Don’t buy books/video/music on physical media unless it’s hard/impossible to get a digital version. But also don’t rely on IP subscription services either. The Cloud is great as part of a backup strategy: but not as an exclusive service that could gate your access to your content.

Digital storage is great because it can hold anything: books, shows, games, whatever. And it can be easily copied, and sent around the world. Have some space you own: redundant and automatically backed-up to a Cloud service… then enjoy it for years. It will feed your ebook readers and media players and homelab devices for a long time, and take up almost no space.

One big one. You can buy a second big one later :)

It will work as you describe with no issues: vibration won’t be a problem. Use large/slow case fans (and even for the CPU consider a 92mm model if 120mm won’t fit) and it should serve you well for years. Good luck!

There’s not a lot of demand for hardware RAID for only four drives. Hardware RAID in general is becoming less popular, and since many people can just stuff four more drives into an existing case… stuff like USB enclosures are often seen as "good enough’ (though options do exist)

With options like ZFS being super popular in the enterprise (and homelab), what are your concerns with software RAID? I find it offers more flexible recovery options, more config options in general, works with SSDs better, and is faster.

A modern multicore x64 with half that RAM would run any workload that cluster could do… faster (carved into a handful of containers or VMs if you needed isolation).

It’s a cool project, for fun! It would be a horrible way to do any useful work though. Just the thought of wiring it all up makes me shudder…

You chose the least reliable way to combine drives, with the cheapest components you could purchase, routed through the slowest interface for SSDs. So I wouldn’t be worrying about micro-optimizations.

You’ve got automated 321 backups right? ;)

For $300 start with a mirror of 14TBs, and expand to RAID5/Z/6/Z2 when you can afford to.

Computers are so fast these days you can have entire VMs in the background and not even notice them. Since Win10/11 come with HyperV and WSL you don’t need to buy any separate hardware to start playing with homelba/Linux stuff.

I’m following this thread more to hear what people would do with unlimited-money setups. Even with limited funds… modern systems are extremely capable: to the point there’s nothing I want to do in a homelab that I can’t already do.

Look at the new E18 pSLC drives on DigitalSpaceport. They’re being bought up by the Chia and ZFS crowds because of high sustained writes and write endurance. They come in 320GB and 640GB versions (essentially 1TB and 2TB models, with pSLC firmware).

From what I understand the first batch is almost bought out, but eventually they have enough of them to be selling through Amazon as well.

But if this is a boot drive… you don’t need anything special. You’re going to use like 1-2% of its rated TBW per year: so any warranty would time out well before you hit endurance limits. Buy a midrange consumer 2-4TB NVMe on Black Friday and be done with it.

All your options are within ±$150 of each other: so I’d grab the largest-usable config. If it also happens to be the lowest $/TB… that’s gravy. Pay those few extra dollars now and it may let the new setup run a couple extra years before it doesn’t meet your needs anymore.

I don’t stress over brand/model: parity configs take care of availability, and automated 321 backups take care of recoverability. Disks are consumables: any one of them could fail tomorrow: but you data should be immortal :)

If I’m buying new I’ll look at $/TB/years-of-warranty, but for refurbs you’re lucky to get a couple months so that doesn’t really sway my decision.

Enjoy all your new space!