Getting many HDDs online?

[Zerophase]

I'm trying to figure out the most economical means of getting a large Chia farm online. The RockPi project is probably a bit out of my reach. My HDDs are also SATA. I don't trust SATA to USB cables, definitely not the cheap ones. I did notice there's a HAT for the Raspberry Pi that would let me get about 4 drives online at once. But, then I'd have a ton of Pis everywhere cluttering up my apartment. Might also be a tad expensive. But, this definitely is potential solution. There might be a way to get a pi supporting more drives too. I think it would still have reliability problems, though.

Buying a bunch of used servers seems costly too. You're also paying for hardware I'm sure that is not needed. Some of the server cases would definitely be excellent for storing the drives. What other options are available? Do I need to worry at all about drive performance, or is just getting them seen by the network enough?