Which color and material do you prefer for your TNAS enclosure?

[Valnjes]

Air is an insulator, so if the alu-chasis is not connected with a thermal compound, it does nothing.
It will be warmed up by the hot-air movement, but if it gets warm, the fan is not moving air in an efficient way, so i would ask myself, if my NAS is okay or not.

So if the alu-case gets warmer, you know that the chassis is trapping heat inside.

You have a metal PC case. Touch the top case - if it is warm to the touch, you dont have a good exhaust fan.
If you have a good exhaust fan, the top of the case should be cool to the touch.

Or even simpler test - open your metal/alu PC case - did the temperature drop or not? If yes - you dont have a good air setup, so the warm air builds inside your case. If the temperature is slightly lover, then you have a good air setup in your case, so the difference is just a minor,
If the temperature rises when you open your case, then your fans are very well channelled, and provide a good push-pull configuration, that looses its efficiency when you remove the casing panel.

Anyway, alu-case can be good, if it is a part of the cooling, with thermal pads/compound, like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoRp3SI2UKM

https://streacom.com/products/db4-fanle ... -itx-case/

[V8Triker]

Metal is a better conductor than plastic.

In the event there is trapped warm\hot air inside the chassis, an aluminium (metal) case will aid in dissipating that excess heat better than a plastic case

[Valnjes]

No it wont, if it is not connected with a thermal compound.

By that logic, wood would be great too, because it gets very warm to the touch, but does not melt as easy as metal, does not loose its stability and does not fall apart like metal construction.

But it wont help you with heat dissipation.

Plastic is good for shielding radio interference and electric emission, better sound proofing than any metal, and does not resinate with mechanical drives.
Glass does even better shielding, and even better sound proofing than plastic and metal together.

You can look it up yourself - if metal cases would provide better cooling, then all glass cases should have worse cooling, because glass is a great insulator, just like air.

But they dont - its all about the airflow.

You can do a science test by yourself:
- Room temperature must be 25°C, get two boxes, one of cardboard, one of metal, so you can fit inside.
- Open them, go inside, close them, stay inside.
- Air temperature will rise within both of them, because your body and breath releases heat, the air will heat inside with the same rate
- The only difference will be, if you add active cooling to the case, like fans, then you will cool the metal casing, but you wont feel any cooler, because the air is insulating the cooling from the metal

Concrete is a great heat insulator, so in theory, you dont have to cool or heat your room, but you do - in summer you need some air conditioner, and in winter you need some heating.

Summary:
- You cant replace quality heat-sink and fan with any chassis material, if its not connected with any thermal compound to the chassis, it will not make a difference
- You can make a chassis out of copper, because it has a better thermal conductivity than aluminium, but if you dont have any fans and the CPU/SOC is not connected to the chassis with any thermal compound, it will do nothing for the cooling of the CPU/SOC

https://www.fictiv.com/articles/heat-ex ... -selection
https://thermtest.com/thermal-resources ... -materials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... uctivities

Thats why its important to have a good heat-sink. The 424 series has just a basic alu block, without any copper.





Copper is more dense, more conductive, has excellent corrosion resistance, compared to aluminium, costs more, and dissipates the heat from CPU/SOC better, when combined with a good thermal-compound.

Thats why heat-pipes are made out of copper, not from aluminium. They can be plated for the looks, nothing more.

Thats why i dont care about the case material - make it out of cardboard, i dont care. A good copper heat-sink, or copper-core heat-sink, or a heat-sink with copper heat-pipes, good thermal compound, and an quite and efficient fan will do the best cooling.

[V8Triker]

I am sure you are correct.

I was merely applying Newton's law of cooling.
The ambient heat in the enclosure will heat the metal, which in turn will dissipate the heat to the external atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_cooling

I agree, a conductive material would enhance heat transfer, but it will also happen between the air and the metal cabinet.

[Gremlin]

Consider the situation when the fans stop and there is no active cooling...........

