A NAS case comes down to two numbers: how many drives it holds, and how warm those drives run once it is full. Everything else, the aluminum finish, the walnut trim, the lockable door, is secondary to whether eight spinning disks stay under temperature during a scrub. For years the honest answer to “which case” was a used SilverStone or a Fractal Node 304, because almost nothing was built for the job. That changed. Jonsbo now sells a whole ladder of purpose-built NAS chassis, and the category finally has a real gradient from a five-bay cube up to a twelve-bay tower.
The picks below cover both families that matter now: the compact aluminum boxes that pack five to twelve bays into the smallest possible footprint, and the traditional steel chassis that trade size for a lockable hot-swap cage and a standard power supply. Which one fits depends on the rest of the parts list, so this pairs with the full TrueNAS build, the HBA that drives the bays once the board runs out of SATA ports, and the drives that go in them. With drive prices where they are in 2026, the bay-count math has shifted toward fewer, larger disks, which changes the case you should buy.
Specs, bay counts, and prices verified September 2026 against manufacturer datasheets and live retail listings.
The five cases at a glance
Every case here takes 3.5-inch drives on a hot-swap tray or backplane. The differences that decide the purchase are the bay count, the board and power-supply size the chassis accepts, and how much room is left for a cooler and an add-in card. Prices move week to week, so treat the figures in each section as a band and confirm the live number before buying.
| Case | 3.5″ bays | Hot-swap | Board | PSU | Volume | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jonsbo N2 | 5 (+1x 2.5″) | Yes, SATA backplane | Mini-ITX | SFX | ~11 L | Smallest first NAS |
| Jonsbo N3 | 8 (+1x 2.5″) | Yes, SATA backplane | Mini-ITX | SFX | ~18 L | Compact eight-bay default |
| SilverStone CS382 | 8 (+3 internal) | Yes, SAS-12G/SATA | Micro-ATX | ATX | 39.6 L | Serviceable hot-swap |
| SilverStone CS380 | 8 (+2x 5.25″) | Yes, SAS/SATA | ATX | ATX | 44.7 L | Standard-parts value |
| Jonsbo N5 | 12 (+4x 2.5″) | Yes, SATA backplane | up to E-ATX | ATX | ~49 L | Maximum capacity |
1. Jonsbo N2: the smallest sensible NAS
Five bays in eleven liters is about as small as a real NAS gets before you give up drive count entirely.
The N2 holds five 3.5-inch drives on a front SATA backplane plus one 2.5-inch SSD for the operating system, all on a mini-ITX board. That is enough for a four-wide RAIDZ1 with a hot spare, or a five-wide RAIDZ2, which suits most first builds. It is the case to buy when the goal is a quiet appliance that disappears on a shelf rather than a machine you expand for years. A genuine unit runs around $120 to $140; check the live price.
Skip it if you expect to grow. The SFX-only power supply and the 65mm cooler ceiling force small, specific parts, and there is no staggered spin-up, so the PSU has to swallow the inrush of five drives at once. The backplane fan header also runs the stock 120mm fan at full speed unless you reroute it to a motherboard PWM header, which is the first thing to change after the build. Five bays is the hard limit here, not a starting point.
2. Jonsbo N3: the compact eight-bay default
Eight 3.5-inch bays in eighteen liters is the sweet balance most compact DIY builds land on.
The N3 puts eight hot-swap 3.5-inch bays and one 2.5-inch OS slot on a mini-ITX board, cooled by two built-in 100mm fans across the drive compartment. It fits an SFX power supply up to 105mm and a cooler up to 130mm, which is generous for the size and enough for a real air cooler rather than a low-profile part. This is the case most compact builds should default to: eight bays covers a six-wide RAIDZ2 with room to grow, in a box that still fits on a desk. Pre-owned or new, it runs about $150 to $175; check the live price.
