I think what's important is that most SMR drives can only write a few MB per second anyway once their buffer gets saturated. That's well within wifi/100M ether

I think what's important is that most SMR drives can only write a few MB per second anyway once their buffer gets saturated. That's well within wifi/100M ethernet speeds. I feel like 10gb superspeed hardware is more than a fast enough connection. The hardware is relatively cheap to build, it's just the software. I'm not saying you need a super high speed processor or memory either, since the SMR drive itself can serve can serve as (slow) memory for the CPU. The trick is trying to figure out mostly how to replicate blocks across the raid, and then mapping the files to raid blocks.