With a+ cert and net+ cert, I have taken 10 years and continuously studied related fields to get to a reasonable pay. I should have done CCNA a long time ago, but never could motivate myself.

The last board suggested with 5 ports would handle 4 drives in raidz2.

This is smaller even. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/hRBrxr/asrock-motherboard-970mpro3

I would prefer having the smaller board with the hba and putting 8-10 smaller drives in raidz3. That would give you 6 TB with three drives for failure to prevent loss.

Outside the drives, the cost would be under $200 for the board and the hba.

If you have an old system with two PCI-e 16 ports, then your cost is about $90 before you start buying drives.

I’m doing similar with a DDR3 system and spinning 1 TB disks. It’s fast enough to serve video streams.

Ok, so if you want to do a bunch of drives in a box:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/FhPzK8/gigabyte-mw50-sv0-atx-lga2011-3-motherboard-mw50-sv0

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/yFWJ7P/crucial-bx500-4-tb-25-solid-state-drive-ct4000bx500ssd1

However, that’s expensive. I would go with spinning disks.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/9wVmP6/western-digital-wd-blue-4-tb-35-5400rpm-internal-hard-drive-wd40ezaz

If you want to bring the cost down more,

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/4bqPxr/asus-prime-b550-plus-ac-hes-atx-am4-motherboard-prime-b550-plus-ac-hes

https://ebay.us/m/kmgfao

You can drive the price down more by buying a used system.

The pile of SSDs will be easiest to stuff into a box.

You will need to get creative with cooling.

I’m guessing all the old games were most likely less than 50mb, if you include everything up to SNES, guess if you make AI upscaled images you can bloat that space.

I second reviewing your XMP settings. I have seen instability with more aggressive profiles.

You can try running any built in diagnostics or you could use memtest86+. It appears to work on UEFI systems.

https://www.memtest.org/

This sounds like a hardware issue. If you are lucky, it is a keyboard, mouse, or something. Doesn’t sound like memory because you would possibly have memory errors or kernel panics.