reboot47

very nice set up, the silverstone cs380 seems to be one of the more popular solutions for nas, its available and well priced at least. I think your 980 ti may not do hw transcoding of hevc content maybe check here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/906qud/980_ti_vs_gtx_960_for_transcoding/ I remember having to ditch my geforce 970 since even newer $40-50 gpus were performing better with 4K playback.

Appears heat or too much hot hard drives causing hdd failure is a bit of an old wives tale as long as it's not too hot (60c+): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/9p0hii/safe_hard_drive_operating_temperature/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/ Even google said they did a test on their data servers and found heat was not the cause of hdd failures. I would however still feel better keeping the hdds running cool in its 30s & 40s is fine, maybe towards mid 50s get better cooling.

cheers that is still much better temps then what I get, very true with perfecting air flow. I think all in all my only choice for budget, ease of use later on the CS380 is still the best choice, so many other great cases are either end of life or designed for micro atx builds. Really figured we would be spoilt for choice given the popularity of servers/nas but guess not quite there.

Did not consider the negative air flow, it sure is tricky like you say many cases need some modding was just looking at the Zalman zm-ms1000 which looked decent but also suffers some air flow issues. My 8tb WD red is currently sitting @ 45c @ idle, but in my room it's a hot 30c, and this red has some slight air flow but not fully, its kind of like how the 2 fans blow against the side of the hdd cage on the silverstone case. I do like the idea of air flowing fully at the front and pushing the hot air away from the hdds and being expelled from that back or top though so like the icy dock cage design, I always found this gave much low hdd temps in previous cases. What are your 8tb red and 8TB HGST NAS Parity temps roughly at the moment ?

The mods are what I was hoping to kinda avoid, but I guess with some work it can be done. Will have a good think about it, It is very well priced and a joy to have those 8 front accessible drives though. I did also think of the same idea dmacias had with adding some drilled air vent holes on the other side of the hdd cage to allow better air flow in and out, not sure if its needed or over kill. Going the Icy dock route, well there bit flimsy and plastic and still need to find the old style cases with multiple 5.25 bays which almost don't exist anymore, although missed an antec 900 for 40 quid the other day !

thanks to dmacias and hoopster, I was about to purchase this case its got very rare and limited stock worldwide. It certainly looked too good to be true with 8 hot swap drives at that price, am quite frankly surprised it had bad hdd temps and it requires this level of modding to get it done right cooling wise. I think ill save myself the much needed $$$$ and modding work on it and find better cases or solutions, its impressive the mods you have done. I may look at a simple atx case and wack an icy dock vortex with back pane in and have a few non hot swap drives.

Thank you very much for the answers, good to hear unraid is green and energy efficient even with docker+shared hdd access, sounds like I will then use an SSD for appdata, system shares and vms on the SSD. I will need to do much more reading, research on this community especially space invader vids, maybe I am under using my current hardware (AMD 8 core cpu and 16gig might make a good unraid box) maybe I can ditch noisy bulky desktop PCs and use a VM on a monitor in another room somehow ? And also look at backblaze and cloud storage for better off site backup solutions, I see a great post showing how some on this community have ditched expensive noisy hard drives and just use the cloud storage for their entire storage and media streaming, never even considered these things till I read it.

Hello unraid community, I have 4 questions before I start installing unraid, I am a light user for now using unraid for just basic file server access few times a week, no apps, plugins or vms etc, although if I love it I'd still like the option to use its features more in future ie plex etc 1. Can someone confirm if I enable dockers and vms plugins the hard drives will NOT spin down (energy saving mode) ? -my main worry is cost of electricity will be higher since I won't be fully using the files all the time or am I worrying about nothing here? 2. Is an SSD cache really worth it with my limited low usage ? does it really stabilize and improve read/write speeds to the array as seen in space invaders YT vids ? -If its something really worth it I can add an SSD from what I read on here and on other threads it's mainly for dockers and vms which I won't use off the start. 3. Does unraid actively monitor my hard drives in case its failing and notify me ? 4. Do you think unraid is for me? Appreciate any feed back and response to the questions, thanks.

Fully agree with the above regarding those tiny Sandisk Ultras look so ideal since they take little space on the back and won't get clipped and broken when moving and tussling around in the dark and back. On that note its hot and likely to melt off think ill stick to a long stick instead id bet it would last much longer.