Howdy r/DataHoarder!
I am still a little baby hoarder with only about 15-20TB of data floating around my noisy 10 year old desktop-turned-HTPC. I was looking to expand to ~30TB (with room to grow of course) for a couple of initiatives and initially had been set on a rack and rackmount server or NAS chassis with a bunch of 3.5" bays for price-efficient spinning drives.
The cost though! Racks = $$$ Rackmount Chassis or pre-builts = $$$$!
Every penny I would save in drive capacity I would pay back in getting a nice (home-office) rack and NAS.
So I've come to you questioning a pivot point: What do you think about smaller solutions? Specifically I am thinking about a Mini-PC running nnRAID connected to a JBOD enclosure for disks or large/cheap SSDs.
What's the performance difference between a setup like the above and a low-end rackmount setup (which is at the limit of what I could realistically afford)?
Any pitfalls I should be aware of?
Thanks in advance!