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!
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.