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? 😁
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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.
how do you find so cheap LTO drives?
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.
you could also do an
RFIR remote bridge with two minimal Pisdeleted by creator
Use a hdmi to ip adapter to stream to multiple locations on a local network. Learned about them when looking at security cameras.
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Do you happen to live in zuid holland?
I have 2 unopened Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN006 that I’ll be happy selling.
No idea what a fair price or your budget would be. That is if you are interested in these drives to begin with.
I’m in Hilversum but new, unopened drives will be out of my price range. I’m only capable of sub €50 purchases at the moment
Vinted has some nice deals every so often.
But look at German sites for better HDD deals then NL.Any recommendations?
Honestly, I’ve been taking a chance on eBay. If the price is close to $10/TB and the drive is an enterprise drive that is listed as known to be working, with a good return policy, I take the risk. I just run tests as soon as I have it so far, all have been good (eight purchases).
Same. I use these drives in a mirrored setup or to hold data that’s replaceable. If they make it a few months without showing errors they might get entrusted to something more important. I’ll shell out for a new drive for my constantly in use drives, luckily I read the warning signs and bought a few 20tb HDDs when ram and SSDs started skyrocketing. I’m kicking myself for not grabbing a few backup m.2 nvme and 2.5" SSDs, because I’m already doing the hardrive shuffle in my mini PCs. I’m fine living life with networked rusty spinners, but I really really don’t want to go back to spinny boot/high throughput drives.
What sort of tests do you run?
Have you tried Tweakers Vraag & Aanbod yet?
Yeah, I have it opening every morning to see if there are any new ads
What size are you looking for? I paid ~150€ for 12tb refurbished and ~200 for 8tb new. Don’t think you could get a high capacity drive for 100 even before the crisis
It takes time to build out capacity to increase HDD production, but when operating margins are approaching 30%, somebody is going to want cash in. If the new reality is that every company wants to harvest and retain as much data as possible at all times in case it has potential as training data at some point in the future, then additional capacity will eventually be built to tap into that.
I know it sucks if you need storage now, but I think the smart decision is to hold off until the market stabilizes. You might even get lucky; the bubble might burst and the market will be flooded with cheap excess HDDs.
somebody is going to want cash in
Maybe. The hard drive makers have long experience with boom-bust cycles. They are likely trying to figure out if this is real, or just a blip and in a two years (when the new factory opens!) demand drops again.
If there is new capacity in the future my guess (guess!) is that this is a case of a new factory to replace the old, and they just keep running the old for another year instead of scrapping it right away.
I picked up enough used SAS drives to build an 11 drive RaidZ3 pool. 100 USD each shipped. DIF formatted so had to low level format to native 4k sectors, then run a full run of badblocks, and finally a long smart test to verify no errors. Had a couple bad drives that the seller replaced no questions asked when I provided the smart logs.
SAS controller and backplane opens up a lot of drives that SATA controllers can’t touch.
My old pool drives will be repurposed for a FrigateNVR storage point and a storage point for some other stuff as well as spares for other pools.
Get lucky - just as this was starting I saw a failed disk notification on my NAS so I ordered a new drive just before they went up. Then I realized it was a stale notification for the drive I replaced a year ago so I have a spare should one fail.
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
I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.
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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:
https://datablocks.dev/ is a Dutch company.
Amazing! Thanks
Oh well … they’re not getting cheaper.
It looks like good prices. But every single one is out of stock
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 SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #32 for this comm, first seen 29th Jun 2026, 14:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My work sells commercial tier drives that were used by customers in NVRs for $10/TB. It’s honestly a great perk of the job for a data hoarder like myself with a fully redundant 100TB of stuff (aka 200TB of drives). I also got a dope 16 bay server chassis with slides and a few other components from them. I fully intend to drop like 2 grand on HDDs if/when I move to a new company, assuming they don’t fire me for AI or something first.
