[magixx]

I've looked into using SBCs for a DIY a lot, if you're fine with no hotswap and 4 disk then it's doable on the cheap. Since I wanted more than 4 drives and hotswap I gave up and ended up looking for a dedicated NAS. The issues with SBCs are usually the adapters you end up using have SATA controllers limited to 4 (or 6 for ASM1166) drives or use SATA port multiplers which reduces performance. For home uses, I don't think this matters that much tbh. Adding hotswap is costly due to backplanes and when you have more than 4 disks you run into annoying things like needing more power so you need a real PSU for your SBC. The best solution I though of for this was PicoPSU to keep the size down or FlexATX but the latter adds up in cost. After seeing the size and all these costs add up I just gave up.