I've been using NAS Servers for backing up my important photographs for my photography business. It is vital to keep all my info backed up properly as a service to my clients. I've used various NAS servers from an Acer Aspire WIndows Home Server to more recently, a home built FreeNAS server. My FreeNAS home built server has been pretty awesome for my needs but one thing was lacking, a good server case with hot swap-able drives on it.

After searching through many different server cases, I settled on this one. The case arrived a day earlier than I expected. I installed a Sabretooth 990 FX Motherboard with AMD 8120 3.1GHZ CPU and 16 GB of RAM. The only downside to installing this motherboard was the placement of the SATA connectors. They were facing the back-plane making it a little difficult to install. This is something to keep in mind when picking your motherboard. Buy one that has connectors facing up on the motherboard rather than facing to the right.

The back-plane for the hard drives requires two molex connectors rather than SATA connectors to power the whole thing. Make sure your Power Supply has them! You won't be using many of the power connectors for back-plane. This frees up using them for something in the 5 inch bays (possibly two more hard drives with an extra SATA card?)

Build quality seems pretty solid and the case itself has ample circulation. The sides of the case bows out slightly which seems to give more room for circulation which is a plus when running 8 HD's in this case. I've only had this case for 1 day but so far I love it.

This is an extremely nice NAS case. With an Avoton or Xeon D-based board and (most likely) a SATA HBA, you can create an very competent NAS in this case.

The overall aesthetics are excellent. The top-mounted drive cage allows for a front that's completely featureless except for a power button and single LED. A tastefully understated Silverstone logo doesn't intrude on the clean look. A cutout at the top of the back panel affords some modest cable management. The drive caddies themselves are hard (and seemingly very sturdy) plastic with a screwed-on thick aluminum fascia/handle piece that perfectly matches the case. My one (admittedly minor) quibble with the aesthetics is Silverstone's failure to include black thumbscrews for the side panels and black screws for the drive cage.

Build quality is on the better end of what can be expected from Silverstone; which is to say that it's very good. (On the other end, I'm looking at you, SG03.) Front, back, top rails, and base of the case are very thick aluminum; side panels, top, and bottom are steel. The case is painted rather than anodized.

The case includes a single 120 mm intake fan at the bottom that, sadly, is not PWM. I replaced mine with a PWM fan. (Word of warning: it's nearly impossible to access the fan's screws with the motherboard installed.) The cooling design should be sufficient for components you'd find in even an overpowered NAS; but, if you're ridiculous enough to slap a high-powered CPU and/or GPU in this case, expect trouble. Below the fan is a slide-out washable nylon mesh air filter. (The filter material is welded onto its plastic frame; so, unfortunately, there's no easy way to replace the filter material; nor does the frame really accommodate augmenting the material with an additional layer.) The use of thick aluminum makes for a very quiet case. If you wanted to go crazy pursuing silence, you could probably install some sound-deadening material on the inside of the steel panels.

At 14.2 L, this is not the most space-efficient case. But, it's not that bad, either; and most of its volume is height, keeping the footprint rather small. It does make much better use of its space than its sibling, the CS01 (which replaces the hotswap cage with just two 3.5" non-hotswap drives).

The hotswap positions in this case do accommodate the 15 mm drive height typical of higher-capacity 2.5" drives.

Even taken together, my quibbles with this case don't seem worth knocking off a star. It's an outstanding case for its particular niche.

I have purchased two of these cases and I am running FreeNAS on both of them. I have 7 SAS drives (+1 SSD in the internal 2.5" drive bay) in my first system and 8 SATA drives in the other. I haven't had any heat issues. I would of given this case a 5 star rating except for the fact that there is no way to install an expansion card (e.g. SAS adapter, SFP+ adapter, etc) without losing one of the drive bays. If only the case had been a bit longer, 15" instead of 14.2", then perhaps it would be possible to install a high speed NIC and use the 8 drive bays.

Love this case. Just what I needed for an 8-drive NAS upgrade. WSIWYG.
My only complaint is that they could have fabricated it to be a bit longer, to accommodate a full size ATX motherboard without having to remove the drive cage and/or the rear cooling fan.

Also, SINCERELY HOPING there won't be any electrical problems with the hotplug drive backplane in the future, as that would be an absolute disaster... But we'll cross that bridge *IF* we come to it. It appears to be a very nice backplane from what I can see. 8 Drives Powered by just 2 power molex connectors cuts down on cable clutter. Individual drive activity LED's on the front of the hotplug trays.. Drive cage cooling fans conveniently plug right into the back of the backplane as well.

A great case. It works perfectly with the ASRock Rack C2550D4I motherboard, and has good build quality. When fully loaded with 8x 3.5" drives, I had issues with drive cooling -- the three factory 120mm fans are quiet but don't provide much airflow, so some of my drives were hitting 42C under heavy load, which can shorten their life. I upgraded all three fans to SilverStone FM121's, which brought my peak drive temps down to around 34C, which is much healthier for them. The new fans are of course much louder, and would be too loud to sit next to me on the desk, but since my NAS stays in the basement, it's not an issue.