The cost involved in transporting text messages is not just the capacity in the network. These messages all end up on a SMSC, a carrier-grade system able to handle multiple-hundreds or -thousands of simultanious SMS messages and route them to other subscribers and operators. These systems are provided by a handful of suppliers that know what to charge for a decent cluster of these baby's... and somehow they need support as well! NB. Not in any way affiliated with telco's.

A buddy of mine made a media server with bunch of drives (8 I believe) on a single controller. The trick he used is that he switches on and off individual drives through a small PCB he made that uses a relay for switching power. Data connections for a bunch of drives are merged together. The board is controlled through the parallel which theoretically enables him to do 64 drives I hink (2 control signals and 6 for which drive to apply the command to). Small PCB and seems to work nice. So there is a strict setup routine which drives can be on/off managed on BSD through a perl script. One drive is allways on and used as a buffer disk. A script finds the file you're looking for using an Index, starts the drive, copies the file to the buffer disk and powers-off the drive again. Power-friendly solution as well ;-)