Planning my first(ish) homelab. What is the best way to purchase storage with a budget of ~$200? My thinking was buy a single drive in the 12-16TB range and expand to a 4 drive mirror+stripe on ZFS. Is there any viable way to buy 4 drives for $200 (with a capacity of at least 2TB), just to avoid the headache of “rebalancing” a ZFS pool*? I’m not really too concerned about data loss, it would just remain as a single drive for about 4 months (and my data isn’t critical, just backups and media; the only loss would be time).

*rebalancing isn’t technically possible in ZFS, so you have to write a script to do so, is my understanding.

I also have another post here that didn’t get any responses, so if you have bigger picture feedback, that would be so appreciated.