Not so cheap when buying them 8 at a time 
$280 = Odroid C1 $35 x 8
$040 = Odroid C1 Case $5 x 8
$040 = Odroid C1 Power cord $5 x 8
$080 = SD Card w/OS installed $10 x8
$480 = USB 1TB HDD $60 x 8
$050 = Gigabit switch
$016 = Cat6 cables 6’inch $2 x 8
$986 = Total Cost
Edit: This is way cheaper then building 8 regular computers 
Yeah tho I don’t think I could afford to drop $900 bucks. But maybe rig up one or two at a time and build on it. Where’d you get the 1TB usb hard drive for $60?
I got a sweet deal on amazon.
$900 might be worth it if this thing catches on. Besides, I want to do everything I can to help the network.
I find it difficult to find USB hard drives that aren’t externals, would there be anything specific I should be looking for? Sorry for the newbish question 
Seeing that above has me wonder it will be USB3 rather than USB2.
I’ve little sense of the CPU demand the network might need… so hard to know what to make of that above but it’s looks good and 8TB is a fair size. Perhaps OP can feedback his experience of the limits of it’s capability… will the CPU cf HDD be optimised - I wonder it’ll be useful later to have some indication later of what is the best CPU:RAM:HDD.
Yeah, that was another concern for me is that the C1 only has USB2.0, wouldn’t that have a pretty large impact on transfer rates to the USB hard drives?
Looking at the USB2.0 rate suggested transfer of 1TB would take 4.5 hours but perhaps that’s not too bad. OP has x8 disks rather than just one. Still I expect those with SSD and USB3.0 are more likely to see where the limit of CPU is. Right now, I’m unclear what to expect, so I’ve not started to consider hardware beyond what’s kicking around.
The real limit will be bandwidth. I have time warmer cables ultimate package with 50Mbps down and 5Mps up. At 5Mbs up divided by 8 Odroid C1s that is 0.625Mbps per C1. USB 2.0 transfers at 60Mbps. So, I don’t think USB 2.0 will be the problem/bottleneck.
Hey @betterthantrav , Newbie here hoping you can help out a little bit. I have concentrated my skills more on software development than on hardware. Can you provide a video on on joining the individuals components up and probably why they are need and contributions. I realize its a lot asking this and you may not have the free time but the help would be highly appreciated. Or a pdf doc of you assembling it up from scratch.
Thanks.