Fractal Design, definitely. The model I’m using is no longer made but they have very good ones today too. Look into the Define and Meshify lines. They have models that can utilize the full height of the case for HDD/SSD slots with openings on both sides for maximum ease of cable routing.

The Define 7 or Meshify 2 is most likely what you want. They only come with 6 HDD brackets included but you can buy more and they have slots for up to 11.

The R5 is another good choice, I like those brackets more, but it’s not so flexible as the others I mentioned, and the 5.25" bays will most likely go unused and just take up space.

Don’t get the Node 804, it’s much larger than it seems (check out yt videos) and is cramped and hard to work in.

Fractal seems far superior at least in the budget range. Personally just bought a R5 second-hand for roughly 40euros. Totally worth it imo 😁

I used a Fractal Design case for a home server in the past. Pretty happy with them.

I’m using a NetApp ds4246 to hold 24 drives, and it’s glorious - embrace the rack mount life. Although my computers themselves are all HP Prodesk minis, which are tiny and amazing, 1 u high and can fit two across on a shelf.

I can vouch for the node 804, although I haven’t used the others so I can’t say which is the best.

Jonsbo N3 sounds like a good fit

I use a fractal design node 304. It’s pretty cool, but has all the limitations and problems you would expect from a case that size.

I have both Fractal Design and SilverStone cases… love them… but the internal layout is not 100% of the consideration

Have a think about airflow and cabling… some of them have weird air flow designs and if you’re putting the machine inside something, or next to something, then that can make more impact on day-to-day use.

For example, I have a Node 304 (not enough drive space for you) because it fits nicely inside Ikea shelving. But the front air flow under the front bezel did mean I keep that machine near the front of the shelf, not pushed back.

And also consider hotswap drive bay caddies that fit smaller drives into large drive bays. Sometimes these have weird power connections, but if you don’t have them do you have enough PSU leads? So, are they absolutely essential? Possibly. Possibly not…

Maybe not the answer you were lookong for, but those are my main considerations now…

For 9 disks I would need to print bigger case, ut this one suits me well for now 😉

I’m currently using one of the Rosewill rackmount chassis (https://www.rosewill.com/rosewill-rsv-l4412u-black/p/9SIA072GJ92847), fits well in my half rack along with my Unifi gear and HP ProLiant. I probably would’ve gone with something else if I had to buy it though- this was sorta a hand-me-down from a former roommate who didn’t want to take it with him when he left.

I really like the Node 804 even though the design is quite old - probably close to ten years old now. Fractal Design are still manufacturing it, which is rare for case designs that old.

I recently built a NAS using an 804. I had to fit mine into my server closet which isn’t deep enough to fit a regular PC case, so the 804 fit my use case well.

I’ve only got three drives in it (2 x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 for data and 1 x 14TB WD Purple Pro for security cameras) but I wanted the ability to expand in the future, and I wanted to use a Micro ATX motherboard rather than a smaller one.

A Noctua NH-D15 fits fine, even though the spec sheet says it won’t fit.

So I recently went through all of this headache. I started really wanting hotswap that didn’t look like it was from the 90’s. I also needed like 8 drives capacity which rules a lot of the popular cases out.

I thought about it for a while and I don’t really touch the drives at all on any of my previous Nas builds so that meant I didn’t need hotswap.

Eventually I decided that rather than try to hide the case away I would make it a feature of my living room and I went with the tower 500 and I really love it and everyone that has gone over has mentioned how cool it looks

I am using a normal desktop case with an external usb-c 8-bay JBOD drive enclosure from Mediasonic. I’m using mdadm to combine the drives with RAID-6. I know I’m not getting the performance that I could with native SATA, but it can still saturate my 1Gbps network, so it’s good enough for serving video, audio, and some other web-based apps.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #375 for this sub, first seen 26th Dec 2023, 23:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Using a U-NAS NSC-810A. Not the cheapest, but I love having hot pluggable disks with my TrueNAS build.

https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_id=17640