This is the answer that worked for us storing petabytes a decade ago.
We collaborated with OEMs and also shared/compared notes with Backblaze on rackable mass storage for commodity drives.
Backblaze published a series of iterations of designs of multi-drive chassis, and one of the OEMs would make them for other buyers as well. If you’re doing this route, read through those for considerations and lessons learned.
Performance was > 10x better than enterprise solutions. A policy to “leave dead disks dead” aka “let them rot” as said elsewhere in this thread kept maintenance cheap.
The secret sauce part making this viable for commercial online storage hosting (we hosted video) was we used disks as JBOD with an in-house meta index with P2P health awareness to place objects redundantly across disks, chassis, racks, colocation providers, and regions.
We collaborated with OEMs and also shared/compared notes with Backblaze on rackable mass storage for commodity drives.
Backblaze published a series of iterations of designs of multi-drive chassis, and one of the OEMs would make them for other buyers as well. If you’re doing this route, read through those for considerations and lessons learned.
Performance was > 10x better than enterprise solutions. A policy to “leave dead disks dead” aka “let them rot” as said elsewhere in this thread kept maintenance cheap.
The secret sauce part making this viable for commercial online storage hosting (we hosted video) was we used disks as JBOD with an in-house meta index with P2P health awareness to place objects redundantly across disks, chassis, racks, colocation providers, and regions.