I will do everything in my power to encourage people to spend their would be "fancy gaming computer" money on a less fancy gaming computer and 20TB+ of resilient network storage so they can stop paying for every single subscription video service.
Step 1: find the cheapest possible way to attach 6 SAS drives to a computer.
Well you can obviously just go get a 12 bay Xyratex and only put 6 drives in it. The chassis power use is a little high for that and you have to do the whole PSU fan swap mess, but it's possible.
I've yet to find any smaller external shelf/unit/whatever boxes that aren't complete garbage, or super expensive.
Literally anything that says synology or QNAP or whatever is right out. You should not pay more than $100 for a box to connect drives to ($200 if the PC is inside it too), and if it doesn't run TrueNAS (or can run a home rolled linux/unix if you're feeling so inclined), then it's not worth it. There's no point in spending money on storage if it's not as resilient as possible and frankly TrueNAS or any open platform ZFS solution is going to be better than whatever crap any vendor will sell you for less than 5 digits, and arguably even those don't hold up once you look at things like TrueNAS enterprise or CEPH.
Can you tell I have it out for a particular fuckhead wannabe storage admin that loved to buy enterprise crap? Anyway,
The other obvious solution is to just get a computer, which you'd need anyway for an external shelf, and plug the drives in inside. This is okay, but it's more annoying to find a SAS>SAS breakout cable instead of a SAS>SATA breakout cable, and you want to use SAS. The drives are cheaper, higher quality, and more available.
Used SAS backplanes on ebay are cheap but then you have to hold the drives in place, plus be extra sure you've got the right cables, data and power. The big downside is, a backplane itself won't hold the drives in place. The upside is, if you have the means to 3d print spacers/brackets/whatever or otherwise rig it up, you'll probably have an easier to cool solution than anything above. Read easier to cool as, quieter. And you get indicator lights, which is super important when troubleshooting.
And with any RAID et al array, you should expect drives to fail. The whole point is to have a setup so drives can fail and the data be ok. So you can spend way way way less on drives.
The big takeaway here is there's no easy solution for cheap. None of this is hard but, some people just do not want to put in that much effort, and that's ok. It's a whole mesh of skills you gotta learn when you just wanna keep your copy of Bluey safe enough to cancel didny plus.
