I'm looking to build a new NAS, my current server I call storage is starting to fill up again and I'm meeting hardware limitations. The current RAID controller in the chassis is a 3ware 9500S-8 port controller. It's been a rock solid card for me, but it only supports disks up to 32 bit LBA, which was great when drives were no bigger then 2 TB, however to support newer drives that are larger then 2 TB, I need a new RAID controller that has support for 48 bit LBA. Since I'm currently running 8 x 2 TB Seagate ST2000DM001 drives in this machine and I can't install any drives bigger then 2 TB while using this controller, it's time to plot a new course of action.

So I have a couple of options:
option 1 - buy a new controller and buy newer 8x 3TB (or bigger) drives and migrate all my data over.
option 2 - build a new server, use a similar 9500S-x raid controller with 16 ports instead of 8 and with the 2 TB drives, build one large file server
option 3 - do both.

I've decided to go with option 3.  And this is where the classy chassis (sounds like a porn name) comes into play.

I was able to source for a really good price, a Chembro 16 bay 4U rack mount server case. It came fully populated with hardware and hard drives (and yes, I did try a file recover on the disks to see if there was anything in there, and thank god, I didn't find anything). The game plan in the coming weeks / months is to upgrade my NAS storage, with a new RAID controller and larger hard drives, probably in the 3 ~ 4TB range, but in a raid 6 configuration for greater resiliency, and with the left over drives throw them into this chassis a large "backup" NAS. Between Resource (which is a file server / NAS) and Storage, I currently have 12 x 2 TB HDDs, so I can purchase a few more and it wouldn't set me back much and it will give me a large backup server to ensure that I always have 2 copies of my data.  

Once the build is complete, I'll be sure to throw a few pictures up.