Can anyone please provide some suggestions on a cheap enclosure for my DIY NAS. I need a minimum of 8x 3.5" SATA HDD bays, preferably hot swappable although if it costs far more for that I can live without it.
I think that I can be a help.
Take a look at: NORCO RPC-2008 for $180
and Athena Power CA-SWH01BH8 Black Steel Pedestal Server Case for $257
They both seem well rated and I like them both.
Be careful when shopping for cases with a lot of hot swap trays. I have seen several that are designed for 2.5" laptop drives. Crazy, I know. Who wants little laptop drives in a server?
Cool, quiet, very low power on the best and they go up to 500GB already. Sort of a poor mans SSD. If you dont have huge capacity needs, they make sense.
Just want to remind you guys that the 2.5 inch drives that would be used in a server rack would not be the laptop drives. The enterprise 2.5 inch drives are quite fast with 10000 RPM and 15000 RPM spindle speeds. Actually the WD VelociRaptor drive is a 2.5 inch drive and considered to be one of the fastest desktop drives.
you may want to check a brand called Chenbro. This brand carries a lot rackmount cases with hot-swappable HDD cage. www.nowdirect.com offers a lot of rackmount cases in this brand at an okay price.
One model I would suggest is the 2U RM23212-BHwhich has 12 hot-swappable cages and costs you $148.35. (nowdirect offers free shipping if your order is over $150 so just buy one more cable or something to save a bunch.)
Check details carefully before you buy as such cases have different models to support different products , e.g. SATA or mini-SAS (http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=28)
