Not your scenario really but a HBA will allow you to use SATA and SAS drives. Gives a bit more flexibility on price, especially with 2nd hand SAS drives.
My drives are currently in a box supplied by wires hanging out of the PC (Server!) casing but it would look much neater with a 4 bay hot swap cage built for the purpose.
I just wish I could get the full 12 Gb/s out of the couple of SAS drives I use :o(
Oh yes!
You may be out of luck, but doesn’t that board have onboard VGA graphics which you can use?
OMV is a web page dashboard and there’s SSH. What is the usecase for a GPU I wondered?
It needs to be controlled to make a profit. Once something you love becomes popular the bulldozers will move in.
Home network. The most fun was setting it up and finding out about ZFS, ymmv.
No multiusers, so I use a simple vpn to connect to my services from outside.
Apps use NAS ip address:Port and are easily viewed in a browser once installed.
I don’t need much else so I install services as they catch my interest. Tried Tailscale, now looking at NetBird which might be the way forward as they now have a reverse proxy for testing.
Anything else is a bit too complicated for me to maintain.
Thinkpad T420, i5-2520M, 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1TB SATA SSD, 1 x mSATA and a mmc card. Some usb storage plugged in for good measure.
It was bought 2nd hand for children to use, then workshop laptop, eventually retired as occasional NAS space running OMV 8 (Debian Trixie).
I expect it to just work forever.
Hardware - Start small and cheap. If you have it already use it. build it out as you need and understand it.
Software (OS) - Debian based perhaps. Docker probarbly.
Utilities - What would you like to do today? pick one, Pihole is useful.
Once you get something working for yourself, you’ll start to build on that knowledge.
Above all be brave and be curious.