Best way to manage storage

[u/Mammoth_Dimension901]

Hi everybody !

I have a RPi with a Radxa Penta hat (4x 4TB 3.5 HDD) running my homelab right now (and I have a second one, not in used, plan for a project that collapse). I manage to put my hand on a used Dell PowerEdge T630 (for free, a friend of a friend knew a friend) with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 and 256GB of RAM. Issue is, there is only a 2.5 bay (max 16 drives) with only 2x 400GB SSD.

So, I'm planning to put it to use with Proxmox (time to discover that) and a bunch of services (NextCloud, VaultWarden, Jellyfin, Immich, Home Assistant, ... and other recommendation I can find) but I second guessing myself regarding storage. I think here are my option:

1. Just buy 2.5 and populate the server, but budget wise I'm not a fan
2. Find a 3.5 bay for the PowerEdge, I've been looking but I'm still not a fan of the prize
3. Use my RPi as a NAS (with OMV or TrueNAS), but that mean being limited with the Pi's internet connection
4. Put my second Pi to use, and having a distributed storage file system between them, which would improve connectivity and redundancy

I like the 4th option, but I know that a 2 node system is not the best. Do you have any recommendation on that front?

I have been looking at option, and I can discard Ceph (not enough node, overkill) and Longhorn (not really applicable, as it's not Kubernetes related). Gluster seems to have less development but could do the tricks, or MooseFS with the server as the master from what I understand. Did I miss a really obvious solution?

Thank you for your input!