I'm not really in the market myself but I was intrigued by the recent talk on small ITX cases like the Silverstone DS380B.  Apparently so was amazon because they pushed this little guy in one of their adds while I was reading Slate:

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HX7HS5I/ref=dra_a_cs_mr_hn_it_P1077_100?tag=dradisplay-20

 

Drive Bay: Support four hot swap SAS 6G / SATA III drives and one 2.5" OS drive;

Cooling Fan: 1 x 80mm standard case fans

Switch: Power ON/OFF x 1, System reset x 1

Indicator: Power ON/OFF x 1, HDD x 1

Front Connector: Two front USB ports

Motherboard Compatibility: Support Mini-ITX motherboard (6.7 x 6.7 inch)

Power Supply: Support standard Flex ATX power supply (NOT included)

Dimensions ( W x D x H ): 7.75 x 7.5 x 10 inch (19.7 x 19.1 x 25.4 cm)

Weight: 9 lbs

$109

Now, that would make a neat 12TB server (or 15TB, when the 5TB drives become available), with a 2.5" cache drive.

From the looks of it, there might even be room to rig up a second SSD if desired as an app/vm drive too.

 

Though I really REALLY think Tom needs to consider assigning cache to a partition and not an entire disk.  That would let us to use a single drive for both cache and app/vm mounts.  Now we don't waste a good large fast drive on cache-only, and the partition isolation of the two allows the array to be stopped, which unmounts cache, while maintaining access to the app/vm partition.  Slightly OT, but it is my thread ;-)

While the design of this case is very neat, there are some glaring issues with how it is constructed, with catastrophic results.

 

I purchased one case which I proceeded to assemble and had issues sliding hard drives, mounted in the supplied drive sleds, into the enclosure. They just don't line up quite right.

 

After fighting with it and not having the installed drives recognized, the machine refusing to boot with drives installed or rebooting when drives were inserted while it was running. I realized that the case/backplane was shorting out the hard drives and frying the controller boards on them.

 

I notified Norco, who shipped out a new case... WHICH HAD THE EXACT SAME ISSUE! I disassembled the case and illustrated the misalignment of the backplane circuit board to their representative, who repeatedly claimed that no one else had experienced this issue. The backplane circuitboard works just fine outside of the case, but mounted in the case, it doesn't line up to the sata ports correctly and makes inserting drives difficult. The uninsulated drive sleds are slightly bowed on both units and rest against the bare circuit board of the drive... that coupled with the backplane misalignment is most likely the root of the issue.

 

I hope that is true, because my experience has been nothing but heartache. You have been warned.