[scheides]

A true JBOD will take 'a bunch of disks' and present logical volumes to the network, with not a ton of regard to what it puts where. That's why I mentioned the warning about huge and lengthy restore jobs.

Now that being said, with what you have described you have a win7 machine that you use for a desktop or whatever...throw disks in it and share them out individually. Add the latest and greatest 'big' single disk that meets your budget when you need more space. File server, done.

For backups, I use an almost identical enclosure to the one you linked. When you buy a big disk above, budget for a second one the same size or bigger and dump your files to it (and your other secondary disks that match your other drives) and store in a safe, dry place.

Write some bat scripts (or better yet bash after you install Cygwin) and make the process easy on yourself.

This is a pretty simple setup but still plenty of room for failure and still not sure about I/O performance. Let me know what you end up doing!