I recommend a NAS; you'll be in much better shape if you have a single drive fail. It's much easier to organize than some random external drives. Am I parsing

I recommend a NAS; you'll be in much better shape if you have a single drive fail. It's much easier to organize than some random external drives. Am I parsing it right, that you want 24TB of storage? You could do 3x12TB or 4x8TB. Aim for CMR drives, not SMR; SMR is great at intermittent usage, but not certain parts of NAS, like filling a new drive. Try to get different brands, models, or at least batches; there have been firmware bugs hitting at a certain uptime. You can get used drives; test them and verify their capacity. I used https://serverpartdeals.com https://serverpartdeals.com , and they replaced one that didn't work well; they have 12TB drives for $97 right now. I didn't verify they're CMR but I'd be surprised. Amazon and Newegg have a Synology 4-bay NAS for $400 or less. Mine has been easy to administrate locally. You might work from Synology's hard drive compatibility lists. A rough total for those is about $700.