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.
how do you find so cheap LTO drives?
you could also do an
RFIR remote bridge with two minimal PisIve seen LTO for sale in person at the $300 USD mark…but I admit that’s a rare occurrence / fire sale. So that “as little as” is probably not fair. Sorry and retracted.
EBay shows some in the $1200-1500 USD range (and maybe closer to $3-4K brand new).
That now makes me feel stupid for walking past one at $300 (“tape drive? Who the fuck needs that ancient shit”) but I’m willing to bet that wasn’t a lto-8, in hindsight.
Even my LTO-3 claim is not as remembered; I can find a lto-3 for $60 USD here locally (not the $5 I jokingly claimed), with cartridges in the $15 USD range.
https://ebay.io/m/1UST3Y
https://ebay.io/m/Gcf77T
Not bad, but not 12TB per cartridge.
All of this to say; the DVD shuffler + pi intermediary (+ NVIDIA shield if needed) is probably the genuinely better version of this. Bizarrely.
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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