With lack of expansion cards combined with m2 drives modern PCs are looking completely different to just 10 years ago. Just a big motherboard with a video card and a massive cooler. Those big cases look mostly empty. All the wiring is just for RGB now. :)
Even spinning-disk hard drive arrays (another good way to fill out a large case) don't get much love since SSDs have gotten cheaper and people rely more on cloud storage. My next rig will, at least, continue to have an ever-growing number of 18TB hard drives as a huge volume managed by Windows Storage Spaces.
Most people just don't have that much data. Those huge HDD arrays were mostly used for pirated media but these days most people are on streaming. Even for games, it's usually easier to just delete the games you aren't using and download them back when you want to play them.
Many modern cases opt for only one or even no HDD bays because it makes the case look cleaner, smaller and gives it better airflow. Gone are the days where most cases had top to bottom bays of DVD and HDD slots
HDD arrays for “Linux ISOs” have never been better. In fact, I’m pretty sure that modern day is something of a golden era thanks to the dropping prices per TB on spinning media.
Yup. Currently building a new storage setup with 18TB disks. Each of my 18TB HDD is also backed by a 512GB NVME cache to speed the already fast HDDs up.
Distributed raids (like ceph and glusterfs) and raid expansion (recently added in zfs) also make it easy for a homelabber to get started cheap and continuously add new disks.
