Thank you for the comment. I can definitely resonate with running out of space much faster than you anticipate. Part of my plan though is to start integrating much larger drives than the 6 and 8 TB drives I've currently got. All of the potential NAS boxes I am looking at can well over 50 TB total capacity and since it took me ~5 years to fill 10 TB I think leveraging larger drives will probably be fine with a smaller bay device. I do think I am going to do some additional research on potentially going for a rack solution. Seems like a big jump but I do agree with your premise. Doesn't hurt to check so thank you for that.
As for price, yeah it would be cheaper to build my own but I'm honestly just not in the mood for that at this juncture in my home lab development cycle. I imagine the upgrade following the one I am currently mapping out will be DIY, Im just not there yet. As for the ZimaCube, when you compare the other 6 bay machines from the other popular providers the cube is actually cheaper and better spec'd with 2 additional on board NVME slots and PCIe expansion slots. The more I have researched it the last couple days though I can't find confirmation that they have fixed the issue with Ironwolf drives, so I may end up having to choose something else anyway unfortunately.
A few other people have mentioned Unraid as well so I am doing some additional research into the company. With the ever growing trend of enshitification in tech, which is a primary motivator for me doing this move anyway, I don't know Unraid is the solution for me. You are definitely right about them being the ideal solution for mirroring SRH capability as far as drives go, and I have no problem paying for good software, so I may end up going for Unraid after I test out some of the other options. Thanks for the vote of confidence on it. Based on what I've seen from Zima OS so far, all I know is that isn't the OS I will be using, lol.
Thanks again for you input. Greatly appreciated.
Gotcha, thanks! In doing some more research, it looks like you could potential make mirrored vdevs of your smaller disks and then another for your larger drives and add them to the same pool. That may be a workaround to still be able to use ZFS, but I hadn't heard of SnapRAID so I will definitely check that out, thanks!
You make a good point about just sucking it up and getting all new drives at a much larger capacity though. I am definitely starting to think about that option more closely. Its just obviously expensive as hell when you are also getting a new, much better spec'd, NAS box, haha. Serverpartdeals does have pretty good prices though all things considered so maybe I will bite the bullet and just got for it. Not sure what I'll end up doing with 4 other perfectly good drives that total 24 TBs though! haha. Although I sure I will find something to do with them, haha. Thanks again for the input and insight. Very much appreciated.