Effortless redundancy

get an extra 4 gigs and you'll be fine. Just backup regularly, have hot spares and don't expect any miracle performance numbers,
Poverty data storage has it's sacrifices, freenas is the best way to go.

I see the alphabet agencies are out in force today.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it is just running FreeNAS.

Helios4 may fit your bill.

The Chromebook™ I posted has a USB (universal serial bus 3.0) inupt/output slot. if you have some media stored on your legacy usb drive you can access it by "plugging in" (physically) the drive into your computer via the slot (it is in blue on the left side of the Chromebook™)

In real life tons of companies use both. I don't see why you wouldn't at home, too. Most people can't host their own online backups.

DIY build a NAS based on J1900-5005.

It'll be $150-300 apart from the drives, and the upper end of that is faster.

That machine can do linux snapraid or other things no problem. Just consider building something newer for power draw reasons.

Yea, snapraid and other solutions do that. Mdadm RAID also to an extent, you can grow the array.

Just give me it at less than $20/disk.
I don't care if that means paying $1000 for a 50 disk array, I'm just fed up of this four drive bullshit.
Make it so fucking big that I never have to worry about volumes again and I'll be happy.

THEN I'M NOT STORING SHIT ON THE FUCKING CLOUD THEN, AM I?

This. I don't fucking understand how couple more sata slots and little more sheet metal doubles or triples the price. It's not like storing indian stop motion animations requires any performance.