Hi Rudi,
If you're building something on the cheap, then you could get an even cheaper setup with a 4port SATA >>motherboad, and an add 4port SATA PCI / PCI-e card.
True, that would be each drive on its own port, which is optimal.
With 8 ports, I could get 8 x 2tb and and have 8th in RAID10.
What about this: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=8+x+sata&cid=138356431220698741...
And just a normal PC with lots of drives?
-Jason
Some of those eSATA enclosures will use 1x SATA port per HDD, and some even work on USB which is even worse.
If you can run each HDD on it's own port, you'll get optimal performance. For a cheap in-office storage, I use these: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=icy+dock&...
It's basically a hot-swap cage, but I need to manually tell the OS that the drive was removed, since it doesn't run on a server back-plane. But it does the job as far as cheap storage goes :) Put 4x 2TB HDD's in there and you have 4TB storage on RAID10