There are other things to take into account as well.

The two main things that come to mind are backups and reliability.

A single server unless it's a 2U rackmount (or greater) designed to
take lots of disks or a tower server (also made to hold a lot of
disks) will not be able to hold 8TB and even if they can it will not
leave much room for RAID (guessing you will need that).

Reliability is a large area to cover. It would be useful to know how
much down time is acceptable and what your budget is. What OS are you
planning on running and where will your server be stored (do you have
access to a rack).

So a quick run down of questions you should really know the answer to:

1) How important is the data stored on the server?
2) What is your budget?
3) What are the storage options for the server?
4) How reliable does the service being provided need to be?

I agree with C H though. Either set up a VM of the OS you are planning
on using on your comp or install it on a spare comp and get your
application fully set up on there first.

For 8TB and assuming people would be pissed if you lost data I would
suggest at lease RAID 1 which requires a RAID card (supplied on some
server and not on others) and double the amount of hard drive space
you will be using, so in your case that is 16TB.

Sorry if the above seems a bit unorganised, this is just a brain dump.

Alex
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