Anyone tried using an old Case + PSU as a drive enclosure?

I don't want it to be a NAS, but was thinking about a SATA replicator, or SAS to connect individual hard drives to my main chassis.

I assume if I wanted a 4 port SATA card in the slave chassis, it'd need some sort of OS to drive it?

Else the ugly solution is to just run 4 SATA cables from the first chassis into the harddrives of the second chassis and use either PSU.

Just wondering if there's any other cool ways of doing it, short of buying a device like:
http://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProBox-Bay-Dock-SATA/dp/B0078H8L04  (which I quite like the idea of)
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=210_177_287&products_id=15115&zenid=afcb308191875594f6b9d1ff0bb88fb8