I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?
That looks really great if one's concerned about the FOSS nature of their storage. Thanks for the recommendation!
I'm not sure if an ARM chipset would do justice for a multi-disk NAS setup though (or if the GnuBee would support RAID5/6 — it does seem to, with LVM/mdadm). My experience with consumer ARM-based NASes was that they suffered on transfer speed. I ended up going with a 4th generation Intel Pentium chip on a mini-ITX board, which offered the best compromise between price, performance, and power consumption for my use case.
I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.
I've used the Supermicro enclosures that turn 3x 5.25 bays into 5 3.5" bays and been pretty happy with them. Something similar to the CSE-M35S. More recently (5 years ago now :-) I tried some 5 bay E-SATA enclosures so I wouldn't have to pack these Supermicro into the chassis, and the eSATA were nothing but trouble. Hopefully better these days.
