It'll depend on where you live and what your goals are. If you have free-time to tinker and enjoy that kind of thing, you can build something very fast and reliable and prevent e-waste by building your own storage server with used parts on the cheap.
If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.
For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.
The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.
I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.
I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.
Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.
All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.
I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.
This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.
The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.
All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.
Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.
You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.
eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.
If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.
For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.
The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.
I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.
I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.
Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.
All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.
I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.
This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.
The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.
All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.
[1]: <https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/3u/836/sc836b...>
[2]: <https://www.supermicro.com/products/archive/motherboard/x9dr...>
[3]: <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?forums/for-sale-fo...>
[4]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4SnKAP6cQ>
[5]: <https://zfsbootmenu.org>
[6]: <https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm>
---
Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.
You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.
eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.