[Valnjes]

Consider the situation when the fans stop and there is no active cooling...........

Would not make any difference, because the CPU/SOC will throttle down the Frequency, and it will shut down eventually.
Thats the lesser issue, because i dont want my drives to go above 40°C, so always have monitoring of the Temperatures and Fan(s) enabled.

I recommend to use Grafana to monitor your NAS.
viewtopic.php?t=3284

I can always replace my NAS, even when its broken, i have one cold spare F4-424-Pro for replacement parts,
but down-time for my data, or data loss, that hurts more. I have an external backup solution, and a cloud solution,
but its better to be safe than sorry, so i always run a hot-spare drive for rebuilding the RAID, in case of drive failure.
And all drives will fail some day, but heat accelerates this process, and vibrations do it too, so thats why i love plastic more, because it
softens the vibrations and does not transfer it around.

In case that a fan fails, and the temperature rises above levels that i find comfortable, i get an Email notification, and i can do a remote shut-down by my phone, safely, without stressing the drives inside.

Im too long in IT business, so i do it always by the rules that gave me the best results:
1. Keep it cool, it will last longer
2. Keep it protected by a firewall, disable all services that you dont use - telnet/ssh must always be off, only enable them when you need them
3. Backup, backup, backup - one backup locally, one on remote site, one cold backup, and two good cloud services (Box.Com i can recommend)
4. Everything will fail eventually, keep hot-spare drives, and cold-spare hardware on-site
5. Always function over form and looks. Its a NAS, it somewhere out of site, on network, i dont care how it looks. Give me redundant power-supply for home-user NAS systems, not alu-chassis
6. Buy enterprise level drives, in the long run, it will cost you less
7. Go open-source wherever you can - thats why i love TerraMaster, because i can run TrueNAS, Xpenology etc on it, its my choice.


If TerraMaster decides to ditch plastic housing for home-user NAS models, and goes with aluminium cases, hope they combine them with some thermal-compound to the chassis, so it makes some sense. But the engineering of that NAS would triple the price, so everyone will wine about that.

So keep it simple, plastic is fine, put better fans inside, and copper based heat-sink for the CPU/SOC, and everything will be better.

[Gremlin]

And a metal case would be mine. I don't need all the other opinions/options, I have been working on computers since before the pc was 'invented'.
Thank you and goodnight.

[RayKah]

I like NAS with metal shell, it looks more advanced

[KENSHI]

The advantages of aluminum alloy over traditional plastic shells are too obvious: high thermal efficiency (it can maintain a low temperature even after long hours of operation), premium texture (the frosted surface is completely free of fingerprints), and durability pulls full weight, even with the occasional bump.

[edsallo]

3. Good thermal compound - Honeywell Ptm7950 is the best at this moment, i can only recommend it

I would like to share my thermal testing results regarding the F4-425 Plus.

After replacing the factory thermal interface material, I observed significantly better results using Laird Tputty 910 (liquid gap filler) compared to the phase-change thermal pad Honeywell PTM7950-SP.

Laird Tputty 910 product page:
https://www.laird.com/products/thermal- ... tputty-910

Honeywell PTM7950-SP reference (example listing):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/157442670301

Based on the temperature comparison results, it strongly appears that the factory-installed thermal interface material is indeed Honeywell PTM7950 (or a very similar phase-change pad), because the thermal behavior is almost identical.

Test results:
• With unlocked TDP in BIOS set to 15W
• Stress testing performed using AIDA64
• Duration: minimum 10 minutes

Results:

• With Laird Tputty 910 – no thermal throttling observed during the stress test (at least 10 minutes).
• With the stock thermal interface material – throttling begins within 1-2 minutes.
• With Honeywell PTM7950-SP – throttling also begins within 1-2 minutes, very similar to stock behavior.

Conclusion:
Laird Tputty 910 provides substantially better thermal performance in this system compared to PTM7950-SP and the factory-installed material.

Hope this helps anyone looking to improve thermals on this unit.

TDP 6W


TDP 15W