10 Inch Rack NAS: 15 Spec Sheets, 3 Too Wide, 11 Too Deep

The storage behind this blog is one external SSD hanging off a Mac mini on a desk. I own no rack and no NAS, and I said so in the post where I compared the two. What I do have now is a week of 10-inch rack homework, the geometry, the power strip and the switch, and the next question the mini rack asks is the one people type as “10 inch rack nas.” The autocomplete under it is “build,” “case,” “3d print,” “enclosure,” “mount,” then “best nas for 10 inch rack” and “nas that fits in 10 inch rack.” Two different questions. The first group already knows nobody sells one and wants to print it. The second group wants to know whether the Synology on their desk will go in.

The second question has a numeric answer, so I pulled the published width, depth and height of 15 devices, 14 desktop NAS units plus the Jonsbo N2 case that keeps coming up, from the vendor spec pages on 2026-09-06, and checked each one against the lines from the geometry post. Then I read the 48 issues in the Project Mini Rack repository that mention NAS to see what owners hit when they actually tried.

The three lines a NAS has to clear

Width: the opening between the rails is about 222 mm, the 19-inch drawing scaled down. The README says “approximately 210mm,” one contributor in issue #29 measured 215 mm usable, and another wrote that there is “a bit more space than 8.75" especially if you go farther back behind the rails.” I use 222 and flag anything within 10 mm of it.

Depth: the DeskPi RackMate T0 and T1 and the Tecmojo 6U are 200 mm deep, and the DeskPi and GeeekPi shelves are titled “7.87" Depth,” which is the same 200 mm. The T1 Plus and T2 are 260 mm. A NAS deeper than the rack does not fail to fit; it sticks out of the open back. But that is exactly the “depth problems” Jeff Geerling wrote about in his 2025 rack post, and it decides whether the rack can stand against a wall.

Height: 1U is 44.45 mm, and a shelf costs 0.5U of its own (the shelves themselves, by depth, load and usable width, are compared in my 10-inch rack shelf post). A device on a shelf therefore needs ceiling((H + 22.2) / 44.45) units, on the rack floor just ceiling(H / 44.45).

15 spec sheets against those lines

The table is what the chart is drawn from. Width and depth are in millimetres; the two U columns are my arithmetic, floor first, then on a 0.5U shelf. “Spec” means the vendor page or datasheet; the one row marked “listing” is the weakest number here.

Device	W	D	H	Clears 222?	Over 200 by	U floor / shelf	Source
Synology DS224+	108	232.2	165	yes	32	4 / 5	spec
Synology DS425+ / DS925+	199	223	166	yes, 23 spare	23	4 / 5	spec
Synology DS1522+	230	223	166	no, 8 over	23	—	spec PDF
QNAP TS-264	105	226.6	165	yes	27	4 / 5	spec
QNAP TS-464	170	226.6	165	yes	27	4 / 5	spec
UGREEN DXP2800	109	231	178	yes	31	4 (0 mm spare) / 5	spec
UGREEN DXP4800 Plus	178	257	178	yes	57 (3 mm inside a T2)	4 (0 mm spare) / 5	spec
UGREEN DXP480T Plus	142	179	52	yes	—	2 / 2	spec
TerraMaster F2-424	119	222	154	yes	22	4 / 4	spec
TerraMaster F4-424 Pro	179	222	154	yes	22	4 / 4	spec
Asustor AS5402T	114	230	170	yes	30	4 / 5	listing
Asustor Flashstor 6 FS6706T	308.3	193	48.3	no, 86 over	—	—	datasheet p.6
LincStation N2	210	152	35	yes, 12 spare	—	1 / 1.5	spec
Beelink ME mini	99	99	99	yes	—	3 / 3	spec
Jonsbo N2 (ITX case)	222.5	222.5	224	no, owner-verified	22.5	6 / —	retailer spec + issue #9

Three things fall out of the table that I did not expect going in.

First, width is almost never the problem. Twelve of the 15 clear the 222 mm opening, most by 100 mm. The three that don’t are instructive: the DS1522+ is 230 mm and the owner in issue #276 already suspected it, “RIGHT at 9 inches across ... I don’t think the deskpi rackmate will work.” The Flashstor 6 is 48 mm tall, which would make it the only 1U-class HDD-free NAS on the list, and 308 mm wide, so it never gets to use that height. And the Jonsbo N2 is 222.5 mm on paper, which the owner in issue #9 confirmed the hard way: “just ever so slightly too wide - 1-2 mm too big to fit widthwise in the GeekPi RackMount T1 ... It won’t sit on a standard shelf due to width. Here it’s on the bottom plates.”

Second, depth is the real line, and it is the one nobody quotes. Eleven of the 15 are deeper than the 200 mm of a T0, T1 or Tecmojo 6U, by 22 to 57 mm. Every 3.5-inch NAS in the table is 222 to 257 mm deep because a 3.5-inch drive is 147 mm long and needs a backplane and a fan behind it. On a 200 mm shelf they overhang the back; in a 260 mm T2 they all fit, the DXP4800 Plus with 3 mm to spare. The four that are shallower than 200 mm are exactly the four with no 3.5-inch bays.

Third, the height arithmetic is worse than the height. A 165 mm 2-bay is 3.71U, which reads as “4U” until you put it on a shelf, where the shelf’s own 0.5U pushes it to 4.21U and you lose a fifth unit to the hole pitch. In an 8U T1 that is five of eight units for two drives. The owner in issue #133 had “4U of available space” and reasoned that “a compact 4-bay HDD NAS should reasonably fit within this space,” and by the spec sheets that is true only on the floor: the DS425+ is 166 mm, 12 mm short of 4U, with no shelf underneath. The two UGREEN HDD units are 177.8 mm, which is 4U to the tenth of a millimetre.

