So as a bit of a cheapskate and with a like of recycling. It is possible to get good storage 2nd hand and cheap and fast…. oh yeah – Good, Cheap, Fast.

They normally say it can’t be done… but I think it can, and it can be done in software rather than hardware.

Here’s my thinking…

Loads of cheap desktops, rammed with largish spinning rust with 1 SSD for write cache and OS. Then clustered together to make one massive fault tolerant file system. No special controllers, just the mobo ones.

Here’s my goals…. I want to be able to saturate a 10Gb NIC with consistent read and writes. I want to use cheap commodity hardware, or used server kit that’s reached the 2nd life market.

How hard can it be?