That's what I did last time. It was great until it stopped working abruptly and painfully. Then I was left to fuck around on my own.

Don't get me wrong - I was inches away from a DL380 a few years back. I'm not opposed to the idea, I'm just not sure what I benefit from going that way here. But work it out with me, though.

So the box in question is probably this one, yes? That's $339 raw, 4 drives. Whatever I want on it, I put on it and make it happy.

For another $10, I get this, which has hot-swappable cradles, the possibility for redundant PS, and a design ethic revolving around "people who don't want to deal with configuring a NAS." It actually works out cheaper - because WD wants you to buy drives, a fully loaded 16TB EX4 comes in at a "raw chassis" cost of $280.

Or, I bite the bullet and spend another $400. The equivalent of two Proliant microservers. But what I get with my hard-earned change is this - now we're 5 bays, not 4 (which, if you're going to do RAID5, is your multiplier of choice). I've got dual power supplies. I've got dual fans. I've got four aggregatable ports. I've got expansion chassis that will push this bitch out to 15 drives if I feel like it. I have the ability to cache on an SSD. I've got RAM I can upgrade. And I've got a web configuration that, while kinda scary, doesn't scare me like "FreeBSD" and "ZFS."

Again, I built one of those in 2003. It lasted three years and then failed dramatically, leaving me shit out of luck. Due to life events, cash flow and cantankerousness it took me nine months to get my data back. Color me stung.

I would appreciate your opinion on this. From my perspective, it's worth the $400 hit to have the expandability, to have the support of a non open-source organization behind me, to have a single-point vendor, to have an optimized configuration, to have the ability to build a 16TB array in one chassis rather than a 12TB, to not have to puzzle out all this stuff. My perspective can be changed, however. That's why I posted this.

What's your opinion?

By the bye, fun power fact: Our old apartment is 3 doors down. It's a 2 bedroom vs. a 3 bedroom, though. Nothing else has changed, other than the fact that the refrigerator in this apartment isn't fully enclosed in wood, which means it doesn't run all the time.

My power bill went down $80 a month.