I am building my first custom homelab. Before I had s full size server and that was not flexible enough, and today I just run a synology.

I have now a new rack that is 12U, but slim so I think about 45 cm deep, and found a vendor on alibaba who sell 3u 12 hot swappable sas drives (6gb, not 12, but for homelab I think 6 is enough) and under compartment that fits a regular ATX mobo and PSU.

Does anyone got some suggestions for the following

1. A cheaper mobo with at least two NVME, and some pcie slots, that is stable and support 12/13th gen cpu
2. Minimum 64GB ram slots
3. A SAS card that can power 3x SFF-8643 6gbps backplanes
4. A 10G SFP network card
5. Any other cards that is suggested adding?

I will be running unraid on this one as I already own a 12 drive unraid license that I never used, and it always been working well. Plus the RC version is now supporting ZFS that is great. I looked at realnas, but I did not like the K8 forced to it, since I will not be clustering.

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I also have been looking at some 24 port 2.5G switches with 4 10G SFP, that I get at a reasonable pricepoint, but got a Unifi Enterprise 24 port (12x 2.5G POE, 12X 1G, 2x 10G SFP).

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Any advice?