No worries. I got a beelink S12, non-pro model with 8G RAM and 256G SSD. It was on sale for about $150 USD. Fit my use case, but maybe not yours, although you might be surprised. Perhaps those extra plex share users won’t be concurrently transcoding?
The drives are all USB, the portable type that requires no power source. Like you, I don’t need much. I have ~12T across 3, with a small hub that could provide more ports in a pinch. This model I believe also provides a SATA slot for a 2.5” drive, but I haven’t used it. All of these drives were previously connected to a rpi 3B+, haha!
The drive shares are done via samba and also syncthing. I have no need for a unified share via mergerfs, but I did take a look at this site for some ideas. I’m the type that rolls all their own services rather than using an NAS based distro. Everything is in an ansible playbook that pushes out my configs and containers.
Edit: I should make it clear the NAS is for other systems to access the drives. Drives are directly connected via USB. All my services are contained in this single host (media/backup/microservices/etc). My Pi’s are now clustered for a k3s lab for non critical exploration.
I’m a bit of a minimalist who designs for my current use with a little room to grow. I don’t find much value in “future proofing” as I’ve never had much success in accomplishing that.
Happy to help. As I have it configured, my local network is set to prefer direct play, so any transcoding gets done from connections that traverse the boundary of my network. If you don’t live with your parents this would likely apply.
Transcoding may also occur when you have subtitled content and I believe for certain audio formats, but the transcoding would be limited to the audio track.