My gut feeling would be to we wary of WD Red+ as the older ones weren't apparently not clearly labelled as SMR. This link claims the drive is CMR, but my suspicions are still high on it!
WD Red 12TB drives for $220 minus a $40 promo code = $180, so $15/T.B (T.B separated by a period is my abbreviation for decimal terabytes, i.e. 1e12 bytes). They are consumer drives with 3 year warranty but that is still under $.50/T.B/month.
Using 12 drives with raid-6 (2 parity drives), I get: 12T.B=10.9 TiB. 12 drives in box minus 2 parity = 10x10.9TiB=109 TiB in box. $2160 drive costs split over 36 months = $60/month, so $0.55/TiB/m for disk drives. Obviously that ignores the server cost and colo cost. And it would be lower if computed by 5 years, but 3 years may be more realistic given the still ongoing decreases in drive costs.
I'm not sure why use enterprise drives. Backblaze and seemingly other big users have consumer drives and just swap them out when they have to.
Purely because (a) they have a 5 year warranty and averaging the cost over the warranty period makes them less per TB/mo and (b) Backblaze have staff on hand to just swap them out whereas we have to get remote hands to do it.
The Hetzner auction servers (15x 10TB drives for $118/month) are actually very attractive compared to this, enough to put me close to the "don't do it" camp. With two parity drives that is $1/TiB/month but that includes the entire server with beefy cpu and lots of ram, hosting, no setup fees, etc. Maybe we should be talking about splitting up one of those servers instead of this colo idea. With THREE parity disks it's $1.08/TiB/m. Hard to resist. (Edit: fixed some wrong numbers).
Yes, the Hetzner option is the best alternative going and may make this unattractive to the point where there isn't enough interest. I fully agree with that and won't try to bang a square peg into a round hole. It is only ~24 hours so still just gauging interest.
@tme said: More bandwith than storage. Double/Triple would be awesome. Ready to reduce a bit of storage space for more bandwith
Do you mean monthly? Idk how the economics works out but this storage is imagined as pure cold backups, I think. So there's not really a way to use bw=3x storage for the intended purpose and even 2x seems hard.
The 2U pricing appears to include unmetered 1 Gbps. In that case I wouldn't care about the quantity of BW but more how the usage impacts other people being able to upload/retrieve their stuff. I guess that people would hammer it pretty good for a few weeks while uploading and after that people are going to get the full 1 Gbps most of the time.
@corbpie said:
All the said providers aren’t doing storage in Dallas, that was my main interest point
Yea, that's a big selling point for me too. Transferring data to another continent and being subject to exchange rates and German electricity costs (I saw Hetzner just announced that prices even for current products will be increased) isn't ideal. Plus I'd ideally like to run some stuff like my [internal] VoIP server and cancel the some of the VMs I have in Dallas. Can't really do that from Europe.
@tetech said: I saw Hetzner just announced that prices even for current products will be increased
Seems like about 10% from the FAQ, but not disclosed yet.
Start: 2022-08-11 05:51 UTC+0 – Ends on: 2022-08-31 21:59 UTC+0
Due to increasingly rising electricity prices, we will introduce new prices on 1 September 2022 for all new orders of many of our products. Existing products (ones that customers ordered and that we have brought online by 31 August 2022) will have the “old” prices until 31 December 2022; the prices for these products will change on 1 January 2023.
@tetech said:
Probably a bit on the low side, but maybe keep an eye on how it develops. Do you have a target for "really cheap"? I suppose at some price point it 4TB becomes cheaper than 1TB somewhere else.
If your $1/TB is manageable then I would stretch to 4TB. I've no idea what the tax rate would be, so ideally $1 including tax, but if it's not too high I also might not care.
However, I think all the data I have, if de-duplicated, would be 6TB, including data I don't care about at all and I currently only back up off-site about 0.5TB important data, and 0.6TB of maybe useful data. Given how little data I have, I might well just be best served by continuing to use external disks for the "probably not useful data" and finding a new place to put them away from home (my off-site location used to be my office, but I now work for myself from home, so that's no longer practical).
I'd also echo some of the warnings. It could easily become a nightmare organisationally for you to maintain this server and for relatively modest savings, and I suspect my storage requirements are probably too low to make it worth the hassle for you.
@tetech said:
Probably a bit on the low side, but maybe keep an eye on how it develops. Do you have a target for "really cheap"? I suppose at some price point it 4TB becomes cheaper than 1TB somewhere else.
If your $1/TB is manageable then I would stretch to 4TB. I've no idea what the tax rate would be, so ideally $1 including tax, but if it's not too high I also might not care.
However, I think all the data I have, if de-duplicated, would be 6TB, including data I don't care about at all and I currently only back up off-site about 0.5TB important data, and 0.6TB of maybe useful data. Given how little data I have, I might well just be best served by continuing to use external disks for the "probably not useful data" and finding a new place to put them away from home (my off-site location used to be my office, but I now work for myself from home, so that's no longer practical).
I'd also echo some of the warnings. It could easily become a nightmare organisationally for you to maintain this server and for relatively modest savings, and I suspect my storage requirements are probably too low to make it worth the hassle for you.
Tax is 8.25% on most things. All warnings duly noted.
@willie said:
Any idea how much the color space itself will cost? I'm having redouble seeing it much under $100/m (2 amps) so that's $1/tb right there.
So that's $65 with tax for the colo. Maximum density I assume is 12x16TB drives, so 160TB usable which is $0.40/TB/mo. Minimum density is whatever we decide is viable, but for the sake of discussion assume it is 64TB which is $1/TB/mo, tax included.
