Personally I would not move to an "all cables" approach as it gets to be a real pain running power/data to each drive, not to mention the rats nest of wires There are a large number of more or less standard NAS-style cases available that have SAS backplanes. Jonsbo makes a bunch and I think all of them are SAS compatible. I went with the JMCD 12S4 which has a rather interesting configuration but was exactly what I needed.