External Array Recommendations

[Fussell]

I recently started building out my HomeLab and began with a Minisforum MS-01 system with the intention of mostly using for compute but was hoping to leverage for storage as well. I have several internal NVME's I will be using as mirrored storage for virtual machines and containers/applications. The machine has dual USB4 40Gbps ports, dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and dual 10Gbps SFP+ ports, there's also a PCIe expansion slot that can take a low profile HBA if needed. Unfortunately in my haste to acquire this I did not fully research the limitations of ZFS and USB until after the fact. 

So I find myself here now, hoping someone might have some recommendations of an external enclosure and low profile controller card that could work for me. My searches online are usually recommending older/outdated equipment off of eBay or the products are just not available. I would ideally like to find an external enclosure that was supported over eSATA or SAS with capacity for 5-8 drives, but I also realize my options are limited and will gladly work with whatever I can find.

Alternatively is there a scenario where I could use an external Thunderbolt/USB4 drive enclosure and leverage all the disks without ZFS at the cost of some performance?

Thanks in advance for any comments, feedback, or suggestions.