You say you are on a budget. Yet you talk about 128 Gigs of ram.

Maybe you should clarify what your budget is.

Where are people getting drives at $10/tb?

Where I live it's $50/tb

You're talking a lot of storage - it might be worth investing in some low-end server hardware. A Dell tower or something, maybe one off eBay if you're looking to cut costs.

I picked up a PowerEdge T110II a long time ago and it's been... flawless. Just a simple server with a 4x4TB RAID5. No hardware problems (aside from occasional disk failures over the years), easy to manage. It costs a bit more - but server hardware is often just more reliable and for a NAS that's job #1. This server just runs.

I just upgraded the memory in it to 32GB for ~$100USD. Before that it had 8GB. I needed more for restic doing backups. I probably could have gotten away with 16GB but I figured I'd max it out for that price.

It's better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.

I would consider fewer, larger drives

No more Storage Full warnings.

Is that a challenge?

Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few or even all of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.

Why 16 drives? Do you already have 16 4tb drives?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #156 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 21:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Take a look at https://diskprices.com/ for the best price per TB. Backblaze has been pretty great about sharing their hardware specs and builds. Maybe get some ideas from them https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/

I wouldn't use more than 4 or 6 disks in a home environment. Specially with mechanical drivers, power consumption 24/7 would get me very worried.

I run 4 x 8Tb SSDs, not cheap, but solid, low power AND low heat (even more important).

Consider also heat dissipation as most likely at home you don't have a constant temperature and humidity, so many spinning disks can suffer from heat, and that will kill them faster

Longevity... With so much space I would expect to keep it running a decade or more... So factor in 10x365x24 hours of operation, energy consumed, heat dissipation and failure rate.

On top of that, whatever gpu and ram you throw at it is meaningless, whatever wi work, even an Intel n100 NUC. Having enough cables and port instead... Well.

That sounds like a nightmare tbh. So many failure points, so much heat and power usage, and cables.

I have 6 out of 8 bays filled and still feel like it's a lot to worry about and manage if something fails.