I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don’t want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab’s scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
This is what I’m doing as well. The nice thing about it is that it supports different sized drives in the same mergerfs mount and with snapraid, you just need to make sure one of your biggest drives is the parity drive. I’ve got 10 drives right now with 78TB usable in the mergerfs mount and two 14TB drives acting as parity. I’ve been able to build it up over the years and add slowly.