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I run a 36 bay supermicro server I got for $900 on ebay which could easily host all this. I buy used 6tb sas drives off ebay for $26 a piece. They'd be even cheaper in bulk. That's $4.33 a tb, or about $520 total. You'll want to add a handful of drives for redundancy (we are talking used drives here) but either way it's entirely possible to host this entire thing including hardware for under 1500. Well within reason for someone passionate about it.

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I've been speccing a home storage server in the 50-100tb range and was considering this, but annual electricity costs made it infeasible. How much power does a machine like this consume?

My calculation off a Dell 2U was something like 195W idle - ~900 kWH / year. I'm in California so paying 50 cents per kWH, that would be ~$450 per year -- decided to scale back to a low power tower with huge disks. More upfront, but less annually. More disk drives (6tb vs 18tb) increased that to the point where I figured it was better to have fewer larger disks, even if they are pricier, because of the cost to run them.

> I'm in California

You have identified the problem.

I haven't checked exactly how much juice the server is pulling now. It was somewhere in 120-150w range with low utilization when I first got it, but I have considerably more disks and VMs now so probably around 200 to 250ish.

I did some rough estimates to see if the big disks were more cost effective than the 6tb ones and came to the conclusion small disks were worth it for me. The long term cost was pretty close though in the midwest where electricity is like 15 cents per kWh, giant disks would definitely be the better choice in CA.

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