The NAS has been performing very nicely and I’ve had no actual problems with it. As a remedy to the noise, I replaced the fan inside the PSU with a low-speed 40mm unit and got a Scythe Kozuti as a replacement for the hacked CPU cooler. Although the Kozuti is lower than the Intel boxed cooler, it still had to be installed with the base plate and mainboard already fitted into the chassis. It barely fit in and one of the heat pipes sits extremely close to the other DIMM. These changes helped considerably in bringing the fan noise down and CPU core temperatures now typically idle at around 40 degrees Celcius.

While the system itself is now reasonably quiet, I would recommend against using Samsung HD204UI drives if low operating noise is an important criterion. Their spindle motors are fairly quiet, but the head seek noise seems significantly louder compared to other high-capacity “green” 5400rpm drives. The loud seek noise may partially be caused by the drives being rigidly mounted to the tray/chassis rather than through rubber/silicone dampers. All four drives seeking in unison easily beat the noise from any other devices in my living room – including an old “fat” Xbox 360. However, performance is excellent so they do seem to be a good compromise between silence and speed.

If your system is a dedicated NAS (ie. GPU performance is irrelevant) and will not use advanced ZFS features such as deduplication or encryption, it should run fine with the AMD CPU. I opted for Sandy Bridge only because I wanted to incorporate HTPC features to the same box, and would’ve chosen an Atom D525 CPU/board otherwise. Do make sure that the board can accommodate enough RAM as it almost directly scales into performance when using ZFS. I believe the recommendation from Sun was a gigabyte of RAM for each terabyte of storage plus 1GB extra for the OS. 8GB seems to work quite well for me as the workload on the system is light.

Also – it seems to be common for mini-ITX mainboards to only have two SATA ports so unless you use a PCIe disk controller card, make sure that you get a board with enough SATA ports both for your disk array and boot drive.

1. Now that you have had it for a while, what changes would you recommend if someone were a similar setup? (Other than what you have mentioned above.)

2. How audible is this machine? I have a very small apartment/ home. So, even though I plan to use it exclusively as a 24/7 NAS , it is still going to sit beside the HTPC (which is almost inaudible). Any suggestion(s) to improve its performance in this regard?

For reference, I plan on using:

i. 4 * 3 TB Sata3 5400RPM
ii. IvyBridge (if it is available in the next 3 months)/ SandyBridge “T” Processor
iii. (Any relevant) Motherboard
iv. 8 GB 1333 DDR3 RAM
v. FreeNAS (?)
vi. All devices will be connected through Gbit network (HTPC – Notebook – Tablet – NAS – etc.)

Which brings me to my next set of questions.

3. The Intel “T” processor comes with a low profile cooler. However, review suggests that they do make quite a noise and for HTPC purposes, it would serve better if it got replaced with aftermarket coolers. This means more additional cost, which I would like to avoid, if possible. (Excluding the HDDs, anything under $350 is acceptable, $300 optimum; Drobo costs around $289.99-$359.99.)

That leaves me with AMD E-450 Motherboards, which (almost) all are passively cooled. However, they do get outperformed by by Intel processors but consumes much less energy. So, for my purposes, which one would you recommend?

4. I want this to serve 2-6 devices. So, is RAM an issue? How much do you recommend? Is 8 GB sufficient?

Ease of maintenance, future proofing, longevity and value for money are very important factors for me, hence the DIY approach. I would rather wait a few months to accumulate resources for purchasing the necessary items than do something that only serves me in the short term.

Thanks for your time.