Hello,

 

I have a Silverstone DS380B, it's fine, but the noise floor is fairly high, it's definitely the loudest thing in my living room and if I power it down, the difference is very noticeable.

 

The noise is coming from the case fans, even though they are noctua ones, I have to run them at a higher speed than I otherwise would like to in order to keep the HDD temps under control.

 

The case is poorly designed, especially from an airflow perspective. On this forum some people have been able to use cardboard internally in the chassis to better direct the flow, but the case is so small I really struggled with cable management routing the 3 power cables and 8 sata cables to connect everything on the backplane, I just don't see how they were able to fit cardboard in there as well.

 

I thought maybe the CS360 might be a better option as its a bit bigger and has fans mounted on the HDD cage itself, but after reading a review on here it still has airflow issues and require mods to get the best out of it.

 

Using a fan controller which is able to adapt to SMART readings might be an option but on the other hand, if the fans were ramping up and down that might be more distracting than a constant sound? I don't know.

 

Are there any better cases out there which have 8 hdd slots? It would be amazing if the HDDs were isolated from the chassis as well, but that doesn't seem to be very common with hot swap bays.

7 hours ago, MarlonUK said:

Are there any better cases out there which have 8 hdd slots? It would be amazing if the HDDs were isolated from the chassis as well, but that doesn't seem to be very common with hot swap bays.

How often do you swap your HDDs?

IMO there are too many common disadvantages related to hot swap cases - restricted air flow and backplane reliability being the major ones.

 

Why not to get a freer flowing case without a quick swap option?

There's a good selection of those.

There's even a case with an isolated 8 HDD chamber - the Fractal Node 804.

Edited June 9, 20233 yr by Lolight