> I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives.

How often do you actually do this? In 15 years of running my own NAS boxes, I so far had to do it once. I, of course, choose slow, middle of the range disks.

I never went more than 1, maybe 2, years without needing to open it up. To be fair, I was adding drives over time as I could afford them and I had a large range of drives of various ages that slowly died out or needed to be replaced with larger capacity drives.

It’s partly the annoyance of being in a cramped space filled with drives but also the downtime. Family and friends use self-hosted software than runs on my main server and uses the NAS(es). Shutting down a NAS means shutting down the software. Yes, I can let them know ahead of time and “schedule downtime” but I dislike needing to do that unless I have to. It just makes the system feel less stable for them and I want to provide a great experience.

With hotswap bays externally accessible I don’t have to stop anything. I’d actually be fine with UnRaid (I still run it as my “app” server) if there was a case with 12 or more 3.5” hotswap bays.

I looked into large JBOD servers but between fan noise and rack mounted servers often being in a whole other class (one I have much less experience in compared to desktop tower builds) I’ve never been able to convince myself to get one.

My Synology 12-bays are quiet and easy to work with so even at ~$1.5K they were a steal in terms of maintenance and upkeep (for me).