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Is this something I could get into with 2TB disks? Say 12-15 2TB disks. I have a bunch that are too old to trust and are sitting on a shelf. Any idea how disk failures affect things?

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You need a temporary space of 312GiB to "plot" which is RAM intensive(~4GB min, more if you parallelize) and disk I/O bottlenecked(serious Chia farmers put their temp on an SSD), but finished plots are 101.4GiB each and are just files accessed occasionally, so you can fit a dozen or so on a 2TB. If the drive goes, so do the plots, but the cost is just the time to replot so you probably don't need a backup strategy.

Plotting tends to be a bottleneck - hours to finish one in my experience, though that is with using the storage drive for the temp space. But even with 26 plots(2.5 TiB) I have already earned 4 Chia in a few weeks.

Yes, you could do that. 24-30TB of plots would win a block roughly every day or so with the current netspace.

I'm using a bunch of used drives and not worried about disk failure because worst case scenario is replacing the drive and re-generating new plots.

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