Help me figure out the way to scale laterally?

I have a home lab I use for learning and to self host a couple of services for me and my extended family.

Nextcloud instance with about 1TB
Couple of websites
Couple of game servers

I’m running off an R430 with twin E5-2620 V3s 128GB and spinning rust storage.

When I deployed NC I did not think it thru, and I stored all the data locally, which causes the instance to be too big to backup normally.

As a solution, I’ve split the NC software into it’s own LXC and a NAS into another and I’m thinking about hosting a cheap NUC NAS to rsync the files.

I would also like to distribute the load of my server into separate nodes so I can get more familiar with HA and possibly hyper converged infrastructure.

I would also like to have wo nodes locally to be able to work on one without bringing down services.

Any advice / tips?

Should I skip the NAS and go straight into Ceph?

Would 3x NUCs with Intel i5 or i7ths and 32Gb Ram be enough?

Would I be better off with 3x pizza box servers like R220s or DL20s?

Storage wise I’m trying to decide between m2 to Sata adapter like this [](

) and a mixtures of SSDs and spinning rust. Or

Otherwise would I be better off with SFF?

Otherwise I was considering a single 24 bay disk array with an LSI card in IT mode, but I’m inexperienced with those and I’m not sure about power usage / noise. (the rack does sit next to my workstation)

And yes you can put an LSI card on a NUC surprisingly (This looks like a VERY fun project) https://github.com/NKkrisz/HomeLab/blob/main/markdown%2FLenovo_M720Q_Setup.md

Plus, most likely I would not expand the storage past 5 or 10 TB on each node.

Additionally; I’m looking at cost per watt (current server runs at 168w 90% of the time, looks like those tiny NUCs run about 25W or so and the SFF 50-75W depending on what they have. The shallow depth servers also idle at 25-50 depending on storage and processor options.

I also have a 12U rack at home and I would very much like to keep things racked and neat. It seems a lot easier to rack the NUCs than it would be to do with SFF cases.

Obviously I’m OK with buying new hardware (I’ll be selling the current one once I migrate) that’s part of the “learning” experience.

Any advice or experience you can share would be highly appreciated.

Thanks /c/selfhosted