My "bottom drawer" NAS

  • It is running for almost 3 years now, maybe one likes what i did and might take it as inspiration for an upcomming NAS project.


    Board: ASRock AM1H-ITX, Bios 1.50 (DC/DC Power)
    CPU: AMD Athlon 5350 passive running @ 1,13 Volts @ 48°C max. @ full load, summer 33°C room temperature,
    RAM: 2x 8GB Crucial Ballistics Sport VLP 1.35 Volts
    Power: FSP NB Q90 P 90 Watts 19 Volts
    OS-Drive: 32 GB mini SLC USB thumb drive
    Storage: 3x6 TB WD Red Raid 5, vibration-cushioned mounting
    (storage is powered directly by mainboard. original cable supports only 2 drives, i made my own with 3 ports on it.)
    Case: IKEA Alex, white, drawer air sealed as far as possible with window sealings, silicone and acrylic plates on top
    Cooling: Arctic Alpine M1 passive, 2x Noctua NF-B9 redux (350-1600 rpm, PWM)




    OS: OMV 3.0.83


    Idle ~19 Watts, all disc running, I don't park them, but use low performance/low noise setting within AAM.


    Services: SMB, Teamspeak, Calibre ebook server, DLNA, Nextcloud, Luks, USB-backup on hotplug


    I cut a foam rubber sheet to fit mainboard + cooler profile, so that all air from left chamber has to travel through cpu cooler. Another foam rubber profile lies under the mainboard as well. Dust protection is installed twice: one within the front grid and a second fine filter within the left pre chamber. Both are easy to clean. Air stream enters on left side, cools the discs, passes cpu and tangent power supply and leaves on right side. I set up temperature profiles for both fans, left fan has for all temperatures a 10% higher speed so that a little excess pressure is within the two chambers.




    Sorry, I did not take pictures during build process, it took probably a week, a couple hours each day after work to set everything up.

    Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.
    It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
    Terry Pratchett

    Einmal editiert, zuletzt von riff-raff ()

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Cool idea. I like it and the venting as well.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • Thank you!


    The venting+cooling works quite well, discs do not exceed 37° C. Fans spin with 400-700 rpm, you can't hear them. The spinning of the WD Reds is louder, you can hear them when you put your ear close to the intake/exhaust.


    Thus there is no other case standing around in the house, the WAF is quite high.

    Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.
    It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
    Terry Pratchett

    Einmal editiert, zuletzt von riff-raff ()

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    the WAF is quite high.

    and that is very important :)

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

  • Have not measured the difference jet. I'll guess it makes 1-2 Watts for all 3 drives combined or even less. More efficient was to reduce cpu core voltage and deactivate all unneeded stuff, such as audio, iGPU and so on. Sure, I could spare another 8-9 Watts by sending my discs to standby, but I have no good feeling about the massive count of spinups over the years. In my oppinion, spinups are the most wearing thing for discs during the run.


    I'm out of town right now and will be back in 2-3 weeks. If I have some spare time, I will measure die difference AAM makes.

    Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.
    It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
    Terry Pratchett

  • Have not measured the difference jet. I'll guess it makes 1-2 Watts for all 3 drives combined or even less

    It will be less since AAM is not working at all anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…oustic_management#History


    Still talking about illusions ;) I'm more interested in how temperatures change with fans being off? At least the whole construction looks like an almost close loop (intake way too close to exhaust)


    And wrt spin-up being stress for HDDs: it depends, some real server disks (not cheap WD RED) really don't like to be powered down/up often since they're mechanically not made for that. But those WD RED should be fine surviving spin up/down 10,000 times or more (we tested this with a 4TB WD RED 1.5 years ago and stopped when Start_Stop_Count showed 8000 while Spin_Up_Time was still at the same level -- this SMART attribut is something I would monitor if I allow disks to spin down/up and fear potential damage)


    BTW: Since I would never do RAID at home (useless waste of energy and resources especially with mdraid and once you would need the RAID you run into something like this usually) I practice 'data separation'. Stuff that's really needed 24/7 is on a SSD (btrfs with compress_force=zlib set) and all HDD are allowed to spin down after some reasonable time of inactivity (with some scripting added here and there)

  • Intake and exhaust are close, but fins within the front grid direct the exhaust far to the right. I measured the temperatures in the right pre-chamber and in the chamber before the exhaust; temps in pre-chamber mach room temperature, exhaust-temps are usually 10 degrees above that. So no infinite loop. I probably could deactivate the fans, cpu is without fans something around 60°C at full load. I prefer a litte air flow over the discs ...


    Interesting facts abount AAM ... too sad to hear. So my discs just ignore what is set here. As written above, I did not expect much saving from that anyway.


    I am quite satisfied with the raid used on this machin. I never had any problems, I used Raid 5 with 3x 1 TB in my old NAS as well. (I am aware of recovery problems with increasing pool sizes)
    Since I have backups and all data from this NAS on another NAS (Xeon, 32 GB ECC, ZFS Pool, different location, needed because internet connection was not quick enough) I am not much concerned about a breaking Raid on that machine over here.


    Let the Reds run all day long costs me maybe 10-15 bucks a year, lets say 20. That does not hurt me, compared to over things you could spend money for. 20 bucks ... 3 packs of smokes, 4 beer or 2 days lunch in my company.

    Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.
    It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
    Terry Pratchett

  • temps in pre-chamber mach room temperature, exhaust-temps are usually 10 degrees above that

    That's quite a lot of heat generated there! Ok, then it's both efficient and not advisable to save the two fans here. :)


    Wrt RAID: well, I simply don't understand why people waste one or even two spinning disks for something that tries to solve only one single problem (data availability in case a disk fails hard -- which they don't do that often, most of the time disks are evil and fail softly) and fails so often even with this. But that's obviously just me prefering data integrity over availability at home ;)

  • Is it from Ikea?

    Case: IKEA Alex, white, drawer air sealed as far as possible with window sealings, silicone and acrylic plates on top

    More of them: IKEA Hackers


    Off topic:
    Very noteworthy is the view of that Swedish company to this site: Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V

    OMV 3.0.100 (Gray style)

    ASRock Rack C2550D4I C0-stepping - 16GB ECC - 6x WD RED 3TB (ZFS 2x3 Striped RaidZ1) - Fractal Design Node 304 -

    3x WD80EMAZ Snapraid / MergerFS-pool via eSATA - 4-Bay ICYCube MB561U3S-4S with fan-mod

    Einmal editiert, zuletzt von cabrio_leo ()

  • Maybe I should post my "bottom drawer" at this great site as well


    I did not know it before, I crawled through it a while ... well, the next weekends will be buisy!

    Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.
    It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
    Terry Pratchett

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