Following on from my purchase of the rather lovely
MS08 (8 hot-swap bays, mATX) I noticed that InWin had expanded their tower chassis lineup with some bigger and beefier models supporting up to 12x3.5" HDDs (plus room for 2.5" SSDs)
InWin IW-PLV Tower
Looks like a nice chassis. Though on the large size, especially if you are looking for an mATX build. The IW-PLV reminds me a little of the SM SC-743 I have, which fits 13 3.5/2.5 drives with the 5-drive bay addon. The problem with these "desktop" chassis is they are essentially 4u servers turned on their side with a top plate and bottom feet added. In other words, they are pretty deep. Fairly narrow set of use cases out there where you can fit a 4u server but only if it is vertical. Not no use cases, just few.
Personally I'd never go back to a non-hot-swap chassis ever again, mostly due to Fun had with identifying and/or replacing hard drives.
I'd still argue that hot-swap isn't really
necessary (whether you
want it is another thing) for most home-server use cases and the problem you describe is easily and cheaply remedied with a label maker
Heck I even labeled my drives on the server I have with hot-swap (the above mentioned 743). Saves you a lot of grief. Or even just use masking tape and a Sharpie, doesn't have to be fancy, just legible. Put the labels where you can easily read them with the case open and you are done.
As for downtime, if zero down time is that critical for you (in a home?) then you have bigger considerations besides hot-swap for drives to account for. Myself, I can't think of a time in my house where I couldn't schedule down time for 15-30 minutes some weekend morning, etc. if I needed to, and I run all kinds of everyday-use stuff on my servers.
I think taking a few minutes to label your drives (I use the last 5 digits of the serial+dev id) and finding a case that isn't a complete pain to work with is all I need. I'm the opposite of you, in my house I may never buy hot-swap again