SATA port, and a SATA Disk On Module Port.
Click to expand...

Very nice. Pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

Havn't found it available anywhere yet though. Amazon.com has it, but would be nice to purchase up in Canada.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
Interesting idea. Some thoughts:

  • There's no room for the PCIe card that will probably be required to support 16-20 drives. AFAIK the most any mITX board supports is 12 (and those AsRock units use (IMHO) crappy Marvell controllers).
  • There also doesn't appear to be much room for a CPU heatsink.
  • As for supporting SSDs I'd go for some sort of SATA-to-mSATA/m.2 SATA adapter instead of 2.5" units. The latter are a waste of space (though, admittedly, often a little cheaper).
  • With that many drives vibration is going to be a bitch unless some sort of dampening is implemented.
  • That style of mounting also assumes a particular drive thickness. What if the drives used are thinner?
  • Looks like there may be room enough for a micro-ATX board if you shift it over to the other side of the case. Doing this could also allow for flipping a PCIe card on its side via a L-adapter.
  • Related to above, a micro-ATX PSU could probably be placed in front of the mainboard (Fractal Node 304 style). Flex-ATX might fit better, but with that little fan they can be loud as hell.
Click to expand...



-> PCIe Card Slot: agreed. I will probably create room via half height or 90deg with riser.
-> True: I suspect I'm going to need some more room in general in the bottom section. I don't mind making it taller, but i'm trying to keep the footprint about the same.
-> mSATA would be nice but boards are tough to come by and i'm not really wanting to mount via external adapter (defeats the purpose)
-> True; I don't have a good solution for that yet. Mind you the drives I use today are 5400 RPM; trying to keep this thing relatively low power.
-> I'm not worried about thinner drives as this is targeted at high capacity (16 drives! :)) which are always the 25mm hight
-> MicroATX seems to be a theme, i'm going to look into the dimensions and see if this'll work for my purposes. I like the idea of keeping the board footprint small, but the boards are expensive when looking at SoC systems.


Thanks for the feed back mate!
 
Ideally it would accept a socketed mb, atom doesn't have enough processor for dm-crypt, lzma or gig-e ssh tunnels.
 
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