I've set the allowed screentime of the boost app to 0 this week that way I don't open reddit accidentally.

The server is mainly used for Jellyfin, Nextcloud and as a general purpose family server, it also lives in my parents utility room so noise is an issue as I don't want to annoy them but it's not like I'm putting a jet engine in their living room.

It was running without a GPU at fist but then I realized I had that (pretty old) GPU laying around. I could switch the GPU into the lower pcie x4 slot and give the HBA the top pcie x16 slot so it has the full bandwith.

Thank you for your recommendation! Following up on this I have a couple questions:

• Why would I need a HBA in this scenario? A SATA expansion card, that goes into my pcie x16 slot would do too right?
• Upgrading the PSU would be necessary! Both for the number of SATA connectors available and the total power output. Do you have a specific PSU in mind that you can recommend?

If you need more drives than that eventually, you are going to need to upgrade to a motherboard that supports your needs. At that point would it be worth looking into a rack mount for more than the 18 drives the fractal case can handle.

While I like your plan and think it'd give me enough room to grow for the foreseeable future I'd love to skip this step and go directly to rack mounted hardware that supports connecting drives in to a backplane that delivers power and data connectivity for the entire shelf and running a single cable to my host system. The main downside here for me is the noise. I came across many of these "JBOD enclosures" from Icy Box which sound great in theory but only connect through USB3 or eSATA back to the host system, which I don't know if that's enough connectivity for that many drives.