I went for the single racks because they allow much more spacing between drives, hence making it easier to cool the inside of the case. Those 5 in 3 backplanes cram the drives together, and use a loud 80mm fan behind the drives to move air.
I've been following this thread for a while, and found some good inspiration for this build.
The goal of this machine was to be near silent and to have very low power consumption.
It is a headless FreeNAS machine, running ZFS as the file system. It's primary function is a media streaming...