These boxes were created mainly for development, experimentation, and mobility. More disks would mean more heat, cost, size, weight.
Fair enough. :)
I suppose I just think its neat and a production-ready version would be nice.
Get a few of them and use Ceph. :)
No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.
If only my hobby budget could afford two of them :(
You could run ceph within the cluster of 10. It is certainly enough to run a small cluster
Well - RAID is more or a traditional architecture solution than a cloud one. A cloud storage solution like Ceph provides redundancy across nodes, and I've even read that they strongly discourage the use of RAID. Still, the orange box is a homogenous architecture that can be used flexibly as a training and introduction tool - I've not heard anyone suggest you run it as your production cloud. If you go and spec a real cloud you'll find vendors will provide different configuration for designated storage and compute nodes.
10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node
It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.