Storage?! In this economy!?
from Smurfi@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 29 Jun 04:36
https://lemmy.zip/post/67015080
from Smurfi@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 29 Jun 04:36
https://lemmy.zip/post/67015080
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? 😁
threaded - newest
Everyone asks “where do we get more storage?” and not “do we need to hoard all of this?”
The answer is yes.
Seconded.
Because the answer to the second question is a very clear “yes”.
The answer is 42.
yes
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.
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?
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.
This really depends on what you’re watching it on. 480p can look fine on a phone but like garbage on a 65" OLED. I find that 720p is good for most shows that aren’t visually stunning (like Foundation) while most movies look fine in 1080p on the aforementioned OLED.
My Bravia does some magic that makes video files look better than they do on PC. I’ve started replacing many of my 2160p files with 1080p ones, the difference is often barely noticeable, depending on the quality of the respective rips.
I don’t generally go below 720p but some old stuff that hasn’t been remastered has no reason to go above 480p.
We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t already answered the second question affirmatively.
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!
Usenet will likely still be around, and torrents are like playing whack-a-mole.
It will just be a lot harder to get to, and likely harsher laws put in place as well.
I mean, not allowing vpns for personal use would stop us all. Businesses would of course be allowed to use them.
Yes and no. We’d go back to sneakernets. :)
… But that would be significantly more unpleasantly limited than the current ways of doing things…
And sneakernets would make personal archives more valuable than ever
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.
My only complaint is that lots of my streaming devices don’t natively support newer codecs. So if I convert everything to AV1, my server will end up transcoding basically everything. Smart TVs are particularly bad about supporting anything past h264.
I really want to go AV1 too. Most of what I play is airplayed from my ipad to whatever so I only need my iPad to support it. But I’m not buying an iPad air just to airplay AV1.
But H265 has been prevalent for about 10 years now so basically any smart TV made in the last 3 years should support it. And if yours don’t then any el cheapo smart tv stick should.
if you are also annoyed qbout the tracking and ads shit smart TVs pull off, you could by a mini-PC to fix all of these at once. making an IR remote work will be challenging, but if you go for plasma bigscreen, you can control it fine with kde connect on your phone.
I block all of my smart TVs at the DNS level with my pi-holes. All of the benefits (native streaming apps, easy casting, a functional remote without any fuss, etc) without any of the ads or tracking.
I’m not sure if tracking can be fully disabled with DNS blocking. they could easily implement DoH usage or direct IP connections as fallback
If you torrent that means stopping seeding tho
What you don’t want to hold onto The Wrecking Crew for your descendants?
Don’t get emotional
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.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.
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.
Well, okay, you’re talking “end of the free and open Internet” which, yeah, would be a pretty big and terrible deal, and I really hope people and institutions that are able, are archiving such important things! (I should see how big that Wikipedia archive is for kicks lol). But yeah, we’d have much bigger problems.
We gotta support archive.org and our libraries for this reason! I would hate to be without them.
I personally wasn’t talking about digital “prepping” so much as I was talking about motivations for hoarding data of things we’re interested in. Our media becoming lost media because wealthy interests don’t give a crap or, worse, decided to censor it.
Not everyone is just hoarding Sailor Moon episodes; people have tons of books and manuals too just because it interests them. Lots of people preserve video game ROMs as well, which has thankfully kept those works from disappearing entirely.
Moving that information would become significantly more difficult without a free and open Internet, but that’s a different “threat model” worth its own conversation, I think.
For what you’re talking about. I bet you’d be interested in someone like Marion Stokes , for instance, who “data hoarded” tons of recordings of television news, and that archive actually proved useful to historians way later.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment and perspective. :)
Serverpartdeals?
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.
€356 excluding USA to EU shipping… Oof!
Vinted has some nice deals every so often.
But look at German sites for better HDD deals then NL.
Any recommendations?
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.
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?
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).
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.
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!
what kind of place has those trash bins?
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.
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.
Also true for me
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.
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?
I attach it to my unRAID server as an unassigned device and run a SMART test.
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.
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.
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.
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
Ah ok, I’ve had these drives for a while now but ended up using SSDs instead so they just sat in my parts drawer reminding me of a bad purchase xd.
Crazy how they are like 3x the price now from when i bought them in 2023
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.
Might keep an eye on sales at best buy/Amazon or any other tech part store for shuckable drives.
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.
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.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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Depends on the size you are looking for, but I saw some good deals for ~4TB on Vinted
I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.
Ebay, particularly GoHardDrives, or sometimes you’ll find new drives from random sellers.
I also check ServerPartDeals. Drives are pricy these days, don’t sneeze near your NAS.
Edit: I’m not sure if they ship internationally or not, however.
They do, but there may be better local alternatives, since the shipping can be quite high.
2/3 of the drives I received from GoHardDrive failed within 2 years and all I got was a pre-bubble refund.
Oof. 🙃
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.
I use snapraid for parity on top (OMV7). Works nicely with mergerfs. If a drive fails it can be easily rebuilt. You can use older smaller drives to do split parity (I got 3x 8TB as array and 2x 4TB for parity)
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.
Enterprise decommissions, workplace, stuff ehere they just want to get rid of it quick
datablocks.dev is a Dutch company.
It looks like good prices. But every single one is out of stock
I see 14 SKUs in stock. They explain how they get stock, just need to be patient.
That said, OP is asking for something around 100 EUR which is pretty low and not many enterprises or SMBs will buy drives that small. That just sucks if you need something like 4Tb.
They have good deals on 10+ Tb drives tho.
Amazing! Thanks
Oh well … they’re not getting cheaper.
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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
Ideally 2 or 3 10Tb drives but I would even be happy with 4Tb for now
I’ve got a 12tb sitting with a dead control board. looking for parts to fix it with tbh.
I’m sure there are folks selling drives like that online.