Hello Friendos

I'm a security / cloud engineer and I've had this lab for about 6 months now. In the last few weeks I've decided to start using it to self host some "production" services for me and my loved ones (extended family of 15) Mainly a next cloud instance that serves as our "picture vault"

The hardware is a poweredge R430 with twin ES-2620's and 128 GBs. It has 8x1TB 2.5

HDDs

This thing ended up being really overpowered for what I use it and I feel like by now I have explored everything I wanted to in this hardware. I was thinking about laterally scaling to R230s so I could play with load balancing and HA.

However these servers only have 2-4 drive bays, and I have no experience with DAS.

Can you guys help with some links? I'm researching DAS enclosures. I understand that any server with a PCI slot can take a SAS card, and any SAS enclosure is compatible.

Can you guys foresee any issue with a server as small as an R230 connecting to a SAS DAS?

I see that DAS enclosures have multiple connections per module, would I be able to connect multiple servers to the same module? or is it one server per connection and it can't be shared?

If I have to share the connection, I would have to host a NAS (I probably should anyways) and will have to upgrade my switch from gigabit to 10G

Would also appreciate some other recommendations for small form factor servers that can be bought for cheap. (18 inches or shorter)

Pic of current setup for attention ... don't judge my PC case :) 3U chassis for it is on the mail.