In February, I ordered an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual external hard drive enclosure for $79.75 (it was open-box from OWC's website). It was basically the only product I could find that fit my desires - a dumb external dual drive enclosure with a hardware RAID controller. Everything else on the market is either fully dumb so you have do your RAID in software or use some weird intermediary dongle, or a full-fledged self-contained NAS computer from Synology. But the OWC box fit the bill, and featured eSATA alongside USB 3. Just what I needed to set up my home NAS.
Yesterday, on Black Friday, I ordered 2 WD Red Plus 10TB hard drives for $159.99 a piece. I intend to run them in RAID 1 on the OWC, since I am so poor that I probably won't have a cold backup solution set up by the time one of the drives dies. Buying the hard drives along is gonna be an interesting budgeting fiasco of splitting between credit card usage and withdrawing from my pitiful savings. But it'll be worth it!
So, the enclosure in Feburary, the drives in November. At this rate I'll have the NAS up and running by 2024! :')