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You might be surprised how cheap used SOHO NAS equipment is. I picked up a Qnap TS-869 a few years back for £300.
Like @Velocio I back up to external drives (shucked western digital 14tb white drives, £190 each on Amazon). I store my backups in a fire safe with another copy offsite. No cloud backup for me, it’s not economical.
FWIW I have different raid arrays for different use cases. My best drives (WD reds) store important data in Raid 10, but these sleep when not in use. For pseudo-cache activities like seeding, I use second hand WD greens (or whatever i can get my hands on) for around £30 a pop, in Raid 1 arrays or JBOD. If one or all the drives fail I don’t really care.
Edit. There’s a lot more to maintaining a stable, efficient Raid array than just a simple data striping tool. For example the single biggest killer of drives is operating temperature, so you do need good cooling, intelligent S.M.A.R.T monitoring, regular scheduled maintenance, etc. You won’t necessarily get that with a PC and a bunch of disks. NAS manufacturers have figured a lot of the problems out for you so the investment might be worthwhile in order to avoid a bad experience. Also SSDs are a very expensive (and often unnecessary) way to cache, they will fail a lot faster and only across a fast, cabled network are you likely to see a major benefit before they do. I’d try to save them for DAS use so that they’re only on when in use. I just pulled out a pair of 1TB SSDs from my NAS whilst I was experimenting whether I’d see any benefit.
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freddo
Not enough for a Synology! I've got some PC bits and pieces around the house so will build one.
Might just convert the current server to Unraid from Windows Server as I'll still have room to fit a Parity drive and reuse the SSD for a cache.