I am interested in replacing one of my primary NAS's and building it myself. I have my eye on a U-NAS chassis that holds eight drives. I think a number of people on this forum have purchased U-NAS chassis and I am curious to know their thoughts on the quality and workmanship. Unfortunately it looks like they only deal direct but I am curious to know of they come with drive trays or if they are extra like the power supply.

I have the U-NAS NSC-800 as well as NSC-400 and the quality is average. They ship with Drive bays included. I got the shipment directly from China.

They are good for low powered Mini-ITX boards where you have all SATA ports on the board even if it’s possible to install a SATA controller in the NSC-800.

 

There is not much space in this case so you need a low profile CPU cooler and fan.

Have a look here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=32704.0

 

I would consider a slightly bigger case just to get some more flexibility and better access to the motherboard.

Do you know of other cases like this that are slightly bigger?

Haven’t really done any proper research lately but here are a few that comes to mind but they might be ”a lot bigger”.

• Silverstone DS380. Mini-ITX, hot swap drives is good but the case is still to compact especially if you need to use a PCI card.
  
• Fractal Design Arc Midi R2. Midi Tower, ATX, mATX, Mini-ITX, no hot swap but good quality and great cooling.
  
• Lian Li PC-Q26. Mini Tower, Mini-ITX, hot swap drives, good cooling and excellent quality. 
  

I've also had a look at the Silverstone DS380 which is a nice box, but I've heard the ariflow is not great.

 

I'm interested in hearing from people who have done builds using either the DS380 or the U-NAS chassis.

 

At this point I am leaning towards the U-NAS chassis because its the form factor I want, but I'm not totally convinced. I don't like the capacitors at the rear of the backplane on the DS380 though.

 

Are the bays in the DS380 hot swap?