Dirt cheap.

Cost = maintenance + servers

Engineers always underestimate the cost of their time.

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