6x SATA ports on a motherboard is getting to be rare. You'll need to shop carefully, and make tradeoffs to get there.

I'm moving towards used, ancient, large desktop cases. You can find them at computer recyleries if you have them in your area or local marketplaces. I got one with a hotswap backplane and trays and everything in the 5.25" bays. Of course, the backplane didn't work for me, so I had to pull out the backplane and just wire the drives like normal, but trays are still nice.

I've got lots of space, so I just leave a keyboard and monitor next to my servers, in case I break something. It's not elegant, but it's cost effective. A used $10 monitor and a keyboard I don't like will last forever, but buying boards with IPMI adds $100-$200 everytime I upgrade.

You might also consider a rack mount case. 4U rack cases are usually designed for standard ATX builds. For home use it cleans up a lot of wire mess to have router, switch, NAS, your main desktop, and maybe some other things all on one rack.

When you move you can also just move it all in one piece if you have a liftgate van.

Why do you need 6x SATA? 18 TB drives are to be had for around $300. Just do 4x of those in striped mirrors with ZFS for 36 TB of available storage. Resilver times are stupid fast.

And you have an easier upgrade path. If you buy one pair of ~40 TB drives in a couple of years, you can replace one of the mirrors just by swapping out the old disks one by one and waiting for resilver. Then ZFS can autoexpand your storage to 18 + 40 TB total. And you can repeat further down the line, going 40 + 80 TB or whatever is available, true Ship of Theseus style.

Yes, you lose a little resilience compared to RAIDZ2, but RAID is just a HA solution, not a backup solution, no matter how fancy you make it. And a RAIDZ2 gradual-upgrade by replacing disk after disk is just horrible.

So 4x18TB for HA 36TB.

Then another 2x18TB for backup.

Surely you don't have the backup in the same machine as the NAS? It should at least be in another building entirely.

Home users don't usually have the money to rent another building.

What I do for my personal setup is RAID + nightly backup (3 drives total) in one machine, and then a 4th hard drive that normally lives airgapped in a rental storage unit that I bring home and sync every 6 months or so.

The nightly backup serves to always fetch yesterday's version of any file, and deals with 99% of scenarios that I'd need a real backup.

The 1% (hackers + fires/disasters) is taken care of by the storage unit but I lose the last 6 months of changes.

Well, the person I was responding to asked for 6x SATA. So there's that.

Personally, I like 6x SATA for a couple reasons. One is my case has sleds for 6 drives :P. The other is I run two servers with 2x mirrors as the main storage (they backup each other and are in different buildings although on the same site, which gives me a little redundancy, but not much); I've done an upgrade once from 4 tb to 10 tb, so my case with 6 sleds now has the main 10tb mirror array, and a playspace for less important stuff that I can figure out how to use over time; currently I've got it split up between 50% of each disk used individually for tv recordings, and the other 50% as a raidz2 to hold dvd's i've ripped and fanedits.

When I upgrade/replace the main mirrors, I may update the other server to have more slots, and then it can have a 4x 10tb playspace.

> Yes, you lose a little resilience compared to RAIDZ2, but RAID is just a HA solution, not a backup solution, no matter how fancy you make it. And a RAIDZ2 gradual-upgrade by replacing disk after disk is just horrible.

I haven't done it, so I'm not disagreeing... I'm assuming the main objection is it takes a long time, and the secondary objection is the system has a lot of disk contention while it's in progress. I'd probably address the takes a long time by just planning to do one disk every other week. That means it's a two month process, but it also means that the drives in the system have a two month offset on usage time; a lot of drive array failures are due to correlated failures, and offsetting the power on time can help. If all of your disks are likely to fail when their power on counter rolls over, it's nice if you have two weeks between failures --- that should hopefully be plenty of time to replace disks before you lose the data.

Ordering disks over a two month period may also help avoid getting all disks from the same batch; but sometimes it's better to order all at once for pricing, so that's mixed.

If you do have extra SATA ports, you might be able to do a replace while both the old and new disk are available... I'm not sure if that helps the process or not; it won't reduce the amount of writes to the new drive, but maybe it helps with disk contention during the process?

Beware that not all port combinations are supported. For example, the Z270 chipset supports 6 SATA, but only 4 SATA if NVMe is also used. The motherboard manual will tell you this.

I recently stood up a 140TB unraid instance, first time I did any nas stuff. Get manufacturer recertified drives for about 13 dollars a tb. Went with a framework case and a normal am4 processor/mobo with 8 sata connections.

2tb nvme cache + 20TB a drive + parity is 140 useable TB, and unraid makes the NAS stuff really easy, just installed a bunch of "apps" which are basically docker containers + settings, and things are a breeze.

Where'd you get the drives? That's a quite reasonable price.

serverpartdeals has a seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive that I went with.