my collection of digital media files grew exponentially during the Covid-19 pandemic. I have a rented server with 4x10 GB spinning disks in RAID-10 (= 20 usable TB in total) and the array is already filled with over 10 TB. I expect to hit the full 20 TB in some months time, but this will then also be the maximum storage, that I will need.
There are other considerations though, in my view. Resiliency, EMP-proof DC facilities, electricity, Exchange redundancy, etc. These things do justify the investment in hosting vs SPoF at home.
@bdl said:
but seriously, how tolerant are you to heat/noise at home?
I know what you are getting at, but I think that having a real server / not quiet computer at home would be outside my tolerance level. I really like it quiet...
I only have it connected intermittently for when I'm actually doing backups, but a raspberry pi plus powered external USB drive is a good solution for this, especially if you actually are only going to be plugging one or two drives in at once.
I wouldn't recommend a bus-powered external USB drive though.
Old thread but it's hard to beat Hetzner Storage box for hassle avoidance at affordable cost (about €2 per TiB/month = $2 per 1e12 bytes/month since that's how HDD capacity is stated). HDD's at home have IME been horribly unreliable, especially when not kept spinning (i.e. keep drive in drawer for a year = failure on attempt to power up).
It's unfortunate that LTO8 tape drives are so expensive since the tapes (12TB capacity) are about $60 each now, and are better than HDD's for archiving. In fact they are a reasonable way to store a large media library if you can live with ~ 1 minute retrieval time for less frequently used items. You'd cache the more frequently used ones on HDD.
Anyway, Reddit has r/datahoarder for this general topic.
@willie said:
HDD's at home have IME been horribly unreliable, especially when not kept spinning (i.e. keep drive in drawer for a year = failure on attempt to power up).
Glad it's not just me. Nearly every drive I've had fail catastrophically has been one that was retired in full working order for an upgrade, then brought back into service for some other project after many months without power. Has made me very wary of using HDDs for any kind of [literally] cold storage.
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There are other considerations though, in my view. Resiliency, EMP-proof DC facilities, electricity, Exchange redundancy, etc. These things do justify the investment in hosting vs SPoF at home.
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I only have it connected intermittently for when I'm actually doing backups, but a raspberry pi plus powered external USB drive is a good solution for this, especially if you actually are only going to be plugging one or two drives in at once.
I wouldn't recommend a bus-powered external USB drive though.
Old thread but it's hard to beat Hetzner Storage box for hassle avoidance at affordable cost (about €2 per TiB/month = $2 per 1e12 bytes/month since that's how HDD capacity is stated). HDD's at home have IME been horribly unreliable, especially when not kept spinning (i.e. keep drive in drawer for a year = failure on attempt to power up).
It's unfortunate that LTO8 tape drives are so expensive since the tapes (12TB capacity) are about $60 each now, and are better than HDD's for archiving. In fact they are a reasonable way to store a large media library if you can live with ~ 1 minute retrieval time for less frequently used items. You'd cache the more frequently used ones on HDD.
Anyway, Reddit has r/datahoarder for this general topic.
If you have tape drives at home, it's a MUST to make your basement look like this:
Glad it's not just me. Nearly every drive I've had fail catastrophically has been one that was retired in full working order for an upgrade, then brought back into service for some other project after many months without power. Has made me very wary of using HDDs for any kind of [literally] cold storage.