Something small and 2 or 4 GB RAM. Raspberry pi’s compute power is good enough for me, I’m not doing anything too intensive.
Is raspberry pi 4 still the best answer?
I am a tinkerer and don’t mind tinkering. I typically use Gentoo Linux as main OS. I also don’t mind ARM or other architectures. I’ve been eyeing the RockPro64 as well.
Pi’s have kinda garbage IO. You’re limited to USB only which is a shared bus (so if you’re saturating one hard drive, the other drives won’t be able to do shit and I dislike it) you’re also required to boot from SD card on a Pi, and OS level writes tend to kill SD cards frequently.
The Orange Pi 5 that I have technically has a PCIe NVME M.2 slot that runs at PCIe 2.0x2 iirc. I’ve not done it with mine yet, so I can’t guarantee compatibility, but that can theoretically be split using a m.2 to SATA controller adapter like that
But at that point and cost the Rockpro64 look like a legitimate option, since PCIe to SATA adapters using a 4x slot exist all over the damn place.
Honest opinion though: look for used office PC sales or government/school district clearing sales. I’ve gotten a stack of older 2nd/3rd gen intel Core machines at $50 a pop that are plenty fast for light home server use and have full fat motherboards for connecting up a bunch of SATA devices. They’re a little more power hungry- expect 50W or more at idle when you have drives spinning - but they simplify setup a lot, they package nicely since you can put the drives inside, and the power supply is built in.