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? 😁

  • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • unit327@lemmy.zip
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        15 hours ago

        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.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        RAIDz2 for 5.5TB with 2-disk redundancy.

        All of a sudden USB becomes important. 😅

    • Smurfi@lemmy.zipOP
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      1 day ago

      True, but it’ll be nice to have enough space to let the future arr stack I plan on spinning up, roam free