Being a user and advocate of Bitcoin since circa 2011, I finally got my act together and built my own bitcoin node, because I feel it's important for ordinary people to contribute and help the network stay decentralized... and because it's fun!
Ingredients:
I put the drives in a software RAID-5 arrangement, which gives me about 450GB of usable and hopefully fault-tolerant space (I don't want to have to download the whole blockchain from the beginning again). At this time, the whole blockchain is in the neighborhood of 200GB so I'm hoping this is enough space for a little while. It should be easy to upgrade when needed (I think).
Pretty happy with it. It seems to be chugging away on my ugly router shelf doing Bitcoin stuff.