The README’s suggestion of “placing a 2-bay NAS on its side” changes that: a 108 mm DS224+ or 105 mm TS-264 on its side is 2.4U, so 3U, and its 165 mm height becomes a width that clears the rails easily. I found no vendor page that says sideways operation is supported, and the drive trays, feet and vents were all designed for upright, so I am reporting it as what owners do, not as a spec.

What owners actually built

The “build” and “3d print” autocompletes exist because in the README and the 48 NAS issues I found no finished NAS from any vendor that ships 10-inch ears. What exists is shelves, cages and prints, eleven of them by my count:

• The GeeekPi 1U shelf and the SBC shelf that “can hard-mount two 2.5" HDDs side by side.” Two 2.5-inch drives per U is the floor of the whole category.
• An ICY DOCK 6×2.5-inch bay on that 1U shelf, which is what Geerling started issue #10 with: it “fits perfectly in a 1U space.” The catch is power. One owner ran it from a Pi HAT’s 12 V header with crimped Dupont leads; another wrote “I had to do some scary cable hacking to get my ITX board’s PSU cables to a SATA power form factor.”
• Printed 3.5-inch mounts: the README’s 2-drive 1U mount, which the “Cat Nest” build in issue #258 stacks three deep for six 4 TB WD Red Plus drives behind a Ryzen 7 7700, and a 7-bay 3U hot-swap shelf from issue #119, whose designer could not make an eighth bay fit and found that Dell sleds “stick out” far enough to break “the dimensions of some popular racks.”
• A 3U 8-bay built on a Supermicro SAS-747TQ backplane with two 92 mm fans, the Inter-Tech 2U-2406 cage that one owner measured at “around 220x209mm” and called “quite tight,” and the NanoRack 2U on Etsy, a PETG mini-ITX case for four 2.5-inch drives and two M.2 that I could only read through a search snippet because the listing returns 403 to me.

The recurring complaint under all of it is the one in issue #242, which opened asking for a 1U NAS and closed, in practice, with “I ended up having to go with 4U to get my 6 HDD and 2 NVME in a 10in.” The only device on my list that is a real 1U is the LincStation N2, 210 × 152 × 35 mm with no 3.5-inch bays, and it was suggested in that same thread. Its 210 mm width leaves 6 mm a side, which is inside the range where issue #29’s 215 mm measurement would matter.

What I would do with this

If the drives are 3.5-inch, buy the rack for the NAS rather than the other way round: a 260 mm T2-class cabinet, the NAS on the floor rather than a shelf, and 4U reserved before anything else goes in. If the rack is already a 200 mm T0 or T1, a 2-bay on its side in 3U with 30 mm out the back is what owners are doing, or the drives go into a 1U shelf with an ICY DOCK and a power problem. If the pool can be flash, the 1U question has an answer, and the DXP480T Plus at 2U has a community-printed mount that the search snippet describes as “quite tight.” For the drives themselves, the WD Red Plus vs IronWolf post covers the two lines every build above uses, and if the NAS is going next to a Mac, the SMB behaviour matters more than the width.

FAQ

Will a Synology 2-bay NAS fit in a 10 inch rack?

Width-wise, yes: the DS224+ is 108 mm against a 222 mm rail opening. Depth is the catch. At 232 mm it overhangs a 200 mm DeskPi T0 or T1 shelf by 32 mm and fits a 260 mm T2. Upright it needs 4U on the rack floor or 5U on a 0.5U shelf; on its side it takes 3U.

How many U does a NAS take in a 10 inch rack?

Every 3.5-inch desktop NAS I checked is 154 to 178 mm tall, which is 4U on the floor and, for all but the two TerraMasters, 5U once a 0.5U shelf is under it. Flash-only units are smaller: the LincStation N2 is 35 mm (1U), the UGREEN DXP480T Plus is 52 mm (2U), the Beelink ME mini is a 99 mm cube (3U).

Is there a NAS made for 10 inch racks?

Not from a NAS vendor, as far as the Project Mini Rack README and its 48 NAS-related issues show. The 10-inch-native options are shelves, drive cages and 3D-printed bays: two 2.5-inch drives per 1U shelf, an ICY DOCK 6-bay on a shelf, printed 2-drive 3.5-inch mounts, and 7- or 8-bay 3U designs. The Jonsbo N2, the usual small NAS case, is 222.5 mm wide and one owner found it 1 to 2 mm too wide for a RackMate T1.

Method and sources: the 15 rows are the published dimensions read on 2026-09-06 from synology.com (DS224+, DS425+, DS925+), qnap.com hardware spec pages (TS-264, TS-464, quoted in inches, converted at 25.4 and noted as excluding the foot pad), nas.ugreen.com (three models; the DXP2800 page gives 9.1 × 4.3 × 7.0 in without axis labels and I read 4.3 in as the width because every other 2-bay here is 105 to 119 mm wide), terra-master.com specification pages, the Asustor Flashstor 6 datasheet PDF, lincplustech.com and bee-link.com. The DS1522+ figure is from Synology’s product spec PDF via search and the AS5402T from retailer listings; those two are the weakest numbers. The Jonsbo N2 is retailer spec plus the owner report in issue #9. The 222 mm opening, 200 and 260 mm depths and 44.45 mm unit are from my geometry post and its sources; the shelf depth is the “7.87" Depth” in the GeeekPi listing titles. Owner quotes are from issues #9, #10, #29, #119, #133, #242, #258, #262 and #276 read through the GitHub API; the three r/minilab threads those issues link to redirect me to a login page and I did not read them. I have not put any of these devices in any rack; I own neither. Some links are affiliate links (Amazon Associates, six new IDs registered for this post); any commission lands on the public ledger.