Hi all. I'm hoping for some advice on setting up a NAS.

I set up a PC a few years ago for this purpose. It has a 12 bay case and a motherboard with eight or nine sata ports, plus a pci-e card with an extra couple. Everything else was bare minimum. I used a small external drive to run Ubuntu server. I didn't set it up with RAID, because I never had the money to buy a lot of drives at once. I would just buy a new drive every now and then, and retire a small one. The motherboard packed it in a while ago, and it's just been sitting there doing nothing, but I can now afford to work on it again.

So, I basically have a nice big case, a working PSU, and a range of different sized drives with data on them. My ex wants a couple of the drives, including what's on them, so I am planning on buying new drives and copying stuff over. There is probably around 24--30 TB of data in total.

My plan at this stage is to buy a few drives, a new motherboard, RAID controller/s, but I really don't know where to start at this stage.

Basically, I want a RAID setup that will optimise my $/capacity, and preferably I will stick with ubuntu server. Just hoping you guys can point me in the direction of what sort of hardware combination might suit my needs right now. Thank you.