The Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying.

If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage:

* A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it.

* The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.

That's what I built! It's a great case, the only components I didn't already have lying around were the motherboard and PSU.

It's very well made, not as tight on space as I expected either.

The only issue is as you noted, you have to be really careful with your motherboard choice if you want to use all 8 bays for a storage array.

Another gotchas was making sure to get a CPU with integrated graphics, otherwise you will have to waste your pcie slot on a graphics card and have no space for the extra SATA ports.