Hey all you beautiful selfhosters,
What are your suggestions for frugally obtaining HDDs in the current economic climate? Specifically the EU (Netherlands).
I’m looking at second hand drives, but even those go for €100+ now, with bad sectors and all.
Can we organise a collective AI datacenter robbery and doll out some stolen drives? 😁
Everyone asks “where do we get more storage?” and not “do we need to hoard all of this?”
Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I’m going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn’t as permanent as it was cracked up to be.
There’s plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.
I have family photos starting in 2001, scanned/captured photos and video going back 50 years, music, and backups of all my Xbox DVDs (WTF is the original Xbox even called today?). But that’s a few terrabytes. It can all fit on a few USB sticks. (Which I do as a third level backup.)
The real space killers are the TV shows and movies that I will watch at most once every 20 years. I could delete almost all of it. But I don’t. Instead I keep looking for bigger storage options.
People treat deleting like some dirty word, but all good collections need to be organized and pruned.
What you don’t want to hold onto The Wrecking Crew for your descendants?
I think a big fuel for these storage anxieties is the very real situation we’re in right now, where we’re watching the “forever Internet” erode and crumble before our eyes, and getting rug-pulled from every direction service-wise, and losing access to media we don’t have a hard copy of.
I do wish there were a better way to pool all this storage for a common library of preservation…I mean I guess Internet Archive is like that but they’re constantly under attack. All this is under heaps of legal “gray area” and obviously the media titans want to force a rental-only-own-nothing world.
Right now we kinda have to become a scattered group of amateur historians and librarians, to preserve our culture.
I don’t say this to be mean so please don’t take it this way, but I think this mentality is… privileged? If the free internet goes then so does society as we know it, and the obscure french film collections from the 80s isn’t gonna do anything for you in that new reality. The things that need to be prepped are plain text and take up no space at all, in the grand scheme of things. It is feasible to self-host a text-only version of the entirety of Wikipedia, but nobody here is talking about that. It’s as if people think there’s gonna be some middle-ground where the internet is totally shut down and somehow life goes on as normal. You’d think priorities would shift a little away from media consumption towards “oh shit how do I learn how to filter my water”.
It would sure suck if you were the only person on earth with that french film collection, but do any historians actually know how to reach you? Have you made this information available? If not, then your archive is not useful.
If the free internet goes then so does society as we know it, and the obscure french film collections from the 80s isn’t gonna do anything for you in that new reality. It’s as if people think there’s gonna be some middle-ground where the internet is totally shut down and somehow life goes on as normal. You’d think priorities would shift a little away from media consumption towards “oh shit how do I learn how to filter my water”.
This has been my thinking for the very longest while. If/When the internet goes ‘somewhere’, commerce screeches to a halt, globally. We’re at a point where there is no going back to pen and paper. When commerce screeches to a halt, no one is going to be gunning for your NAS drive filled with movies. They will be gunning for whatever life sustaining resources you have to make theirs. You think people are crazy now…we’ve yet to plumb the depths of crazy.
Yeah, the *Arr stack has effectively eliminated the need to permanently retain media. I want to watch something? I just request it, and 10-20 minutes later it is available on my server. I tend to treat *Arr requests the same way I used to treat Blockbuster trips. It takes a few minutes to get what you want to watch, but that’s also a chance to make some popcorn, grab a beer, and settle in.
I only (“only”) keep ~25-30TB of media available at any one moment. And even that is plenty. It’s literally hundreds of movies and TV shows. And if I want to purge old content, that’s easy to do too. Hell, I can even sort by the last time it was watched, and start with the shit that hasn’t been touched in like 18 months.
Same, I fight the consumerist urge to
catch them allkeep everything, but instead shoot for a lower need to purchase more and consume more hardware. Electricity is cheap where I live, so downloading, then deleting shows that I and my household are unlikely to watch again for many years just makes more sense.
We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t already answered the second question affirmatively.
Frugally (legally) obtained HDDs are still going to cost you a lot of money, there is no way around that at the moment. If you need it, pay up and be done with it. If you just kind of want it, start sorting through your piles of data you don’t actually need (yes, you have that, stop lying to yourself) to free up space for things you do actually need.
True, but it’ll be nice to have enough space to let the future arr stack I plan on spinning up, roam free
So is there a raid 12 for my 13 500GB drives?
Don’t forget the power bill, even if they sit idle most of the time. 12 drives * 5 watts * 24 hours * 365.25 days ~= 525 kwh. That would cost me $157 aud a year for electricity.
If I instead bought a 6TB drive brand new I’d break even after 3 years, assuming the 500GB drives are $0.
In my country we have a website that resells “old” and used server hardware, including HDDs for reasonable prices. Although that has gone up a lot over the last year or so.
Maybe you have something like that in the Netherlands? I recently bought an 18TB drive for around €400.
Storage is just expensive these days. Just like RAM.
Marty, we need to go back…to the future!
(Mind you, those top out at 320GB per cartridge)
Kidding aside, for deep storage…?
