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.
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.
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.