The catch is the SATA count. A mini-ITX board rarely has eight SATA ports, so filling the N3 usually means adding a host bus adapter or a PCIe SATA card in its single slot, which is where the HBA guide comes in. The backplane also ships without SATA cables and runs its fans at full tilt off the backplane header, so budget for a set of angled SATA cables and plan to reroute the fans. Skip it if you need the drives behind a lockable door, since the trays are open at the front.
3. SilverStone CS382: hot-swap without giving up an ATX power supply
This is the case for people who want front-loading hot-swap trays and a standard power supply in the same box.
The CS382 fits a micro-ATX board and a full ATX power supply, and its eight front bays sit behind a lockable door on a real backplane wired for SAS-12G or SATA-6G. Two 92mm fans pull air straight across the drive cage, and there is room internally for another 3.5-inch drive, two 2.5-inch drives, and an optical bay. Cooler clearance is 168mm and cards can run to 369mm, so a proper tower cooler and a long HBA both fit. In a 39.6-liter footprint it is far easier to service than any of the compact cubes. Expect roughly $240 to $270, and it goes in and out of stock; check the live price.
The SAS-12G backplane is not plug and play. SATA drives connect straight through, but running SAS drives or wiring all eight bays cleanly wants a SAS host bus adapter and a mini-SAS HD to SATA breakout cable, not the motherboard ports. Skip it if you wanted something small, because at over 39 liters this is a proper mini-tower, and the 174mm card-width limit rules out some triple-slot GPUs if the box ever doubles as more than a NAS.
4. SilverStone CS380: eight hot-swap bays on standard parts
The CS380 is the cheapest way to get eight front hot-swap bays without touching an aluminum boutique case or a SAS backplane you have to think about.
Where the CS382 is micro-ATX and modern, the CS380 is a full ATX tower that takes any standard ATX board and power supply. Its eight hot-swap 3.5-inch bays sit in two modular four-bay cages, fed by two dedicated 120mm intake fans with a third 120mm on the rear, plus two 5.25-inch bays up top for whatever a build still needs. Seven expansion slots leave plenty of room for an HBA and a NIC. It is the value option in this list: the same eight-bay hot-swap capability on the most ordinary parts you can buy, usually around $210 to $240; check the live price.
It is the oldest design here and it shows in the clearances. Cooler height caps at 146mm and card width at 149mm, tighter than the CS382, so a big dual-tower air cooler will not fit and neither will some wide GPUs. The drives are cooled only by the two side intakes, which is adequate but not generous under a full-array scrub. Skip it if you want the smallest box or the quietest one, because at 44.7 liters it is the largest tower in this group.
5. Jonsbo N5: twelve bays and room for a card
Twelve hot-swap 3.5-inch bays plus four 2.5-inch mounts is where a DIY NAS stops being an appliance and starts being a real storage server.
The N5 fronts twelve hot-swap 3.5-inch bays across two backplanes and adds four side-mounted 2.5-inch drives, on a board up to full E-ATX. It takes a standard ATX power supply and a 160mm cooler, has eight expansion slots, and clears cards to 350mm, so a full HBA and even a GPU for transcoding both fit. Twelve bays is enough for a wide RAIDZ2 or two six-wide vdevs, which is the point at which the pool layout matters more than the case. The walnut front is the marketing, the drive count is the reason to buy. It runs about $240 to $270; check the live price.
Two things to plan for. The power supply must be 170mm or shorter to keep all twelve front bays, because a longer ATX unit forces the removal of the four-bay cage and drops you to eight. And the backplanes ship without cables and need Molex power splitters plus long SATA runs, routed before the PSU goes in, along with an HBA on most boards to reach twelve drives. Skip it if noise matters, because thin steel and twelve spinning disks make it the loudest case here.
Compact aluminum or traditional steel
The real decision is which of the two families fits the build. The Jonsbo cubes win on size and looks. They put five to twelve bays in the smallest possible box, but they pay for it with an SFX power supply on the smaller models, tighter cooler clearance, and drive trays that are open at the front. The SilverStone chassis are larger and plainer, and in exchange they take a standard ATX power supply, hide the drives behind a lockable door, and are far easier to service because the whole hot-swap cage faces forward.
