Planned NAS, hardware ideas and understanding pools.

[Cideway]

Hi there brains trust.

I am in the process of building out my HexOS NAS. 

My planned usage is for the NAS to function as a backup server for my wife and I's computers and phones, a backup for my photo collection as well as functioning as a personal cloud and media server (unsure what method to use).

I managed to score an old storage server from a friends work and I have been slowly preparing it for use. I have 1000/100 internet and am planning on upgrading my home network to 10GBe as part of the process.

In terms of hardware:

8 core Xeon E5-2600 (unsure which exact model)

Supermicro X9SRL-F motherboard

64Gb RAM

GTX 1070 GPU (old GPU from gaming setup)

a 10Gb NIC, (looking for recommendations)

4x SAS9211-8i cards (might be exhausting PCI-E lanes)

26x 6Tb HDD

6x 512Gb SATA SSD

Eventually I plan on updating the board and CPU to an old Epyc combo and look at adding an M.2 SSD to serve as the boot drive but that is a down the line plan.

My big concern with all this is that from the FAQ, it says that a pool should only contain 12 devices, so with my above hardware would I be looking at running 4 pools? And if so are the pools functionally separate?