I totally understand where you are coming from! For me and the setup that this particular case comes with makes it as easy to change drives as you can get without a hot swap. There's a lot of room and no bays or anything need to be removed. My argument was for the D8000 case only. Even if ones loves the D8000 and not being able to hotswap, you can simply add backplanes to the hdd "bays" from Lian Li and make all 20 hdd slots on the front hotswappable. Easy options with whatever way you choose to use the case and it is adaptable.

 

If I had a case with cages where drives were screwed in from the sides and you had to remove multiple cables, cages, or drives or anything other than simply one sata data/power cable (no screws) then I would 100% agree with you. With the D8000, it is SO easy.

Agree => there are very few cases where it's as easy to replace a drive as it is with the D8000.    Cases with side-mounted slide-in slots aren't bad as long as you mount the drives so the cables face the open side of the case => you can simply unplug 2 cables and pull out a drive ... but that's still not as convenient as the D8000 setup.

 

By the way, as near as I can tell the BPxSATA units (BP1SATA, BP2SATA, & BP3SATA) are exactly what are used in the PC-Q25B case ... they are excellent little hot-swap backplates.

 

 

Yeah, from what I've seen they do look good. Last I checked thought the 3xbackplane adapter is a bit of a bear of to chase down.