If the NAS lives on a desk or a shelf and the drive count is settled, the aluminum boxes are the better buy. If it lives in a closet or a rack-adjacent spot where you will pull drives without warning and want a normal power supply, the steel SilverStone cases earn their extra size. Everything else, the wood trim and the anodizing included, is aesthetics.
Count bays for the drives you will actually buy
Bay count used to be the whole decision. It is less so now. A single modern 3.5-inch drive holds more than an entire array did a few years ago, and with prices elevated the sensible build uses fewer, larger disks rather than filling every bay with small ones. A four-wide RAIDZ1 of large drives can carry more usable capacity than an eight-wide array of old ones, at lower power and less heat, which means a five-bay N2 covers far more builds than its size suggests.
Buy the case for the array you will actually run, plus one bay for a future replacement, not for a theoretical maximum. The one place extra bays pay off is a wide RAIDZ2 or a two-vdev pool, where the layout of the pool sets the bay count. And whatever the count, confirm the drives are conventional recording and not shingled before they go in, because a case full of SMR disks resilvers for days regardless of how many bays it has.
Hot-swap is convenience, not redundancy
Every case here advertises hot-swap bays, and the feature is worth having, but it is often misread. A hot-swap tray lets you pull and replace a failed drive without powering down or opening the case. It does nothing for data safety on its own. The redundancy comes from the pool layout, a RAIDZ level or a mirror, not from the tray. A single-disk pool in a twelve-bay hot-swap case is exactly as fragile as a single disk anywhere else.
Where hot-swap earns its keep is time to repair. When a drive fails at 3 a.m., pulling the labelled tray and sliding a new disk in beats shutting the array down and fishing a drive out of a cabled cage. That is a real operational win on a NAS that other people depend on, and it is the main reason to pay for the SilverStone door-and-cage design over an open Jonsbo tray. It is not a reason to run less redundancy in the pool.
PSU, cooler, and HBA clearance
Three clearances trip up more NAS builds than drive count ever does. The first is the power supply. The compact Jonsbo cases take SFX units only, which are pricier and less common than ATX, while the SilverStone cases and the N5 take a standard ATX supply. On the N5 the ATX unit has to be 170mm or shorter to keep all twelve bays, a limit easy to miss when buying a high-wattage PSU.
The second is cooler height, which ranges from a cramped 65mm in the N2 to a comfortable 168mm in the CS382, so the case decides the cooler, not the other way round. The third is the add-in card. Almost every one of these builds needs a host bus adapter to reach its full drive count, so the case must have a free slot with real clearance for it, and that card runs hot in a sealed box. Confirm all three against the board and the parts list before ordering, because a case that will not close over the cooler is the most common reason a build stalls.
What to watch on the drive temperatures
The case is only doing its job if the drives stay cool under load, and a scrub or a resilver is when that gets tested. Backblaze, which runs hundreds of thousands of drives, found effectively no correlation between drive temperature and failure across its fleet, which mostly runs between 15 and 30 degrees Celsius against a manufacturer-rated ceiling near 60. The practical target for a home NAS is therefore not “as cold as possible” but “comfortably under about 40 degrees Celsius while every disk is being read at once.” A sealed aluminum cube with two small fans and a front-fan steel cage reach that differently, and the only way to know is to measure your own build.
After the array is up, read the temperature straight from each disk with smartctl:
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep -i temperatureAttribute 194, Temperature_Celsius, is the number that matters, and its raw value is the current reading. Some drives report it as attribute 190 instead, which the grep above also catches. Kick off a pool scrub, watch every drive at once, and the case has passed if the hottest disk in the middle of the stack holds inside range while the whole array is under read. If it climbs past 45 degrees, the fix is airflow before anything else: reroute the backplane fans to a motherboard header so they ramp under load, swap the stock fans for higher static-pressure ones, or in the compact cubes accept fewer, larger drives to cut the heat at the source. The bays are only as good as the air moving across them.
