I'd probably just buy a Synology station. Yes it's proprietary but the system itself is really good. I know a lot of people buy one just for its own photos system alone https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos
The problem with those is that they are insanely expensive for what you get. Here locally the DS423+ (4-bay one) is like $614 USD + shipping without any disks, and has a Intel Celeron J4125 and 2GB ram. They are unfortunately ridiculously overpriced
That's a good tip, thanks! I have a older i7-6700K machine around here somewhere, that could work. But no ECC ram, and no idea if it draws any less power in the end. Some setup with just two drives mirrored would likely work, but feels a bit risky having no parity drive
