I understand. If you buy a used server then add some drives later you can have a great NAS IMHO. I upgraded from an X8DT6-F with 384GB of RAM and a pair of Xeon X5690’s right before things went sideways. The MoBo has the SAS controller already flashed to IT mode so it’s ready for ZFS. But it’s not exactly light on power and with a 2U chassis and a handful of used 8TB SAS drives you are looking at around 1200.

My current server is a X10DRH-C with dual Xeon E5-2683 v3’s with 128GB of RAM in a 4U chassis with 11 X 8TB SAS drives in a RaidZ3 configuration. Just the MoBo, chassis, cpu’s and 64GB of ram is running about 1150. The drives used are 110 each and before you think you should just get those, SAS drives require a SAS controller and you only get those in enterprise equipment.

But if you can pick up a little here and a little there you can have a nice system. But right now isn’t a great time to get in the game.