Here is my fully 3D printed NAS box. Its an absolutely amazing and highly functional design by 3DWebe.
For those of you who do not know what a NAS is, its a network attached storage device. Basically it acts as a server for all your various files and whatnot on your network. I use a software called Unraid in this system, which acts as a great management system for creating a NAS. It works wonderfully and I'm very happy. For the computer nerds out there who want to know, I built it with a mini ITX motherboard and used an old AMD A8 7600 CPU which was collecting dust. I have 8 gigs of ram in it and am currently building it out with a 8tb of usable storage and a 4tb parity drive for data protection! I also added an old 128gb ssd to act as a cache, see the photos below!
Now onto the case itself! Its very well designed and toleranced. It fits a mini ITX motherboard with a low profile CPU cooler. It uses 3 92mm fans, 2 for the hard drives and 1 for the motherboard. It has 2 mounts in order to hold a single slot or dual slot PCIE device as well (I'm using a PCIE to sata converter currently). It has room for 7 3.5 inch hard drives. Its mostly printed out of PLA, however the feet and the hard drive mounts are meant to be printed out of TPU to help absorb vibrations which works very well! It takes a total of about 200 hours to print and uses nearly 3kg of filament which makes it somewhat expensive. It requires a number of prints (I think I managed to do it in a total of 15?) So my printer was running for DAYS. Assembly wasn't incredibly difficult but it does require a lot of patience. I broke all the rules when printing this because I wanted it as fast as possible so I printed everything at .3mm layer height and I turned up my print speed to about 130% with a 0.4mm nozzle. This means it required a lot of sanding to get all the pieces to happily fit together. Once it was all together however, it's absolutely beautiful and I couldn't be happier.
So who is this case for? Well, its not for anyone trying to save money. There are dozens of perfectly good cases out there for people trying to build a NAS. This case is for someone who needs a good NAS case, loves 3d printing, and most importantly, likes a challenge. Many of these parts are intricate and require a well tuned printer. It also requires a lot of time to properly construct and if I'm being honest my fingers hurt like hell after putting in all 3 dozen screws and snapping all the case parts together. Don't get me wrong I love this case but its not for everyone. Anyway, hope you all enjoyed and remember, don't get lost in the noise!
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