ExtremeTech has a review of the Norco DS-1220 eSATA storage box, which can accomodate up to 12 SATA disks. The price is pretty low (on Newegg.com it is $840 without disks).
I computed a small table that shows how much it will cost for a simple JBOD configuration. So, for less than $3000 you can get six terabytes in raw storage (therefore, 3 TB with RAID-10). Pretty competitive, and scales down nicely to whatever your storage needs are.
Disk capacity (GB)
Total capacity JBOD (TB)
Disk price
Total cost
$/GB
40
0.47
$32.99
$1,235.88
$2.57
60
0.70
$62.95
$1,595.40
$2.22
80
0.94
$36.95
$1,283.40
$1.34
120
1.41
$50.99
$1,451.88
$1.01
160
1.88
$48.00
$1,416.00
$0.74
200
2.34
$59.99
$1,559.88
$0.65
250
2.93
$63.00
$1,596.00
$0.53
300
3.52
$81.99
$1,823.88
$0.51
320
3.75
$86.00
$1,872.00
$0.49
400
4.69
$123.00
$2,316.00
$0.48
500
5.86
$177.00
$2,964.00
750
8.79
$338.50
$4,902.00
$0.54
- Disk prices from http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives
- Enclosure price: $839.99 from newegg.com
From this table, it looks like we are approaching nicely (and even passing) the theoretical 50 cents/TB limit, starting with around 160/200 GB disks. So, when fully loaded, this array scales down nicely as expected.
The formulas above should be obvious:
- Total cost = $839.99 + 12 * disk_price
- Total capacity (JBOD) = Disk capacity * 12.