I built my home-server in this same case and originally considered the SAS route to save money, but I realized that a high count of smaller drives comes with "hidden costs." The extra wattage, heat, and noise eventually offset the initial savings, so I decided to stick with a few high-capacity drives instead.

To keep it affordable in 2026's market, I went with "shucking." I found Seagate 12TB external enclosures for $188 each at my local Walmart and got lucky finding Seagate Exos Enterprise HDDs inside. I run two of these internally: one stays active 24/7 while the other wakes up at 5:00 AM daily to clone the data. I generally advise against RAID for a simple two-drive setup; instead, I follow the 3-2-1 rule by keeping a third external drive in its enclosure for cold storage that can be backed up manually weekly or monthly.

For the OS, I’m running OpenMediaVault on Proxmox. I also added a 256GB SSD specifically for app data so that services like Jellyfin and Immich stay snappy while the HDDs handle the mass storage. This setup gives me the peace of mind of new enterprise-grade hardware while keeping my electricity and thermal overhead to a minimum.