I'm still waiting for a 'Drobo' like device without the proprietary physical layout. A light or dial goes into orange territory, you head to Best Buy or Amazon and buy the biggest drive that doesn't give you sticker shock, you push a button, out pops your worst drive and in goes the new one. Some lights flicker for a while and then go green.

I thought ZFS would have given us almost everything but the hardware ten years ago, but it turned out they oversold a few of the features back then, and then Larry happened.

Custom hardware is too expensive for small run consumer hardware, and Apple might have gotten into that space but never did. I wonder how many PCIe lanes you could shoehorn onto a Pi clone...