Selfhosted

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.

Everyone asks "where do we get more storage?" and not "do we need to hoard all of this?"

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.

Marty, we need to go back...to the future!

https://ebay.io/m/85Z5UG

(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 (400+ DVDs) were a thing for a minute. You'd have to write bridge software because they're HDMI and 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...hmm...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.

$300...I could do this. I could make a clock work Jellyfin server...

No, stop. This is a dangerous rabbit hole.

PS: shit - I just thought of two better options - and one of them is even semi sane (store video at 480-540p on DVD as mkv, use Nvidia shield to upscale on fly to 1080p). Back of envelope maths suggests this would be around 3000 movies.

I should not be online this late at night with easy access to credit card.

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.

https://datablocks.dev/ is a Dutch company.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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'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.

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.