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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Some people just want to watch the world burn
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 PisUse 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
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
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.
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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:
https://datablocks.dev/ is a Dutch company.
Oh well … they’re not getting cheaper.
It looks like good prices. But every single one is out of stock
Amazing! Thanks
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
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 you, 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?
RAIDz2 for 5.5TB with 2-disk redundancy.
All of a sudden USB becomes important. 😅
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.
Yeah, it’s half joke, half backup territory (so the drives could just be offline mostly).
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.
Have you tried Tweakers Vraag & Aanbod yet?
Yeah, I have it opening every morning to see if there are any new ads
I usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they’re a bit smaller than I’d like them to be, but in the other hand they’re free except from the minor work and documentation involved in ensuring that no company related data remain.
Wish my company allowed that. Everything goes to a licensed secure destruction service that literally puts them through an industrial shredder. Awesome to watch, but wasteful as all hell.
Well, there’s a footnote on my end: Me taking the drives home is a bit of a grey area, as the procedures say that the drives are to be mechanically destroyed when no longer needed. It doesn’t specify needed by whom. And I do attack them with my angle grinder, so it’s in accordance with company policy.
And yes, my employer knows and is OK with it. We go through a ridiculous amount of drives due to large storage needs, so pragmatism tends to trump bureaucracy.
Well let’s start with how much you need.
Then we can all cry. Currently looking at replacing HDDs with SSDs and significantly cutting down on my data storage requirements - basically uninstalling all those games I haven’t played in a long time and probably won’t. Plus it’s easier to avoid getting sucked into playing ESO and wasting money on it if it’s behind a 100+ GB download. Majority of games I actually play are under 5GB so I could go pretty heavy. Couple second hand 512GB SSDs perhaps? Under £100…
I reckon I need about 10TB of RAID 1 for a decent Jellyfin media server
I have a 2tb ssd for my media server. I haven’t filled it yet, but I do sometimes delete things. Don’t tell anyone.
If you’re willing to run at least 4 drives, RAID5 is good too. You get 75% of the space and as long as only one drives dies, you can rebuild the array without data loss. Ideally.
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.
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
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!
