Jonsbo N3 8 Hot Swap Bay NAS Case Review

this is the johnb N3 Nas case which supports a mini ATX motherboard as well as eight hot swappable hard drives I recently did a review of the N2 uh which is a five bay version of this this is a newer offering by johnb so I thought I would give an overview of the case itself as well as build it up as a Nas device and kind of give feedback on that so first of all let's go ahead and take a look around the case itself and uh we'll compare that with the uh Johnsville two which is right here move this over a little bit so you can see the styling is very similar and uh sizewise uh it's definitely uh the N3 is definitely taller it's also a bit deeper as well not by a whole lot just for a size reference this is an 8 Bas analogy Nas unit this is the 8 bay jbow N3 you can see from the top here this is definitely wider but a much shorter and lastly here's your sonology 4bay unit but let's go and take a look at the outside of the case it's an all metal construction it's like a matte black paint on it looks nice and uh it's got this removable front panel just like on the N2 and except this time obviously you've got the uh 8 Bays as opposed to the five and uh it does look like let me get the light down here so there's your back plane which houses the eight hard drives and it looks like it could accommodate an sas drive as well the uh N2 also accommodates uh SAS drives and actually recognized and worked with them as well so that's I'll verify that uh later when I install the drives and you can see here nicely labeled 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 across the top and then uh you've got your USB uh three port here a audio jack and a USB C Port here and then the power button and then status lights for all eight hard drives now if you compare that the N2 had no status lights on here it just but does have a uh very similar aesthetic though as far as the USB ports audio jack and the power button so if we continue to look around the case a little bit more uh you can obviously see this front panel here just a lot of ventilation over on the one side you've got the grill so if we take a closer look at the back here you can see we've got the uh two fans that come with the case they're 100 mm fans and 25 mm thick we'll take a look at those in a second then you actually have Provisions at the top there's no fans included here but you could fit two 80 mm fans side by side there if you wanted to You' got a full height pcie slot as well double width and then obviously that's your uh opening for your back plate for your motherboard then over on the other side really nothing to look at there then on the bottom you've got your um feet which are like a soft foam now to get access to the case um it has some hex uh screws on the side here which is the same thing that it had on the N2 as well the thing is the N2 actually came with a uh a hex key um tool so that you can open the uh top of the case without having to dig for your tool which is nice to have it doesn't look like they have that provision here however they do provide the uh in their kit here and we'll go over those in a second a tool in there as well so so looking at the accessories box you've got a number of screws here for uh they look like uh fan screws so probably to accommodate the two uh fans in the back there zip ties the two of the hex tools and then a uh screws for ssds there is provision for a single SSD in there as well as the eight hard drives and then uh the mounting screws and washers for your motherboard and additionally uh we'll take a look at these in a little bit but these are the uh mounting Provisions for the hard drives to slide into the front here and so they don't use like a traditional type of tray or something that you might find on a qapp personology type NZ unit so basically you just screw these on the front and you can pull it in and out and we'll go over that when we get to that point so to remove this to panel we'll go ahead and get out the key and this just pulls right out now it looks like this is reversible um you can put it on either direction yeah no problem there and go ahead and take a peek inside this guy uh one thing that you'll notice is as far as the power supply is concerned it's got this power plug here already and it routes to this uh cable here so you install your sfx that's the thing is this also requires an sfx PSU so you can't use a common uh ATX PSU um not a huge deal but just if you're looking to uh build with the existing components you're going to have to look make sure you get a SF X PSU instead of a standard ATX and this now I'm not a big fan of having a attachment like this this personal preference here only because I have something similar in a fractal design node 304 and well I like the case a lot the node 304 uh the one thing I don't like is that you have no access to the power switch on the power supply itself you actually have to unplug it from the back to actually power off the computer if you want to um just pull power from it completely and then you obviously have your Provisions for USB 3 your audio this is HD audio front panel and then a USB 3 connector that's USBC connector I should say and then what is this oh it looks like this is the cable that runs over to the back plane for the status lights it looks like in the front I'm curious about a couple of design decisions on this thing because they offer a full height pcie slot and not sure if it really justifies the