Hardware Advice for a Newbie

[Elarem]

Oof.  Including hard drives in that budget is tough since they're so expensive now.  Do you have any left over hardware we can re-use?  A case?  Power supply?  Memory?

For your needs, we don't need a lot of compute power.  But if you want to do a locally attached RAID array that limits the form factors we can do.

I guess I've been second guessing the RAID aspect lately as you're right, hard drives are pricey these days. Is it too risky to go without the whole array thing and just invest the money into better GPU/Mem/Storage? Form factor is definitely an important aspect to me