Moving external disks to a DAS?

[alb123]

So I live in the third world and salaries over here, even for college educated individuals are not very high. I make in the ballpark of 1500 US dollars a month holding a master's degree. What's worse is that we have an import tax for any technology that we bring over that exceeds 200 dollars, which is 18% of the total cost of the item on top, plus additional expenditures for fuel and others usually adds 100 dollars more to the 18% tax, but it varies.

The idea is to motivate us to buy locally and stimulate the country's own economy, but unfortunately these kind of workstations and homelabs are rarely available and if they are, they cost comparatively to a car's down payment or worse. Either way is essentially out of reach for me.

That said, I don't particularly need that much juice anyway; been self hosting for the better part of 20 years and the only services I've accumulated on all that time are my media server, website, dns server, nextcloud, rss sync service and a metasearch engine. I'm hosting all of that on a mini pc which handles it all without any issue, with the exception of my media server, which uses an old gaming pc with an arc GPU.

My usage of external disks comes from the fact that you really can't find any for sale in my country; when I go to the store, I only find 1-2 tb internal disks, and maybe if I'm lucky, a 4tb external one. And usually the last one is overpriced at nearly 200 dollars. External disks on amazon are usually under 200 and pay no taxes as opposed to internal ones, which do even under 200, as a rule exception unfortunately.

Anyway, recently I've been delving into selling pc parts and getting certain tax exemptions through commercial licenses and this allowed me to batch order internal drives of which I can retain some for personal use. So 4x for my DAS amount to 56tb, which is more than enough for me. I'm already struggling to fill out 38tb, so I think 56 will be sufficient for my use case even if I indulge myself into adding all kinds of super sentai and tokusatsu shows to my collection, which would probably grow it a couple TBs.

Wow.  I've needed a liver transplant some years back and now one of my kidneys is being a total wimp, so he might be on the way out soon.  My health is in shambles.  Got a non-cancerous brain tumor up in me noggin' just to provide the enjoyment of chronic migraines & headaches...A real model of health.  LOL  So, I'm considered "disabled" now.  

Once again, I'm in a similar position as you are - running many services on one tiny box.  In your case, the Mini-PC.  In mine, an old Dell Desktop i3 w/6 GB RAM & embedded Intel video, repurposed to be my Torrent machine, Radarr/Sonarr/Readarr/Calibre Server/YAC Library Server/Jellyfin.  It's really amazing how well such a wimpy box handles things - until Jellyfin gets busy with multiple users and qBittorrent is hard at work.

I'd like to have as big server so I can try running more self-hosting stuff and get some real home automation going on.  We have a Rachio 3, smart thermostat, smart lights and a couple of junk cameras that I plan on replacing with some Unifi cameras (I think...I have all Unifi networking gear at the moment).  I don't want to move into something that is plenty.  I want overkill, in a way, so I have plenty of time to grow into the new machine as I come up with new ideas for having a homelab.  I have so much reading to do, to be honest.  I don't know what is the best play for me right now - and by right now, I mean, even over the next year.  I'm in no immediate rush.