Those cheaper drives scare me.

What grinds my gears is you can rent enough compute to handle this for $30 a month. That covers redundant internet, staff, fire suppression, generators, air conditioning.

I want to couple that with a chassis full of sata. Obviously more power and heat but not 16 times that.

You can get 2u of colocation for about a hundred bucks per month. I've been pondering for a few years building out a 4u chassis and doing a friends and fam storage co-op. You could do a 208tb (real 189) z2 with two parity drives for around $4,500 bucks plus 100-130 a month.

The current pricing is all based on SAS. Even the companies that aren't using SAS are still charging like it is.