I would say cases like the Fractal Node 304 or something like the HL4 / HL8 from 45homelab would be the best suited candidates.

Regarding mainboards - models from CWWK with lots of SATA ports have been trendy lately. But there are reports of problems. The other options are either using some obscure supermicro mainboards with lots of ports or using a HBA for expansion.

I want to mention a possible middle ground here: UGreen NAS Storage. All but the smallest model come the OS on a seperate M.2 drive. If you disable the watchdog in BIOS, you can use the models like a normal Server This would give you:

* 3x M.2 slots * 4, 6 or 8 SATA bays * N100 (4 bay), Pentium Gold 8505 (4 bay), i5-1235u (6 & 8 bay)

The M.2 slots are connected rather slow, but good enough for OS/app drives.

For example, my plan for the next NAS would be the 4-Slot N100 variant with TrueNAS. One M.2 SSD for boot, Two M.2 SSDs for Apps/Server duties in mirroring and the 4 drives in Raid-Z1.

[dead]