For a 24 drive server, I'd just get a heavily discounted dell or HP box. A startup should be able to pay half list, buy two, and be ahead vs. s3.
Supermicro chassis re a big improvement overdoing your own wiring. The Areca controllers, especially in raid 6, re great. For raid 5 I'd also look at 3ware.
For single gig e, you can get away with esata expanders, building something like the back blaze pod. I've done that kind of thing for personal use, and to have an onsite mirror of something, but I'd want several, in several different colo facilities, to compare with s3. The exception is if you need some kind of scratch storage, but even refilling a 40TB archive with downloadable content takes a really long time over a 1Gbps link.
I'd build a few boxes like this now, but the Thai floods pushed hard drive prices up to the point I have to wait. Hopefully fast 4-5TB drives will be $200 by summer 2012.
Supermicro chassis re a big improvement overdoing your own wiring. The Areca controllers, especially in raid 6, re great. For raid 5 I'd also look at 3ware.
For single gig e, you can get away with esata expanders, building something like the back blaze pod. I've done that kind of thing for personal use, and to have an onsite mirror of something, but I'd want several, in several different colo facilities, to compare with s3. The exception is if you need some kind of scratch storage, but even refilling a 40TB archive with downloadable content takes a really long time over a 1Gbps link.
I'd build a few boxes like this now, but the Thai floods pushed hard drive prices up to the point I have to wait. Hopefully fast 4-5TB drives will be $200 by summer 2012.