A solution? A set of OSS components and off-the-shelf available tools:
- Any MB with at least one or two 10 Gbit/s ethernet ports (the most expensive part) and at least 8-10 SATA slots (PCIE risers can add 2-4 more ports per riser). There are several older mATX SuperMicro boards and a lot of newer overpriced "gaming" boards in this segment
- The cheapest 10 Gbit/s switch or some used "large" switch if you know where / how to buy one
- Any off-the-shelf Fractal Design computer case with 8-10 HDD bays (do not forget 2 "free" 5 inch bays that can be used for 3.5' drives!) or similar (Fractal Design are a bit expensive, but build quality is awesome)
- Any suitable RAM / CPU (for SuperMicro you will have to buy Xeon and ECC RAM)
- Linux as OS (any flavour you like),
mdadm for RAID arrays, samba for local sharing- Just mount your drives locally via
fstab (just an example)://192.168.2.5/share /mnt/share/ cifs username=YOUR_USER,password=YOUR_PASS,iocharset=utf8,uid=YOUR_UID,gid=YOUR_GID,dir_mode=0775,file_mode=0775
- Use any other OSS Linux software, change it as you wish, use any drives you want!
- You can have
mdadm, zfs, luks, lvm - whatever you want in any combination;If you just count the bare minimum cost w/o drives, probably you can get away with US$600-700 per 8 - 16 drives
#hardware