On NASes... a Google search turned up this:
http://www.itinstock.com/dell-powervault-md1000-sas-sata-15-bay-drive-storage-array-san-2-x-controllers-33384
Yeah, the MD1000 is really just a box of disks, PSU's and a couple of SAS expanders - no "intelligence" as such.
Actually someone I knew built a NAS from something similar - in this case
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/847/SC847E16-R1K28LPB - apparently the fans sound like a jet taking off.
I've finished for not - everything squeezed in and cables tied off neatly and an OS installed. My final view on the case it that it's OK, a bit pricy but OK - it does, in fact, have per disk activity LEDs - I didn't notice the tiny light guides in the disk caddies.
So there are just two outstanding issues:
1) The Toshiba N300 8TB drives, I realise that there are a few comments on Amazon to the effect that these drives are, or can be, noisy but I thought "no modern HDD is
that loud". Completely wrong - these emit an irritating deep clicking noise on head movement. It was especially irritating when ext4 was doing its lazy table/journal initialisation - after a few minutes I just wanted it to stop. I see now why one reviewer said he dreaded turning his PC on, it was like listening to someone incessantly grinding their teeth. It's a bit better now the initialisation is done but I think that they are going to have to go back.
2) Thermals Undervolting wasn't stable, although there were some oddities which I need to look at. Keeping the lid on thermally needed a massive underclock. Sadly I think that the NH-L9i is not up to an 8700k. To be fair noctua say the cooler won't work with an 8700K citing a max TDP of 65W (but confusingly they do claim it is OK with 91W TDP Skylake CPUs).
Hence a re-think might be called for. The NH-L9i is probably the best, indeed almost the only, cooler for its 37mm height and so if it can't cut it I'm not sure what will (suggestions welcome). In another case I'd possibly try a higher airflow fan on the same heatsink but here isn't room. Liquid cooling probably isn't an option - even if you could get a block on the CPU it would not be possible to install a radiator (even outside the case which I thought might be possible).
Even in its current hamstrung configuration the 8700K is an impressive CPU. It is doing a software h.265 encode more than twice as fast as my mildly OC'd 4770K does and would be more than 3x as fast at stock clock speeds. More impressively the hardware encode (which I can't do on the Haswell chip) is managing 127fps which is about 25x faster than the earlier chip could do in software.
Ultimately I'm going to have to admit defeat, I think, on the idea of putting an 8700K in such a small box and probably move the 3770T motherboard into the U-Nas case. I think that will work well as the NAS server CPU and will be a really good match to the case. I just need to find the 8700K and its motherboard a new home so really I just need to buy a mid sized case (of which there are loads of nice ones without breaking the bank) and an ATX PSU (ditto).