![](/static/66c60d9f/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8286e071-7449-4413-a084-1eb5242e2cf4.png)
I would recommend:
- go on eBay and find some sort of cheap Lenovo/dell/hp thin client for your secondary node. You can find workable 1L-class boxes for around $100. You can get away with some of the older m700/710/900/910 tiny models, but the extensibility of the m720/920 tiny models is going to be much better.
- for your primary, I think you’d probably be best off finding an old server tower with 8 3.5” bays - if you’re lucky and on-the-ball, you may be able to snipe something like this, but shipping is of course going to be a bitch. An alternative is to pick up another one of those thin clients (making sure it’s a model with USB3, but preferably 3.1 or 3.2 whatever the gen is (side note: fuck anyone involved with the USB versioning scheme, because it’s absolutely indecipherable) that can actually support meaningful data transfer, and then just find a cheap DAS and connect it to that node.
They support NVMe and have a PCIE riser; if you get the little adapter from Lenovo’s proprietary slot to standard PCIE, you can run it as a nic, or get an HBA with external SFF-8008 ports and then find a cheap enclosure to use as a custom DAS solution.