added height of this Nas case cuz most people probably if you're using it as a Nas you're going to use the eight Bay you're probably just going to need like an HBA add-in card SAS SATA HBA add-in card which are usually half height anyways and whether you need the extra cooling or not um chances are you probably are okay because you're not going to be running a high-end CPU in here anyhow so neither here nor there I just think it's an interesting design design decision here um let's go ahead and take a look at the uh the back and you have these two fans that come with the case they're actually branded as John's bow fans now you can see here that these are 100 mm fans and they are 25 mm thick now I do have a 80 mm fan here just to show you um it's 80 mm roughly and uh 25 mm thick and it mounts fine in the provision or up opening right here you can see the clearance holes there line up so 80 mm fans fit there now we can go ahead and take a closer look at the back plane and you can see it's powered by two for pin MX connectors and a single SATA power connector it does have two fan headers or four pin fan fan headers in the back just thought I'd mention that it does accommodate a 2 12 in SSD as well so you can just mount it uh on the inside here looks like you just used the Taps two screw holes like that just have it hang there and it looks like you can also do that on the other side as well as these uh this lines up there as well as back here so either position is fine obviously that depends on the thickness of the pcie card that if you manage to put one in there this front panel actually comes off too I don't think there's any really reason to remove it but I'll do it anyways couple of screws so when you remove that front panel this is what you get basically it's a uh just the panel and then some form of metal filter there so I guess you could remove it to clean that out if it ever gets dusty or whatever it's also made of metal okay so next I'm going to go ahead and build this thing up I've got my uh ITX motherboard it's uh an older model but uh it'll work just fine and uh I also have the sfx PSU now obviously because you're running eight hard drives in here you're likely going to need a uh PCI E card anyways to run all eight hard drives unless you actually get like a Server Motherboard which actually has eight set of ports on it and uh this one has six but uh I'm going to actually add in a uh SAS pcie HBA card in here as well okay first obstacle the uh motherboard went in just fine but mounting the power supply requires you to look looks like to remove this bracket here mount it to the power supply and then mount this bracket back in the case with the power supply on it because you can't get a screwdriver in to screw those uh screws the bracket to the power supply also need an extra long screwdriver here unless you can get in at an angle there's no way you're doing that with a Linus Tech tip screwdriver all right bracket is on thing you have to think about is how you want to orient your power supply as well the uh fan is here so I want it going out the front panel here because there's ventilation there don't necessarily want any hot air although this shouldn't get that hot pushing it into here but I don't know I guess it's whatever your personal preference es now in case you're wondering um if you you probably need at least a 140 mm long shaft on your screwdriver to get it down there so you can actually access the screws okay now this is a quality of life Improvement here I don't know why more motherboards or more cases don't do this but it's actually a single connector to hook up all your uh status lights your power switch your power reset it Etc I don't know why this hasn't been done in the past poof just like that okay so I managed to get the motherboard installed and the power supply and they do have a few tie downs here so you can manage your cables and a little area to tuck your uh cables into if you need to here and then down below they have uh this little rail here has some holes in it that you can use to tie down your cables too to help organize them obviously I don't have the data cables in here yet but what I want to do is fire this up without these fans uh connected and then also fire it up with the fans connected to kind of get an idea for the uh sound difference there and see how good or bad it is now as far as mount in the hard drives is concerned see it has this little rubber band that you put on the back of these here and I wouldn't screw these down more than hand tight otherwise it'll squish that down it won't be able to ride in that rail inside of there but otherwise it's a pretty smooth operation to install and remove just have to support the case a little bit when in inserting it because against that Sater Port there it uh it's a little snug fit now I do have a number of screws left uh I only put four screws per hard drive and if you wanted to put six it looks like you have enough uh screws to do that if you'd like to and there is an extra strap here as well now that I have the hard drives installed I'm installing this LSI 9211 8i uh SAS seta adapter and through these two ports here I can get four seta out the end here so with two of these I can support the eight discs that are in the case all right so I have uh sat connectors connected and I'm not going to really tidy this up too much cuz I may be taking this in and out but looks like there's ample clearance to put this guys in here these are the