The best solution in my opinion is to buy 5y old, used, server motherboards and CPUs (like AMD Epyc 3 right now). They are fairly cheap, it is durable products designed to work 24/7, and it comes with a huge number of PCIe lanes and extensibility. Same with enterprise SSDs for home usage, which is usually very little write. A used enterprise SSDs with a ton of endurance and very little writes is probably the best bang for your bucks. Wouldn't do that with hard drives though.

Power consumption is at a completely different level, though. The N100 gives you pretty good performance with very low power draw.

Ark says 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0?

For a NAS, I don't think I'd need more than 1-2 lanes for any single device. That sounds fine.

Yeah, I assume most home users these days are never pushing a NAS beyond 1Gbe, and 99% of people who have faster networks are still probably just doing 2.5Gbe (still just talking about home use). This wouldn’t make that PCIe bandwidth sweat.

Absolutely. This particular setup is meant more for your bog-standard home NAS.