Super storage server?
I've been looking for a nice storage solution for a while now. I may well have found it. The combination of the SC846E1 + 9690SA-4I seems good. Looking on google, it seems that the chassis and controller can be had for £1137 and £187 respectively. Given that WD 2TB green drives can be had for about £90 (£2160 for 24). Tallying up, that gives you 48TB for £3484. You'll have to add a mobo chip and ram to that, but that can be had quite cheaply depending on what sort of processing power you need.
As far as a filesystem goes, until btrfs is ready it's got to be zfs, it provides block level deduplication, and much better big volume management than any other stable fs i have seen. This can be achieved with nexentia, which combines the opensolaris kernel with the debian userspace. They even have a NexentiaStor Community edition, which is a web GUI based NAS solution. The only free NAS distro to support zfs I have seen.
Storing Data For The Next 1000 Years
Tom's has a nice article on a bit of research done on data storage
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/harddrive-storage-hdd,news-28035.html
Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the
transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is designed
as a distributed network of individually fully functional network
storage devices. Compared to current MAIDs (Massive Arrays of Idle
Disks), NAND flash memory (described as on-volatile random access
memory - NVRAM) within the project has been added to each node with the
purpose to store data signatures, metadata, and other small items,
allowing deferred writes, metadata requests and inter-disk data
verification to be performed while the disk is powered off. Since the
NVRAM can run frequent searches without the need to spin up a hard
drive, the disk media can remain powered down more often, effectively
reducing wear as well as the power consumption of a MAID.