I would suggest you to skip all these "cheap" solutions and get a used Dell T20 with a Xeon v3 and 16GB ECC Ram... it is about 100 bucks and way more powerful t

I would suggest you to skip all these "cheap" solutions and get a used Dell T20 with a Xeon v3 and 16GB ECC Ram... it is about 100 bucks and way more powerful than any small solution, and 33watts idle power consumption with 2 10TB HDDs. If you wanna scale up, you could re-use the Dell T20 as NAS only device and buy a more powerful server hardware. You could also get one of these lenovo mini devices as a server, but I invested some more money and got myself a still cheap but very power efficent Fujitsu D3417-B2 Board about 9W idle. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MucGkPUMjNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MucGkPUMjNo As Software / OS you could start with TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox.