So I set out and bought some hardware to get myself a “SAN” setup. I ended up with just about 6TB of space. A friend of mine had some old hardware that I am using and boy is this great. The only issue I am having is the throughput on the network card as it is only 10/100. I am getting a quad port gigabit NIC off another friend. Then I will setup Link aggrigation so that my data is flying to and from the disks!
For reference, here is the NAS I purchased and am using:
Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS416slim (Diskless)
Here is the article on how to setup the OS and Disk Station: Roll your own Synology DiskStation for NAS
Then you can follow this article to get link aggregation setup if you have the capabilities: Link Aggregation Setup