I love watching the cost of storage drop. The last time I was buying a lot of disk for my home file server, in the spring of 2008, 750 GB drives were $110.00 on deep discount. The drives I purchased, along with a moderate white-box fileserver, cost me around $900 USD – or around $0.29/GB all told.

Now 2TB drives are under $100 USD each. I suspect prices will fall again soon, as Seagate has enough of their 3TB drives to cram them into all kinds of SOHO NAS devices. The most recent of these is a $1875.00 USD, 12TB, 4 bay array that serves as a drop in system for most moderate users. Configured as a RAID5 array (so there is protection from a drive failure), the price is about $0.20/GB.

Now, $1875 would go a long way towards building a home file server, running OpenSolaris or OpenFiler, or whatever you like. Some quick checking on NewEgg will build you a file server with an 80 GB boot drive, a main array with the same 9 useable terabytes of space (7 x 1.5 TB drives, one for parity), 16 GB of RAM, two gigabit NICs, the case to put everything in and a power supply able to run it. While it will take a much longer time to bring up a home-brew file server, you get a lot more bang for your buck. Want to run iSCSI? NFS? A LAMP stack? Firefly (MT-DAAPd)? It’s all there, ready for you to go to town on. Do you want to setup an archive system? Or perhaps a squid proxy? If you use ZFS, on top of all of this, you get a data integrity promise from the ability to scrub every block of data and verify that it is what you wrote months or years ago.

(To be fair, I would probably spring to spend slightly more to get redundant boot drives, and I would probably configure the array with two parity drives. This way, any two drives could fail before I had to worry about data loss, and would give me time to rebuild the failed array member. This still gives me 7.5 TB of useable space for around $0.24/GB.)