We look at the latest SFF storage-centric chassis from SilverStone. Enter the DS380. Take a look as Tyler tells us all about it in this review.

Introduction, Specifications and Pricing

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If you are one that enjoys the challenge or wants something built more to your own specifications, then the ability to build your own NAS is a great choice. With today's technology, options to do so have never been so prevalent. With Mini-ITX, you can actually do a very powerful build with all the bells and whistles if you so choose.

Apart from the real hardware of your NAS build, you will also have to choose a chassis that fits your needs, and depending on the size of your chassis, you may need an SFX power supply as well.

Today, we have the fortunate opportunity to take a look at one of the latest SFF NAS chassis from SilverStone, the DS380. This chassis features SECC steel construction with a lockable front door made from aluminum. Behind the door, you will reveal eight drive bays capable of holding 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives in addition to the internal capability to mount four 2.5-inch drives. Furthermore, the eight hot swappable trays located on the front of the unit have the ability to utilize SATA or SAS drives due to the custom backplane, allowing for more flexibility in your NAS build.

MSRP of the SilverStone DS380 is set at $149.99 with a one-year warranty.

PRICING: You can find the SilverStone DS380 for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The SilverStone DS380 retails for $149.99 at Amazon.

Packaging and the DS380

Packaging for the DS380 really focuses on the chassis' ability as a storage enclosure.

Here we have the right side of the chassis, which carries a blank steel appearance.

Moving to the left panel, we see SilverStone has designed this to be the air intake for the front drive cage.

Here we have the back of the enclosure. As you can see, the DS380 will accept SFX power supplies. Moving down, we have two expansion slots and a single 120mm fan.

With the chassis, SilverStone has added quite a few bits to help with the build. Among other parts, we have drive labels, keys for the front door of the chassis, and screws.

On the front of the chassis and with the door open, we get a good look at the drive bays. As you can see, we have the eight bays that have been prescribed for the enclosure. USB 3.0 ports flank to the left along with the reset and power buttons.

Packaging and the DS380 Continued

Starting off the third page of this article, we take our first look inside the chassis. As you can see, we have the hot swap bays to the left and the internal four bay rack to the right. The motherboard tray sits in the back of the chassis.

To remove the drive rack, there are two screws on the bottom side of the enclosure.

Now that we have the drive cage out, we can get a good look at it. Here we have dual Molex connections that fan out throughout the PCB and are connected to the caps to supply clean, ripple free power to the drives. Furthermore, we have 16 SATA connectors on the back of the unit, eight of which are used to connect SAS drives.

Now that we have the drive cage out of the unit, we can take yet another look inside. As you can see, we have quite a bit of room to work with here. Up front, we have the front panel wires coming through around the fans, while the fan wires, while not sleeved, follow the same path towards the motherboard.

The setup we are installing in our DS380 is an MSI Z87I Gaming AC motherboard, an Intel Core i7 4770 CPU, and 16GB of Patriot Extreme Masters.

The Build

As I stated in the introduction, when building your own NAS, especially in this DS380 chassis, you will certainly need an SFX PSU. For this build, we will be using the SilverStone ST45SF-G, a fully modular 450W SFX PSU.

The ST45SF-G comes with a full compliment of modular cables to aid your build; these cables are made shorter to fit easily in the schematic of an SFF build. SilverStone did include an ATX PSU adapter, allowing you to use this PSU in a full sized chassis.

Here we have the layout of the PSU. As you can see, we have a 24-pin connector up top with an 8-pin PCIe connection to the right in blue. Below, we have the 8-pin EPS connection and two SATA/Molex connections.

In our build, we chose to use a full sized video card. As such, we had to utilize one of the design features of the DS380. Here, as you can see, SilverStone has allowed the removal of a panel to allow longer video cards to be installed into the chassis. The caveat for this is you will lose a bay for the hot swap bays.

Above, you can see our completed build. Overall, the build went off without a hitch, and as you can see, we did have a good amount of room left in there to where we could install an all-in-one water cooling solution if we wanted to.

After the build was completed, I fired up the motherboard to get an idea of the noise of the build as a whole. As you can see, at the intake side of the chassis, we measured a reading of 34 dBa.

Over on the exhaust side of the DS380, we received a reading of 37.8 dBa.

Final Thoughts

The SilverStone DS380 is one of very few storage-centric chassis. The build quality of the chassis was rather superb, and I found all the materials used to be quite durable all the way down to the hot swap trays themselves. In doing the build, I did find the intake fan wires needed a little finesse to get them tucked away, and they could possibly benefit from a bit of cable sleeving. I'd also like to see a better way to route all the front panel wires, but again, this is a closed door chassis, so if you choose to leave your cables sloppy, no one will see it.

With the front mounted drive cage having the ability to utilize both SAS and SATA drives, we find a lot of options for those building a mixed interface storage server. The uniquely designed cutout for allowing full length video cards to be used increases those options.

Overall, the SilverStone DS380 has all the right ingredients to be the perfect build-your-own-NAS box. Even with the slight downsides, such as SFX only PSU support, they are offset by the immense capabilities of this unit. Heck, you could even take this a step further and build a large capacity steam box because this chassis carries all the elegance one demands in a lounge room setting.

PRICING: You can find the SilverStone DS380 for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The SilverStone DS380 retails for $149.99 at Amazon.