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? 😁
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 (800+ DVDs) were a thing for a minute. You’d have to write bridge software because they’re 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…Shit…i could do this. $300…i could do this
No, stop. This is a dangerous rabbit hole.
Depends on the size you are looking for, but I saw some good deals for ~4TB on Vinted
Everyone asks “where do we get more storage?” and not “do we need to hoard all of this?”
People treat deleting like some dirty word, but all good collections need to be organized and pruned.
You don’t even necessarily need to delete either. If you have a ton of H.264 video you could convert it to 265 or AV1 with minimal quality loss, but huge space savings.
With how the internet is going, I don’t think we will be able to get content from it in 5 to 10 years. It will be completely locked down, so all we have on our drives will be it. Back to mailing DVDs!
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.
I’ve become much more selective with my video quality. I’ve found that 480p encoded from a raw source produces pretty acceptable quality, anything that isn’t made to be eye candy I’ll encode myself from a raw file down to 480p. There have been many things that have been very hard to find, so I feel it’s more important that they exist, rather than be in the highest definition possible. Quality of pixels is more important that quantity of pixels.
Aren’t old games pretty small though? It’s new ones that you may need a huge volume to store many of them. Depends how much we are talking of course. 2TB or 50TB?
Depends what era but generally yes. Xbox 360 seem to be in the 3-6GB range, Wii / GameCube in the 1-2GB range. Older gens are ofc smaller.
My entire gaming library is approx 200gb, but it’s curated, retro / indy focused (early 2000s to mid 2010’s)
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
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.
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.
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.
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 |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
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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.
I usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they’re a bit smaller than I’d like them to be, but on 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is where I go. It’s ridiculously expensive right now, though. I just paid nearly 2k USD for three large capacity drives for our local UnRaid box.
Might keep an eye on sales at best buy/Amazon or any other tech part store for shuckable drives.
