So awhile ago I got a computer with a motherboard with 6 sata ports and that was doing good but only 6 ports limits me. I love buying used hard drives so is there a cheaper way to use all these hard drives, like a multi bay enclosure or maybe a server???
Replace your low capacity drives with higher capacity drives.
Idk, maybe more computers? USB hub and sata thingies? the professional solution is a SAS card and SAS expander, which will set you back a fair bit
if you have the space, noise would be ok and cheap power: used dell server like R720 or R730 and install TrueNas
The absolute cheapest way to get storage. For the barest bones, ugliest setup, I’ve seen people have two PC power supplies on their desk, a motherboard, a few SATA cards, and a number of drives plugged into the SATA cards, and using Linux + ZFS + Samba for the heavy lifting. Alternatively, a “NAS PC case” with a decent motherboard and such should work.
If I were building the cheapest way to have a lot of storage, but have a warranty, I’d go for a higher end QNAP NAS that supports QuTS Hero, even QES. I would then load TrueNAS SCALE on the QNAP hardware, use ZFS from there on out. This ensures a lower attack surface, and ZFS without any added stuff. The QNAP hardware isn’t cheap, but it is fairly reliable.
Used HBA flashed to IT mode with a couple of breakout cables would get you 8 more sata connections. Only thing you have to watch out for is knockoffs on eBay.
I do mini PCs and USB hard drives. More frequently accessed stuff and smaller files (think music, pictures, documents, backup repositories) resides in about 6TB of SSD storage. The only way you could go cheaper is probably raspberry pis or something but they’re not nearly as good in terms of compute for the money.
You could also get a PCIe SATA expansion card for more internal storage if your case has space.