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Any recommendations for a budget 10-12 bay, hot-swap case?

Question/Advice

I'm contemplating doing a rebuild of my plex server and would like to simplify my storage solution. Any recommendations for a case that includes a hot-swap backplane for 10-12 HDDs? It can be big and ugly but I'd like to keep it under $200 if possible. Also I'll need an internal SATA expansion card too so a recommendation there would be appreciated (6 port).

Current hardware:

  • Ryzen 5 1600

  • MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max (6x SATA ports)

  • 32GB DDR4-3200

  • GTX 1050 ti

  • SATA: 8x 4TB, 1x 256GB SSD (cache drive)

  • M.2 NVMe boot drive

The plan is to have the 8TB drives in a mergerfs + snapraid pool. I would also consider selling the CPU, mobo and GPU and switching to Intel QSV solution too which might be easier.

Edit1: Silverstone CS380B looks perfect but prices have gone waaayyy up. Was less than $140 a few years ago.

Edit2: Found a couple of others meeting the size and HDD slots requirements but without the backplane which is not such a huge deal as they have good cable management.

  1. Phanteks Enthoo Pro PH-ES614P, $140 on Amz but its been much lower. 6x 3.5" HDD bays and 3x 5.25" bays so 3-5 more drives with various adapters.

  2. Fractal Node 804, same as above in that it has no backplane but it looks like there's tons of room in there and supports 10x 3.5" without any extra hardware.

Edit2: Just in case anyone finds this, I ended up with a great and economical solution that is working well.

  • Case = Coolermaster N400. I actually was already using this case and didn't realize it could fit so many drives. It has 8 3.5" bays, 2x 5.25" bays and lots of space for 2.5" drives.

  • I got some additional hardware: 3.5 to 5.25 bracket adapters, a pack of SATA power splitters (8 ports total), 2x mini-SAS to SATA fwd breakout cables (8 ports in total), and a LSI 9207-8i HBA card from Art of Server. Total cost was around $130. If I was buying the case new it would have been another $90 (normally less than $70 though).

  • The 8 3.5" bays are for media disks connected to the HBA card and the 5.25" bay is being used for a single parity disk (mobo SATA). Boot drive is the NVMe and there's a 2.5" SSD (2nd mobo SATA) mounted on the inside panel for the transcoder cache.

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Under 200 will be difficult if your using SATA and not SAS drives. My recommendation would be to get one of those monster cases with 4-5 5.25 bays and put in 5.25 to sata hotswap bays. That way you end up with a very expandable case in the end with add ons you can use in other cases.

That's an interesting idea. I saw a cage on newegg that combines 3x 5.25" bays into 5x 3.5". Maybe I could find something with some more 3.5s in addition.

Btw do you think it would be better to get a PCI SAS card and connect with an adapter or just get a PCI SATA card?

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I just got this one from TaoBao for my TrueNas: JMCD 12S4 (12 hot swappable 3.5 drives, plus 4 more internal 2.5 drives):

https://bytepursuits.com/12-bay-homelab-nas-jmcd-12s4-from-taobao-upgrading-my-truenas-scale-server-optionally-rack-mountable

I think this is as small as it gets for the number of drives.