You can go with a single large capacity server, such as: https://www.45drives.com/products/storinator-xl60-configurations.php Or go with a cluster and a distributed file system. It’s a lot less work/less complexity to go with a large single server. Performance wise, you either care most about the cost and use hard drives or you care most about speed and use some kind of solid state storage.

If I were you, I’d call a few storage vendors and see what they say. Compare feature vs cost and then decide if you want to roll your own.

MS Windows uses IP addresses for some things, last I checked.

Give it 127.0.0.1 as its default gateway or block it at your router.