If you get a NAS with 10G (it’s such a nice upgrade, I made the jump last year), there’s no reason a nice NUC can’t do the job. I went that route after previously running significantly overpowered server hardware ten years ago. We have an embarrassment of riches with modern hardware.

Re DAS: no you can’t connect multiple systems to it. iSCSI and NFS on a SAN or NAS support multiple connections but the OS or app needs to support it.

You should limit your connections to one machine per volume when using iSCSI or nfs. Smb would probably the best for multiple connections.

How much storage are you actually using? You could just split it between the r230s and set up zfs replication in proxmox.

DAS is 1:1, It's more or less like just connecting en external hard drive to your computer.

SAN can do some crazier stuff. You can take arrays and attach them to LUN's and to sign luns to separate computers. You have fiber optic routing and virtual networks, sometimes iSCSI. But that stuff is extremely expensive and power hungry and did I mention extremely expensive

NAS is basically just a computer with disks attached to it sharing the data through one of her protocols you need.

For home gaming, even sharing with a extended family, truenas, unraid, or just a computer with ZFS is ideal.

ZFS is the elite but slightly harder way to do it. Your volumes all need to be the same size even if your disks are different sizes. There's regular maintenance that needs to be applied, But it's very fast and very flexible and very easy to expand.

Unraid is very slow but very flexible, the discs aren't in a raid they're in a JBOD, so really really slow, But if you lose one disc all you've lost is the data on that disk, and you can run up to two parity discs. As long as your parity drives are larger than your largest data drive.

Truenas is more of an unraid type situation but with a ZFS. Both unraid and truenas support virtualization and/or containers for running applications and give you nice metrics and meters and stuff.

You can hand roll with Debian, ZFS, docker and proxmox.

I think DAS is pretty much dead. If you have a ton of ephemeral data, and you need to do high speed work on it It's a reasonable solution. But I think for the most part eight terabyte nvme has made it pretty niche.

Where does the coffee come out?

Not your question sorry, but since your hosting next cloud what's your experience with it, because I find mine pretty slow and not really smooth

about 5TB of the 7 I have available are in use. I was planning on expanding to 12 to allow for growth.

I could just upgrade to bigger drives (1 TBs currently) but it feels cheaper to go with DAS