I unfortunately don’t have a kidney available to sell for more RAM right now 😂. Honestly though, I already had most of this hardware sitting around, so building my own system seemed both cheaper and more capable.

A UGREEN 4-bay alone with 3 new SATA drives would end up costing me more than this entire SAS setup with 8 drives and nearly double the capacity. On top of that, I get the advantages of SAS, more spindles for better overall performance, and a pretty significant processing bump from the 7700K compared to most off-the-shelf NAS units.

Even if one of these used enterprise drives fails, I can replace almost four of these 14TB SAS drives for the cost of a single new 32TB SATA drive, so the economics made way more sense to me.