[metabrew]

When we set up user content storage of images and mp3s for Last.fm back in 2006ish we used MogileFS (from the bradfitz LJ perl days) running on our own hardware. 3/4/5/6u machines stuffed full of disks. I still think it's an elegant concept – easy to grok, easy to debug, easy to reason about. No special distributed filesystem to worry about.

Don't take this as an endorsement of the MogileFS perl codebase in 2021, but worth considering this style of storage system depending on your precise needs.