This is pretty close to something I've wanted for ages: the smallest possible Ceph OSD. This doesn't have the right set of devices on it but it's pretty close.

This is pretty close to something I've wanted for ages: the smallest possible Ceph OSD. This doesn't have the right set of devices on it but it's pretty close. Ditch the wifi for gigabit ethernet, slap a sata controller on the pci-e and mount it in a stackable frame with a power bus. Buy a drive, one of these nodes and stack it on top of your existing ones. Bam your own tiny cloud you can expand in increments of one drive (and commodity ethernet). It's probably a commercial non-starter now that 8TB drives exist but I still love the idea. Or now that I think about it skip the sata and just sell it with some NVMe flash storage built in. Stackable storage bricks.