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? 😁
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.
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Some people just want to watch the world burn
Use 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
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 Pis
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. 🙃
Enterprise decommissions, workplace, stuff ehere they just want to get rid of it quick
Everyone asks “where do we get more storage?” and not “do we need to hoard all of this?”
The answer is 42.
Because the answer to the second question is a very clear “yes”.
The answer is yes.
Seconded.
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?
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)
- Beyond Sunset
- Citizen Sleeper
- Dino Strike (Wii)
- Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition
- Donut County
- Exo One
- Fallout 3
- Final Fantasy X (PS2)
- Firewatch
- Flower
- Go Vacation (Wii)
- Gun
- I Am Your Beast
- Inscryption
- Just Cause 2
- Killer Frequency
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1–4 (Wii)
- Lifeless Planet
- Luigi’s Mansion (GC)
- Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GC)
- Mini Ninjas (Wii)
- New Super Mario Bros (Wii)
- Luanti
- Scanner Somber
- Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
- A Short Hike
- Sid Meier’s Pirates! (Wii)
- Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
- State of Mind
- Super Mario Sunshine (GC)
- SUPERHOT
- The Exit 8
- The House of the Dead: Overkill (Wii)
- The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (GC)
- TOEM
- Twelve Minutes
- The Invincible
- Untitled Goose Game
- UnMetal
- Diablo 2
- WarioWare: Smooth Moves (Wii)
- We Love Katamari (PS2)
- Prince of Persia (Wii)
- Hitman 2 (GC)
- Cubivore (Wii)
TIL Sid Meier’s Pirates was released on Wii.
Its a really good version too. My favourite is probably the OG C64 (first love and all that) but the Wii has some real hidden gems.
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.
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.
“I mean, not allowing vpns for personal use would stop us all.”
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.
If you torrent that means stopping seeding tho
What you don’t want to hold onto The Wrecking Crew for your descendants?
We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t already answered the second question affirmatively.
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 you’re not useful as an archive.
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. :)
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. 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”.
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.
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:
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Depends on the size you are looking for, but I saw some good deals for ~4TB on Vinted
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
Vinted has some nice deals every so often.
But look at German sites for better HDD deals then NL.Any recommendations?
Serverpartdeals?
€356 excluding USA to EU shipping… Oof!
