I used to have a rack mounted server that I used for Jellyfin and as a NAS so it was easy to install a SAS card, but it was sucking up way too much power and costing me about $50/month to run, so I got rid of it, and replaced it with one of those tiny gaming PCs you can get on Amazon.
I've gotten it to work over thunderbolt with an eGPU case on both the mini computer and my laptop, so it can be done, at least with NixOS.
I still have the tapes, and I use them to archive really important stuff, but honestly what I mostly do now is have a pretty resilient ZFS RAID, which is 24 16TB drives, three RAID-Z2's chained together, so I can lose up to six drives (two from each RAID) before I risk losing data. I run a scrub once a month, so if a drive dies, hopefully I can catch it before I lose anything.
I've gotten it to work over thunderbolt with an eGPU case on both the mini computer and my laptop, so it can be done, at least with NixOS.
I still have the tapes, and I use them to archive really important stuff, but honestly what I mostly do now is have a pretty resilient ZFS RAID, which is 24 16TB drives, three RAID-Z2's chained together, so I can lose up to six drives (two from each RAID) before I risk losing data. I run a scrub once a month, so if a drive dies, hopefully I can catch it before I lose anything.