LTO-8 is 12TB native per cartridge. A used LTO can be as little as $300 USD with a 12TB cart $65ish. Ancient LTO-3 can be had for like…$5…and stores upto 800GB per tape.
So…if it’s deep storage you want…that’s one insane option.
OTOH if you’re looking for a Jellyfin streamer…they’re tape, so random access would suck bad. You’d genuinely be better off optical media at that point lol
Though if we’re time travelling… DVD shufflers (400+ DVDs) were a thing for a minute. You’d have to write bridge software because they’re HDMI and com port only…hmm. Checking quickly, they seem to go for $100 USD…is this even possible…? You’d be limited to 1 stream at a time, but I can see a way to share that across multiple TVs with HDMI splitter…hmm…how do I carry RF remote signal from each room back to main unit…oh, I don’t need to, could I make a web ui that controls the shuffler via a Pi to RS-232, that you access on your phone?..Shit…i could do this.
$300…I could do this. I could make a clock work Jellyfin server…
No, stop. This is a dangerous rabbit hole.
PS: shit - I just thought of two better options - and one of them is even semi sane (store video at 480-540p on DVD as mkv, use Nvidia shield to upscale on fly to 1080p). Back of envelope maths suggests this would be around 3000 movies.
I should not be online this late at night with easy access to credit card.
SUBSCRIBE
Some people just want to watch the world burn
Use a hdmi to ip adapter to stream to multiple locations on a local network. Learned about them when looking at security cameras.
Stop enabling my drug addiction :P
https://datablocks.dev/ is a Dutch company.
I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.
You know the fun part is you could just about use a 750 zip disk to steam video. Read speeds are about 7.5mb/s…enough for 1-2 simultaneous 480p Jellyfin streams.
Shit…everybody about RAID and here we are suggesting RAIT. No school like old school.
I still think the “DVD shuffler clockwork JF server with AI upscale” idea would be more fun to build tho, because as stupid as it sounds, the maths adds up. It would be gloriously cursed, but 3000+ hours of video is 3000 + hours of video.
I used to have a DVD duplicator. Picked it up at an auction many, many years back then turned it for twice what I had in it. Something similar to this:
Frugal and recycled. Using a mix of old disks in OMV8 with a mergerfs array, suprisingly they amounted to 20TB, so saved a few bob.
If a disk fails in Mergerfs you loose the data on that disk only and not the array as you would with a pure jbod array.
There is a remove disk utility in the OMV8 mergerfs plugin that allows the data from a failing disk to be copied back to the array, if enough space is available, retaining the data from the failing disk. The disk can then be physically removed. If the array is short on space, add a disk to expand the array before removing the failing disk.
I’ve only ever used it with a failing disk, not a failed disk, I would guess that a backup would be required in that case.
The same applies to mergerfs outside of OMV8, this was easier for me.
Personally I just track sales constantly. I know I don’t want less than my smallest, so I look for 14TB and up. If I come.across an upgrade for the right price, I buy it even if I don’t need it right now. The drive I replace moves to another array, so its not wasted. Hell I’m still using some 2-3TB drives in the (much larger in qty) backup array.
The only thing I’d point out with the DC is they may not even have the hardware in there - there’s a stupid amount of money that is being counted against product not even installed (or even shipped yet) in the stock value game these narcissistic scumbags are playing.
I’ve had good success buying second hand on eBay, but I bet you could also do worse than getting used parts off Gumtree, look for anyone selling a broken or outdated computer - or in the free section - and spend some time going through a pile of ewaste, shucking all the drives, and then running tests on them.
trash bins 😅 sometimes you can get permission, other times not. 🤷 I’ve gotten permission to dig in this one trash bin, and it had a ton of decent 3tb hdds from server rack. pretty hard use and 1/3 of the ones I picked was overheating but the rest were still good!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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Vinted has some nice deals every so often.
But look at German sites for better HDD deals then NL.Any recommendations?
There was someone here not too long ago who purchases HDD with bad sectors. I think the idea was to instruct Linux to not use the bad sectors. I am unclear about the mechanics of how it’s done, but the concept has been rolling around in my head ever since. The drives in question were purchased knowingly with bad sectors and came with a warranty.
When a drive has bad sectors, the rest of the drive will likely also be near EOL…
I thought the same thing, but whomever the chap was, was buying 15 TB+ drives and didn’t seem to have issue. I questioned him about exactly what you said, and again, they didn’t seem worried about putting over 15 TB of data long term, on a drive that had bad sectors. The reason it came up, was because I was scrolling through New Egg and came upon some relatively cheap drives, however the seller was upfront about there being at least 25 bad sectors. I asked ‘Who would buy such a thing?’ and that’s how the convo started. I’ll have to go back through my comments and see if I can find it.
Enterprise decommissions, workplace, stuff ehere they just want to get rid of it quick
You can buy a secondhand laptop on marktplaats for under €100 and take out the hard drive then sell the rest. I got one with 256GB for €15 not long ago.
