I have two primary concerns with regards to the performance of my NAS: throughput and power consumption. The throughput of the machine determines how useable it winds up being, and the power consumption typically determines how much it’s going to wind up costing me on a recurring basis. Naturally, there are untold other possible metrics that could be of interest; these are just the two that wind up of the most interest to me. Are there any benchmarks that I’ve overlooked? Please leave a comment for any metrics you’d like to see in future NAS builds. Power Consumption

This took some serious patience and planing to make it all fit but in the end I proved that it was possible to install with off-the-shelf SATA cables Fans: 2x 120 mm or up to 230 mm @ front (1x 120 mm included), 1x 120/140 mm @ rear (1x 120 mm included), 2x 120 mm @ top 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 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. 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.

While the design might be tried and true, it does prove to be problematic a little later into the review. All I’m trying to do when I burn-in one of my NAS machines is to look for any kind of defect in the computer’s hardware or how it’s been put together. My primary concern is that once I button up the case, I’d rather not have to open it up until I’m doing some sort of upgrade. I tend to zero in on the motherboard, CPU, and RAM in how I burn-in the DIY NAS. The fact that I have redundancy amongst the hard drives makes me feel a bit cavalier about testing the hard drives.

Altogether, it used all 4 of the CPU core to make 4 passes of the 12 different testing algorithms types supported without any reported errors. Usually, I just like to leave the memory test running for day(s) on end while I work on other things, but the free version of PassMark’s Memtest86 is sadly limited to 4 passes, which should be more than enough to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the RAM installed. I got an especially warm and fuzzy feeling, as I had to do this several times as I tried to capture it in video for the blog. Great airflow to the internal components thanks to two well placed 80mm fans and a large intake vent.

Is a SSD for SLOG worthwhile? Will any vendor's SSD work (aside from reliability or read/writes per minute), or are there potential driver issues with Samsung versus Intel?