Do go for an air-cooled build. While passive cooling might also be an option, that increases the risk of premature failure of your drives. Throw in a couple of quality fans and maybe a CPU cooler, and you should be good to go. I’m not sure how detectable it is in the assembly’s video, but I ran into two problems immediately in the BIOS and then on the next boot.

There are hot-swap variations of this case available if you wanted that. Otherwise, the L4500 fits up to fifteen 3.5″ drives, which should be more than enough for any home user. You could even try buying multiple cases in the unlikely scenario you run out of drive bays.

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 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

The fans utilized are 3-pin units. We would have preferred here if the fans were 4-pin PWM units which allows easier control of the fan speed. In 2019, virtually every motherboard that one would use in this chassis has 4-pin fan headers.The functionality of the hot-swap bays are very smooth and not janky. They don’t feel cheap at all. 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...

I'm also very much interested in this case -- I want one than can hold 8-10 3.5" hot-swap disks and two 2.5" SSDs, for a NAS (and eventually general-purpose home server) than can grow over time and last 5-6 years. Once I exhaust the 8 hot-swap bays (each of which supports either a 2.5" or 3.5" drive -- nice), I intend to install a 3-into-2 hot-swap cage into the top two 5.25" bays, something like the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS . 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...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.