I don't have a ton of experience with other cases but I have been blown away by the quality and customizability of the Define 6. It's super solid with good hardware and the ability to convert it around to different formats. You will need to purchase extra drive caddies as mine only came with 4 I think but I've bought extras over the years to the point that I have an extra set that I didn't realize I had. The whole front is drive space from floor to ceiling and It has two mounts in the back for 2.5" drives along with two in the front that can be used to mount a GPU vertically or for two additional 2.5" drives. You will need to buy two extra 2.5 mounts to use all four spots though. Apart from that it's silent like I mentioned with foam in the top panel to deaden noise. It also has removable screens in the base and front for the air intake to make it easy to clean the dust out. Both side panels are removable with lots of cable management built in and a built-in fan hub.
I'm not super familiar with the 7th gen Define and it's XL counterpart so you may do some research to ensure it has the same capacity if these are all you can find now. The Define 6 is only slightly larger than my old Antec midtower case.
I agree they have no legitimate plan and are just fumbling with a bunch of idiotic moves and call it governing, but I also agree with the other commentor that these credits aren't as great as people think because manufactures have time and time again raised prices by amounts equivalent to these credit amounts (like when Biden revamped the expiring credit system) so all we're really doing is subsidizing these major corporations with our tax dollars.
Depending on your future storage needs, you might check out Fractal's Define series of cases. I have the Define 6 and have room for around 12 3.5" drives + 4 2.5" drives in a midtower format. It's super silent too with four fans and the nine 3.5" drives I had in it previously (consolidated down to six larger capacity drives now).
If your visibility is bad when you park front in, then either you're hauling something that's blocking your line of sight (in which case it would make sense), or your vehicle has terrible visibility
Or, you know, you have two vehicles parked on either side of you. Bonus points if they're two fullsize trucks/SUVs while you're in a sedan.
I think those rules are more about loud exhaust pointing straight at people's windows and those fuckers who leave their trailer hitch attached and have it sticking out across the sidewalk at shin height. CO isn't going to reach any sort of concentration where it will he harmful just from backing in near an AC unit.
I used to be a lube tech in a different life 15 years ago and would occasionally see vehicles without dipsticks. Like you said the German brands like BMW and Mercedes but also Chrysler vehicles like the 300 and Magnum had a tube for the transmission dipstick but no dipstick inside of it just a cap on the tube.
File transfers between devices is one reason. With NVME R/W speeds you can easily saturate 1Gb networking equipment. I think 10Gb is more than most people need most of the time but it would still be nice to have if it weren't so expensive. I just bought a small 2.5Gb switch to connect my server and PC together since both have 2.5Gb NICs and that seems to be a happy medium.
Because tenants pay for their own electricity so there's no direct incentive for the owners to install solar in order to reduce a bill that someone else pays.
Or the fact that most people with balconies live in rented apartments and apartment managers aren't going to pay to subsidize an electric bill that tenants are entirely responsible for paying.
Also MergerFS like mentioned above, SnapRAID, OMV, Unraid, TrueNAS, or just plain ZFS. Something to create a pool of drives will be your best bet. These all do it while some are full OSes or hypervisors and others are things you can implement in your current OS. What are you currently using for your OS?
AFAIK no you can't use different sized drives. I have read about the update to allow you to expand existing pools but it hasn't made its way to the version of ZFS that Proxmox uses, but I hope it does soon.
Previously, I was using SnapRAID which does allow you to use any size drive provided your parity drives are equal or larger to the rest of the drives in the pool so you may check that out. It worked well for me on Windows, is available on Linux, and makes it very easy to expand the pool.
I would caution that if you plan to build a big library over time, to just bite the bullet and get matching drives to start with because I tried mismatched drives purchased over several years (whatever was a good deal when I needed to expand the pool) and it got to the point where it was becoming unmanageable once I hit about 8 drives as SATA ports became limited and HDD capacities on the market increased (why waste a port on a 6TB drive when you could have a 14TB-20TB drive instead?). With this new server build, I just bought several matching 14TB drives from serverpartdeals.com and had to transfer everything from the old SnapRAID pool to my ZFS pool which took about a week with rsync.
You might look at TechHuts previous tutorial on setting this all up from around a year ago where he instead used Cockpit to manage his ZFS pool shares rather than TrueNAS. I followed that one a few months ago with a minor amount of Linux experience and got everything set up on Proxmox quite easily. I do recall some people complaining about having issues with permissions or some such which is why he created this new tutorial, but I didn't run into those issues for whatever reason.
This new Proxmox build has been rock solid after running everything on flaky laptops, mini PCs, and a Windows-based server build for the past 12+ years and I've also used it to now run things like Jellyseer, Immich, Frigate, and more which is awesome, but I did spend a good chunk of money for a lot of new hardware, redundant SSDs, RAM, etc so you may be better off starting with something more basic to tinker and learn with.
I don't have a ton of experience with other cases but I have been blown away by the quality and customizability of the Define 6. It's super solid with good hardware and the ability to convert it around to different formats. You will need to purchase extra drive caddies as mine only came with 4 I think but I've bought extras over the years to the point that I have an extra set that I didn't realize I had. The whole front is drive space from floor to ceiling and It has two mounts in the back for 2.5" drives along with two in the front that can be used to mount a GPU vertically or for two additional 2.5" drives. You will need to buy two extra 2.5 mounts to use all four spots though. Apart from that it's silent like I mentioned with foam in the top panel to deaden noise. It also has removable screens in the base and front for the air intake to make it easy to clean the dust out. Both side panels are removable with lots of cable management built in and a built-in fan hub.
I'm not super familiar with the 7th gen Define and it's XL counterpart so you may do some research to ensure it has the same capacity if these are all you can find now. The Define 6 is only slightly larger than my old Antec midtower case.