Hi all,

I am close to completion of my NAS case. The goal was to make it as power efficient as possible and as quite as possible with-in limited budget. I will add description as and when I get some time, but I want to start of with some pictures.

I am still waiting some parts( illuminated power button, Few SATA Power combo cables).

Here is the configuration:

Asrock G43FullHD Motherboard
Celeron E3400 @ 1.056v Dual Core
2GB Kingston HyperX DDR3
5 x 2TB Samsung H204UI HDDs
1 x 32GB Zalman SATA SSD
Dell RM 112 Power Supply (Fan Removed).
Single Antec 120mm Tri-cool at lowest speed pulling air from bottom, sending some air thru Power supply- Suspended
Note: Planning to replace 120mm fan with 140mm along with tower heatsink to make it complete single Fan system ( 140mm would be CPU Fan, and cools complete system)

Current Power consumption:
Idle with only OS disk: 24 Watt AC
2 x Prime 95 thread running maximum power mode: 43 Watts.
Idle with Storage Drives spin-down: 28 Watts AC
Idle with Storage Drives spinning: 44 Watts AC
Actively writing content( with Dedup & compression): 47 - 49W

CPU reaches Max 42 C with after several hours of Prime 95 with CPU Fan running at lowest speed allowed by MB ( ~ 1000 RPM) with OEM heatsink.

HDDs normally running around ~26-28 Deg C, on stress test with several GB of transfers, surface scans etc to ~28-29 C. I am little concerned, they are running too cool. (Based on Google HDD doc, it seems 35 C is sweet spot for HDDs)

The design:

Fairly compact Size: 9 3/4" Width, 11 3/4 depth. 14 3/4 inch height including legs, built with 3/4" Hardwood (Red Oak).

Case inside is lined with Aluminum sheet for EMI protection
All vents are covered with Steel Mesh.
Air enters from completely open bottom covered with Steel Mesh, and exit to sides (Tapered side openings).
There is air guide on the top to split the air-flow to left and right
Power Supply is mounted on front top, perpendicular to Motherboard, fan opening facing down, air exit to right.

HDDs are mounted in custom made cage, suspended on elastic strings vertically ( Connection in the bottom) so both sides of HDD get plenty of Air. HDDs have bottom aluminum plate which is folded to hang on to elastic on both ends( so it would not fall down, even if rotate rack in air direction.

The HDD cage is mounted to left side door.

coming up with internals photos soon...
Inside photo, on top it is air guide to send air to sides smoothly(like a vane). See Power supply mounted in the front, had to customize power cable with crimp on connectors to fit tight space.

Here are HDD mounted to left side door in the Cage.. on its side. When door is mounted, HDD stand up connectors facing bottom.
Casing is lined with Aluminum. In this picture side mesh is not installed yet.

Some more photos. Power button is photo shop . waiting for it be shipped..

Very nice work! I'm just getting to the point where I can put a system in the wood case I'm working on, and I admire how clean yours looks. One thing though, so no add in card support?

Thanks for compliments. This is my first custom handmade case. I did minor customizations to commercial cases before, but never from ground up.

There is just enough space to fit low-profile PCI/PCIe cards, but that will block the smooth airflow. As this is intended exclusively for NAS, it does not require any cards at this moment, but I kept my options open and ordered a flexible PCIe raiser cable so that I can mount any PCIe card parallel to MB (Then I may need to drill some holes).

If at all I do, I may add a Intel GigE nic for better network throughput. The OpenSolaris support for on-board Realtek 8111B is not great (do not support Jumbo frames).

BTW, I intended to get walnut stain, but after applying the stain, it looked ugly. May be I selected the wrong stain, I should have just put the clear sealer. But anyways in the end, I used 2 coats of black primer with 3 coats of Satin Black paint. I did not put sealer yet. Not sure yet.

Thought of creating a 3D digram, but did not got chance to, but I have a cross section of case I created during design.

Hopefully, this will be useful for someone else.