Can you get around this by changing your DNS? I thought that’s the primary way ISPs can control your traffic (though I only enough about this stuff to be dangerous)

IMDB would probably be a good start.

I think it depends on what you’re storing. If it’s video then you’ll want bigger drives because you’ll fill your array of small drives up quickly and trying to manage 10 or 15 1TB HDDs will get out of hand quickly. Backing up isn’t super critical with large “Linux ISOs” since you can just torrent most everything again to replace missing files.

For fast throughput of small files, I think smaller drives in an array win out and if these are important files, it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to buy a couple of large HDDs to backup the entire array.

It’s interesting how old console tech comes back around to be useful for other stuff. I’ve used a couple Xbox Kinects to do 3D scanning and with an augmented reality sand box.