For DIY, just about any setup would work fine as long as you put it in a case with lots of bays. Throw 2 or 3 of these in there* and you now have however many ports are on the motherboard (probably 2 or 4) plus 8-12 more ports available via the cards.
*I’m not recommending that specific card, just something that gives you SATA ports on a PCI-E card. Just pay attention to bandwidth bottlenecks on the cards. Here is a table of PCI-E speeds.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Not the person you responded to, but personally I just went Truenas scale on baremetal and it worked really well. Currently they also work with docker so setting up additional apps is really easy as well.