What changed though? The price of drives makes it even less desirable to buy extra drives for storj — but that was never encouraged in the first place. How you manage your server for other needs did not change. Buying more space than today’s need is driven by anticipated use going forward, and does not depend on cost of drivers.
But if your ram stick dies or PSU or mb — you would have to replace it regardless of whether storj is running. Otherwise you don’t really need a server and we are back to square one — building hardware for storj.