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? 😁
Depends on the size you are looking for, but I saw some good deals for ~4TB on Vinted
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on eBay, but I bet you could also do worse than getting used parts off Gumtree, look for anyone selling a broken or outdated computer - or in the free section - and spend some time going through a pile of ewaste, shucking all the drives, and then running tests on them.
Have you tried Tweakers Vraag & Aanbod yet?
Yeah, I have it opening every morning to see if there are any new ads
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.
2/3 of the drives I received from GoHardDrive failed within 2 years and all I got was a pre-bubble refund.
Oof. 🙃
They do, but there may be better local alternatives, since the shipping can be quite high.
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
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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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!
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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 PisSUBSCRIBE
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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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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:
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
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 have a 2tb ssd for my media server. I haven’t filled it yet, but I do sometimes delete things. Don’t tell anyone.
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.
Serverpartdeals?
€356 excluding USA to EU shipping… Oof!
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).
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).
What sort of tests do you run?
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.
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.
