I'm looking to make a low power/noise NAS (plus a small amount of VMs) for my homelab. To fulfil this, I'm planning on going with SSDs instead of platter drives. I also strongly prefer hot swappable drive bays. My ideal is a front drive interface similar to a Dell PowerEdge R550 or R760.
Considerations:
- Rack mountable, preferably 2U.
- Supports Mini-ITX or possibly Micro-ATX motherboards.
- Absolute minimum of 6+ 2.5" hot swap bays, preferrably with drive failure light.
- NOT using 3.5" hot swap trays with 2.5" adapters.
- Space for PCIe graphics card, prefer full size w/riser but low profile is acceptable.
I can get close to this using something like the SilverStone RM23-502 chassis with one or two 5.25" to 2.5" drive enclosure units (IcyDock ToughArmor MB998SP-B). The problem is that the product specification for the IcyDock enclosure states that the status LED only indicates "Drive Power" and "HDD Access", and not drive failure. I suspect that this feature requires the bays have integration with a RAID controller but am not familiar enough with DIY servers to know.