You can do it. I use a powered USB hub and a raspberry pi, and 5 hard drives.
It is a mess of cables but was simple enough.
I also sprang for a UPS because most filesystem’s I tried like zfs and btrfs didn’t appreciate random brownouts from running 4 drives off the pi itself.
Right now they’re xfs and used for a minio install and torrent storage
States can get their hands on things for criminal investigations. Or they can get that data in the infectious disease database but usually that’s carefully anonymized into general steps of ten… But this… This is some messed up shit