two rearm mounted fans on the johnb N3 case and they are used to cool the hard drives which mounts to the back right here you can see through the back plane and over passes over the hard drives in there and these are 100 mm by 25mm fans and they are three pin which means it's a DC control there is no pwm control for these and uh you can also see that it has Johns Bell branding I didn't find any other branding on here so I don't know if uh these are just some off-the-shelf fans that they just put their own branding on or not now the rear back plane here does come with two fan uh pin headers see one the left there and then one over on the right and uh I'm going to go ahead and plug these into there which will run at full speed which uh runs at the full 12vt of the fans then I'm also going to test it by plugging it into the header on the uh motherboard and then I'm going to go into the BIOS and set it to what's called standard mode which will run the fans at a reduced speed or RPM and that's at about 8.8 volts now I'm going to be running three different scenarios of discs in this case and first is the uh eight of these 2 tbyte 7200 RPM Cate hard drives and uh run in a raid six and then I'm going to run 4x4 tbte hgst SAS drives you can see the SAS connector there run and raid five and I'm going to separate those every other Drive Bay and then that's going to be run in raid five and then lastly a combination of 12 Tab and 14 tab Western Digital discs um I think I have five of the 12 tby and three of the 14 tbyte I'm going to combine those into a single raid six array so a total of eight of these higher capacity discs and each of these are going to be run in the two different scenarios both at 12vt fan speed as well as 8vt fan speed and checking the cooling performance of the case in the fans so I currently have the 82 TB Cate drives in here and here's the cool performance while it's going through a raid six build you can see they're all about 30° C one's a little like 34 but pretty cool and that's with the Fan's at Max and here you can see that it's uh in the sync phase of that raid array all right so I'm building an array using the four SAS discs right now and uh you can see here it's been going for quite a while 67% complete if we go ahead and take a look at the Smart attributes for the temperature you can see here they are running around 37 38° C now here's the uh Johnsville N3 with the 52 TB and 34 TB and a raid six array and take a look over here you can see that uh it's sinking it's been going for quite a while and uh in a raid six config now we're going to go ahead and take a look at the temperatures of these discs basically running at full speed 100% utilization and we're looking at 40c or less here are the cooling test results of those fans and how well it cools the different configurations of hard drives and looking at the chart here you can see in the horizontal access we have the total time of minutes of the test and then the vertical access represents the degrees Celsius of the hard drives and we have two sets of data here the blue and the red the blue represents the lower fan speed which is plugged into the header on the motherboard and set to the standard fan speed setting then red represents the uh maximum fan speed set setting plugged into the rear Fen headers on the uh back plane of the case itself so obviously that's going to be a faster RPM which should result in lower temperatures which we're seeing here you know each of these lines represents a different separate hard drive so we should have eight Total Lines here in each case so uh the higher fan speed setting you can see here uh during idle a total of 3 hours it uh never no single disc exceeded about 32 Celsius and then even running at the lower fan speed uh no single disc exceeded 35 Celsius so now for higher utilization I did run a raid six build so basically the discs are running at close to 100% utilization throughout you can see here this is a 6-hour test 360 minutes and uh it's the 82 tby hard drives and you can see here running the higher fan speed setting uh no single disc exceeded about 34 C and then the low fan speed setting kept the discs uh below about 37 38° C now here is the idle uh result for the uh higher capacity discs and in this case it's the idle test so basically just sitting there doing nothing um and that's for the 512 tab plus 314 tab running those in a raate six that doesn't matter so much for this test but uh the higher fan speed basically idle kept the discs below 40 Celsius for the most part and then even if you lowered that fan speed down to the 8vt um it was able to run at 44 Celsius maximum now under 100% utilization we can see here that uh the regular or high fan speed connected to that back plane um resulted in temperatures pretty much remaining under 40° C throughout then if you wanted to bump that fan speed down by hooking up to your motherboard header whatever it kept the discs below 46 Celsius even under a full load now I did plug in eight uh Samsung 850 Evo ssds in here I just wanted to mention that there are no brackets or anything to plug it in so you basically just have to plug it in there but uh there's nothing really they're not very heavy and there's nothing really needs to support it but the main reason why I did that was to check the uh back plane just to make sure there was no funny business going on with the uh speeds of those discs so effectively I ran a HD parm test U basically just a uncashed uh