Assume an unlimited budget for now, I just want to know what's out there.
I mean, if you're willing to pay the price of a car per SSD they go up to at least 122TB density per drive... (e.g. Solidigm SBFPF2BV0P12001 D5-P5336 -- $16K~$20K depending on supplier from a quick search)
I don't actually recommend that for personal use, but since you were curious about what's out there, there's some absolutely crazy shit in enterprise server gear if you have deep enough pockets.
You're requirements are too vague as "lots of apps/VMs" doesn't describe the expected load. Overall though if you want small just build a mini-ITX system. Then you can put in any x86 chip that fits your needs.
Ok, so if you want to do a bunch of drives in a box:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/FhPzK8/gigabyte-mw50-sv0-atx-lga2011-3-motherboard-mw50-sv0
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/yFWJ7P/crucial-bx500-4-tb-25-solid-state-drive-ct4000bx500ssd1
However, that's expensive. I would go with spinning disks.
If you want to bring the cost down more,
You can drive the price down more by buying a used system.
The pile of SSDs will be easiest to stuff into a box.
You will need to get creative with cooling.
enough, a lot, more demanding.
You need to give some sort of guidance here.
If I/O speed is important the challenge will be getting lots of nvme slots in a small form factor. Many atx motherboards have bifurcated pci-e slots that can be converted to manage 2 nvme drives at once (in addition to on-board nvme slots) but I don’t know if matx boards do that, so if you wanted 3+ drives that would be the first thing to consider. If you just want a bunch of sata ssds there are more options, but all considerably slower.
NAS only, or storage and workload?
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
I have no experience with this. Just sharing so you have more ideas to think about
If you're looking for more compact than powerful asustor has this https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=91 12 nvme sticks with 8tb per stick would give you 96tb of storage in that small form factor. Only problem might be how much power you'd get out of that processor but you can bump the ram up to I think it was 96 gigs
I'm personally using https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product%2Fproduct&product_id=294, sounds like what you're looking for. It's got four m.2 slots, up to 16gb ram, the rockchip soc should be sufficiently powerful for anything that's not crazy demanding.
If the big consideration is really sound, doing whatever is necessary to use larger, but slower (wide, high CFM per dB/RPM) and higher quality (fluid dynamic bearings) fans might serve the purpose regardless of other hardware. Some of them are rated to be <20dB, quieter than a whisper, and fluid bearings are supposed to be mostly impervious to the noise added by aging that hits a lot of fans.
A high-cpu small machine will have noisy fans, there's no avoiding that. The fans have to be of small diameter so they will spin at high RPM. Maybe you can say what you're actually trying to run, and make things easier for us.
I gave up on this approach a long time ago and it's been liberating. My main personal computer is a laptop and for a while I had a Raspberry Pi 400 running some server-like things. The Raspberry is currently not in use though maybe I'll get it going again sometime. All my bigger computational stuff is remote. So the software is self-hosted but not the hardware. IDK if that counts as self-hosting around here. But it's much more reliable that way, with the boxes in multiple countries for geo separation.
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