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Very silent mini atx case


tdse13

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I am looking for a very silent case for my mini atx Asrock J4105. It should have (at least) 4 bays for 3.5 " drives. Right now I am using a Shuttle XPC cube case which is very noisy. The server is placed in an one room apartment. Therefore, any noise is very anoying. And I would like to use the existing PC61J 300 watt 80 plus power unit from Shuttle. I am not interested in design but in low noise.

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  • 1 month later...

Right now there are 2 8 TB drives only with a Asrock J4105-ITX board. Actual power consuption 30 - 35 watts. At a later stage I may add up to 2 more additional hard drives. Total power consumption will not exceed 70 watts. Pico PSU could be OK. I prefer a case. Any idea?

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 5/11/2020 at 6:48 PM, tdse13 said:

Right now there are 2 8 TB drives only with a Asrock J4105-ITX board. Actual power consuption 30 - 35 watts. At a later stage I may add up to 2 more additional hard drives. Total power consumption will not exceed 70 watts. Pico PSU could be OK. I prefer a case. Any idea?

 

I bought a Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L case and modified it, so it has now 8 hot-swap bays for HDDs. Total costs for case and the HDD cage 50€. My experience regarding noise is that you should look for extreme silent fans and HDDs. For example my NAS is very silent (my guess is about 14db) due to the fact that I put some sound-absorbing material on every surface that I could and chose silent fans and HDDs. Also keep an eye on vibration of the HDDs, which is also an annoying noise and can mess with the lifespan. Nonetheless you can hear it and so I placed it in another room where it doesn't bother me at all.

https://geizhals.at/cooler-master-masterbox-q300l-mcb-q300l-kann-s00-a1752080.html?hloc=at

 

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Edited by smileyworld
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/2/2020 at 9:48 AM, tdse13 said:

That could be a solution. Could you please provide more information on the cages, vibration reduction and sound absorbing materials. The server is supposed to run 24/7 in a very small apartment. 

 

You can build your own cage. It is just a question of how much effort you want to put in this project. I used some screws, wood, hot glue, paint and two Mini SAS SFF-8087 to SFF-8482 cables. This allowed me to get my hot swap bay.

 

image.png.f2f782716b9fd51ba46603992eacf9fd.png

 

Furthermore I did use some nops and sticked them on every surface where the HDDs have dircet contact with the drive cage (they reduce the vibration and therefore the vibration noise), the other material is from a shop in germany.

 

FP-35-SA-GR-50-8-5-R.jpg

absorbing foam.JPG

 

Nevertheless, I like it completly silent in my home office and therefore I put my NAS in a different room. Also I switched the case recently because I wanted to be able to use more HDD and SSD slots. So i bought some hot swap cages and an used sharkoon rex 8 case and built this:

 

image.thumb.png.24fc6ccb86e6d553b41045396b590054.png

 

However this is approach is much more expensive and you could go for a 19" server case instead, but I wanted my NAS to be as silent as possible and to fit in a regular case. 

Edited by smileyworld
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