I initially started with a Raspberry Pi to thinker with more software, and when I felt ready, I bought an F4-424 Max, with three 18 TB Toshiba Enterprise drives, two 1 TB SSDs for caching, and now I'm running in Docker around 20 different services that handle my video storage, photo management, Plex server, network ad blocking, among others.
I also upgraded the RAM to 32 GB because I wanted to have as much headroom as possible. It has been a solid device. One that disappears to my family (they’re not tech-savvy) and hasn't caused any problems, which is the most important thing to me. Nobody likes to be a technician for their hobby, haha.
I thought four bays would be more than enough, but now I'm a data hoarder, and I'm quickly realizing that it might not be enough if I continue at my current pace.












