Depends a lot on budget, space, and electricity costs. Going to 'overkill' level once can save a lot of these issues down the line.

Mine started similarly, some small box with a couple drives that got up sized and then moved to another to add more...

Eventually I bought a used 2U box with 14 bays and set it up with a ZFS pool all made up of mirrored disk pairs and auto snapshots so it can have a drive fail without issue and go back 2 weeks if something gets oops deleted.

Downside, now the whole lab uses about 700 watts continually so the power bill is kinda nuts.