read performance test on each of those discs connected to each of those slots and these are the results that came through they're all about 500 megabytes per second so that back plane is performing perfectly fine and then just for funsies here's the raid six of all those ssds uh connected together and uh that hit up about 18850 megabytes per second there I took some sound level measurements the decibel level reading of the uh case fans and you can see here we've got the ambient noise in the room which is about 145 DB and and uh I have other equipment in the room which have fans running and stuff so that's what uh that equates to so I did run it with uh basically the low fan setting with no hard drives running then low fan setting with 2 tby hard drives and then also with the 12 tab hard drives running you can see here that uh compared to the no hard drives 42.6 and then the high capacity discs went up to about 47.9 DB and then as far as high fan setting uh with no hard drives running it was at 45 DB and then the high fan setting with the high-capacity discs was 48.3 DB obviously those noise levels will vary depending on the hard drives you're using but just to give you an idea for what those uh sound levels are like and uh honestly it really is not any more noticeable than any other computer in the room so I think they did a pretty decent job with that now I'm going to show you a few examples out of here just so maybe you can get an idea for these sound of the fan if you're interested uh following this section so here's my final thoughts on the uh johnb N3 case obviously it's an all metal construction it's got the eight hot SWOT Bays it's a miniitx form factor and it utilizes an sfx power supply and I think overall it's a good fit and finish it's a solid build with no noticeable buzzes or rattles while it's in use and it's easy to build in uh in general except for the uh PSU bracket which requires a long Phillips head shaft screwdriver to remove and you have to remove that bracket in order to attach it to the uh power supply there's also ample clearance for a large CPU Cooler and a full height uh dual width pcie card the uh included uh 200 mm fans they provide adequate cooling for the hard drives at reasonable sound levels and it keeps the larger capacity discs uh cool under load under 40 celius and the discs themselves are super easy to access and they fit snugly in the slots and they don't create any noticeable uh excess vibrations or or noise that I could tell and this is kind of a minor thing but I think it's a nice quality of life addition is the the front panel pins like for your hard drive light uh indicator lights and your power switch and everything that all comes in a single connector not like six or eight individual little pins that are trying to connect on that front panel header now overall I think that executed the uh design as it is very well I think my uh biggest gripes would have to be with the overall design decisions on this case and first of all this one's kind of minor but uh the top cover uh uses a hex tool to remove the uh the four screws I think that could be a Phillips screw just because everybody tends to have Phillips screws screwdrivers around and hex tools are something you got to dig for not a huge deal but just a little nitpick of mine as far as the form fact as concerned I don't think it needs to be quite as tall uh I think uh since you're going to be using this as a Nas device that's really what the case is designed for you probably really aren't going to have any massive heat sink or a super wide or tall um pcie card in there so you could probably uh knock a couple inches off the height of this thing and still be perfectly fine now that gets to the form factor the motherboard uh it does only support a miniitx and that limits it to a single pcie slot and most many ITX boards don't have more than four SATA ports so a pcie card is pretty much required if you want to run all eight discs in this case and so that kind of restricts you you can't uh install like a faster network card like a 10g network card or something else even if you wanted to um just because you only have the single pcie slot to work with now it's good to see that they did put the usba A and USBC connector on the front of the case but again because this is mini it X there's very few uh miniitx motherboards that uh carry both a usb3 20 pin header as well as that uh USBC uh connector and so you kind of have to choose between the one or the other um what you're going to connect to your uh motherboard and so you kind of lose access to one or the other unless you go through some crazy adapters of some some kind I'd rather just see two USB type A ports than one a and 1 C just because of that reason I explained and as mentioned earlier I'm not a big fan of the internal power plug uh there's no way to manually switch off the power without pulling the plug or removing the cover to get access to the switch for the power supply and that's about it for my uh overall uh impressions of this case I think generally it's good I think they could uh improve on it from a couple design perspectives but uh if as it is I think it's a pretty solid case so that's it for now I hope you found this fun interesting entertaining whatever and uh until next time I'll talk to you later right

Channel: HTWingNut

Views: 10,047

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Id: 3tCIAE_luFY

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023