UNRAID U-NAS-800 vs. Silver Stone 4RU 420?

Hi all,

Looking for some advice on building my first UNRAID Server.

I pretty much have two options I am thinking about

1. choose a case that supports front loading of disks and keep it small. Like a UNAS-800. This would be a dedicated UNRAID box with maybe some docker apps.

2. Choose a bigger 4U case like a silver stone RM420 or somthing equivilant, this will give me more ventilation to run a bigger CPU and also maybe run EMBY Server to do some transcoding for a couple of streams, plus some docker apps.

Love to hear your advice, I have an RU18 rack so my preference would be to either have a rack mount server (not too lound) or a small form... I'd be keen to know who runs Emby Server on UNRAID and the kind of specs you would need to make sure there is enough grunt for UNRAID + EMBY

Thanks

I got a NSC-800 a little while ago.  It's both terrible and brilliant at the same time.

The drive sleds are lovely, they hold the drives nice and firmly, so no vibrations.  The backplane LEDs aren't too bright, so that was a nice feature.

However, just about everything else is terrible as far as build quality goes. 

- The top lid is aluminium, and it virtually impossible to get on without assistance from a second person, as it's springy and the clips never line up. 

- The fans supplied (Gelid branded) were terrible, and to replace them means removing about 20 tiny screws.  About 50% of mine were wrong threaded from the factory. 

- Once the fans are replaced you have to be VERY careful with the routing of the cables, as you'll not get the motherboard in if you route the cables wrong. 

- The SATA backplane cables are the same, they're stretched and cable tied to within a millimetre of their lives in the factory, to the point were some of the cables were pinched against the sharp corners of the frame. 

- If you wanted to replace the SATA to SFF8087 cables, you'd have to source super-thin SATA cables. 

- The top PCI-E slot is in a dead air space, so any HBA you put in there is going to run at 100C.

- The PSU is on the opposite side of the case to the board, so I had to get a 24-pin extension cable, as no 1U PSU had long enough cables.

- The PSU hole is the very rare 100mm 1U format, so I had to spend ages finding an adaptor to fit a standard 80mm PSU.

- The internal USB cable's connection to the PCB on the back of the facia was done with some poor soldering, and snapped clean off the PCB the first time I moved the cable.  I also bought a USB3 front USB cable/PCB and it was the same.  The tracks came straight off the board - really poor quality PCB.

- The motherboard has to be either passively cooled, or you have to use a super low profile heatsink.  Even the Noctua NH-9Li doesn't really fit, it's fan is hard against the hard-drive tray, so the fan is effectively drawing air from Bay 1, which is OK if you're using a SSD, but crap if using a HDD.  Only heatsink that worked properly was an Intel retail cooler that came with an i3-6100T (35W) - the standard Intel cooler was WAY too tall.  Even then, temperatures were high.

- Finally, one of the two backplanes went wrong, so when a drive was plugged in it shorted out the PSU.

Yeah, total waste of £200.  I got so angry with it I just threw it out, and I'm pretty patient. 

My stand is always that if you have space, opt for something bigger. It makes life a lot easier - and easier to upgrade.

Thanks all, I have had my fair share of problems with small cases. I am going to go with the Lian Li q25. I think a 4RU case is a little over kill and its going to introduce back plane challenge when I start to go over 8+ drives that I dont really have the time to focus on.

Overall for me the Lian Li Q25 case is as good as it gets in terms of both worlds

The PC-Q25 is a brilliant case, I've had at least one around here for probably 5 or 6 years.  I'm close to moving back to the Q25 - despite the larger size, the Dell T20 doesn't have as many HDD slots, and isn't cooling the drives enough in fringe scenarios (parity check on a hot day, for example).

I got a NSC-800 a little while ago.  It's both terrible and brilliant at the same time.

 

The drive sleds are lovely, they hold the drives nice and firmly, so no vibrations.  The backplane LEDs aren't too bright, so that was a nice feature.

 

However, just about everything else is terrible as far as build quality goes. 

 

- The top lid is aluminium, and it virtually impossible to get on without assistance from a second person, as it's springy and the clips never line up. 

- The fans supplied (Gelid branded) were terrible, and to replace them means removing about 20 tiny screws.  About 50% of mine were wrong threaded from the factory. 

- Once the fans are replaced you have to be VERY careful with the routing of the cables, as you'll not get the motherboard in if you route the cables wrong. 

- The SATA backplane cables are the same, they're stretched and cable tied to within a millimetre of their lives in the factory, to the point were some of the cables were pinched against the sharp corners of the frame. 

- If you wanted to replace the SATA to SFF8087 cables, you'd have to source super-thin SATA cables. 

- The top PCI-E slot is in a dead air space, so any HBA you put in there is going to run at 100C.

- The PSU is on the opposite side of the case to the board, so I had to get a 24-pin extension cable, as no 1U PSU had long enough cables.

- The PSU hole is the very rare 100mm 1U format, so I had to spend ages finding an adaptor to fit a standard 80mm PSU.

- The internal USB cable's connection to the PCB on the back of the facia was done with some poor soldering, and snapped clean off the PCB the first time I moved the cable.  I also bought a USB3 front USB cable/PCB and it was the same.  The tracks came straight off the board - really poor quality PCB.

- The motherboard has to be either passively cooled, or you have to use a super low profile heatsink.  Even the Noctua NH-9Li doesn't really fit, it's fan is hard against the hard-drive tray, so the fan is effectively drawing air from Bay 1, which is OK if you're using a SSD, but crap if using a HDD.  Only heatsink that worked properly was an Intel retail cooler that came with an i3-6100T (35W) - the standard Intel cooler was WAY too tall.  Even then, temperatures were high.

- Finally, one of the two backplanes went wrong, so when a drive was plugged in it shorted out the PSU.

 

Yeah, total waste of £200.  I got so angry with it I just threw it out, and I'm pretty patient.

That sounds really terrible. Not many users here are using this case, but the few threads on it are largely positive. I'm planning an unraid server with that case, after reading your post I'm not so sure anymore.

Glad I didn't go with this case, I went with a Silverstone DS380 instead, different form factor but same amount of drives. It has its issues too, but I'm happy with it.

I considered the DS380 originally too but then I didn't think it was designed very well in term of cooling. The fan appears to blow air onto the drive cage instead of through the drive.

What temp do your drives idle at?