If there's really not much demand, then we can drop to 1U for $30/mo+tax.
That is an amazing colo offer. 3 amps is 262 KWH/month if my math is right, so that's about $.23/KWH counting zero for the rack space and network. I'd worry about them trying to jack up the price after a while.
I do think for a 12 drive dual cpu server, 3 amps are probably needed. For a 4 drive 1U server, 1 amp may be just barely possible using a low powered processor. What do you expect to spend on the server hardware? That has to be counted too.
About raid-5, the idea of a 12-drive raid-5 array (11+1) seems doomed. At minimum the system should be taken offline while any rebuild is in progress, since user activity during a rebuid slows the rebuild a lot. I'd prefer 10+2 or even 9+3.
What would the timeframe for this be? Later is better for me since I want to avoid significant expenditures for the moment.
I have an old 1U dual cpu Opteron server with 4 drive slots that I can donate, but it weighs a ton and probably wants at least 2 amps, so may not be cost effective.
@AC_Fan said:
If you were doing this for fun, I would have researched and provided some options, but since you aren't, I'll just come out and say it: Don't do it.
It will be far more trouble than it's worth: you only need 10TB, and the difference between your rate (0.6$) and the market rate (2.0$, ServaRica) means you'll save a grand total of 14 dollars, which is roughly an okay McD meal.
If you need a storage VPS, go for ServaRica BF Offers (2TB at 4$ or 3.5TB at 7$, paid annually).
Otherwise, get decent cloud storage at a discount:
MS OneDrive: Get 4 * MS 365 Personal 15-month subscriptions at 4 * 60$, redeem on MS website, add a month of MS 365 Family at 10$. 250$ gets you 6TB of storage for 5 years and 1 month.
Google Drive: CryptoRefill/BitRefill, get Turkey gift card to use Turkey's discounted pricing.
Another note, you don't need a Turkey gift card or credit card to get the discounted pricing. You don't even need a VPN. If you set your country to Turkey at checkout, you can use a regular Visa credit card without needing a VPN.
FroCDN Files - Anonymously upload up to 15GB per file for free with unlimited bandwidth. FroCDN Paste - Paste text to share with others, fork of Hastebin. Also completely free to use.
@willie said:
I'm not sure why use enterprise drives. Backblaze and seemingly other big users have consumer drives and just swap them out when they have to.
Enterprise drives are becoming a lot cheaper, most drives 10-12TB+ are NAS/enterprise already.
If you're fine with refurbished, you can get 16TB's for as low as $180 and 14TB's for as low as $150
Although, the deal you pointed out is quite good 🤝
FroCDN Files - Anonymously upload up to 15GB per file for free with unlimited bandwidth. FroCDN Paste - Paste text to share with others, fork of Hastebin. Also completely free to use.
I see some amazing offers in Hetzner auction now, even at the relatively low end. Like Intel Xeon E3-1271V3, 32GB ECC ram, and 4x10TB enterprise drives in Helsinki for €42.70/month. I'm paying around €28 for a non-ECC i7-3770 and 2x3TB drives so maybe I should just upgrade. There are also some intermediate offers like 2x6TB etc.
@willie said:
That is an amazing colo offer. 3 amps is 262 KWH/month if my math is right, so that's about $.23/KWH counting zero for the rack space and network. I'd worry about them trying to jack up the price after a while.
They might (who knows what happens to future prices), but I'm not too worried. There are similar offers from others. They are going to assume that not everyone will max out their power allowance 100% of the time. Anyway, my retail cost is something like $0.15/kWh.
I do think for a 12 drive dual cpu server, 3 amps are probably needed. For a 4 drive 1U server, 1 amp may be just barely possible using a low powered processor.
I think it is pretty clear there will not be enough demand for 12 drives at least for some time. This is my actual usage on a dual-Xeon DL360 with 4 drives over the past 24 hours (blue = average, red = peak):
What do you expect to spend on the server hardware? That has to be counted too.
The server itself, under $500 (refurb, obviously) for a 12-bay DL380 with 2x E5-2630 v3, 32GB RAM, redundant power supplies, P840 RAID controller. Was already counted in all earlier numbers. This is one of the smallest costs (like $8/mo over 5 years, but it will definitely be ready for retirement then). Just the two parity drives for RAID6 would cost that much again.
About raid-5, the idea of a 12-drive raid-5 array (11+1) seems doomed. At minimum the system should be taken offline while any rebuild is in progress, since user activity during a rebuid slows the rebuild a lot. I'd prefer 10+2 or even 9+3.
After the first couple of posts, numbers have all assumed RAID6. This really hurts the $/TB for 4 drives, so if there is low demand maybe it gets revisited.
What would the timeframe for this be? Later is better for me since I want to avoid significant expenditures for the moment.
I'd probably aim for a go/no-go decision in the next few weeks, but to actually put it in production maybe mid-October. It would be kind of nice to give people time to copy stuff off BF deals in time to cancel them in an orderly way.
I have an old 1U dual cpu Opteron server with 4 drive slots that I can donate, but it weighs a ton and probably wants at least 2 amps, so may not be cost effective.
It is a nice offer, thank you, but yeah it probably isn't worth trying to save too much on that.
@willie said: I see some amazing offers in Hetzner auction now, even at the relatively low end. Like Intel Xeon E3-1271V3, 32GB ECC ram, and 4x10TB enterprise drives in Helsinki for €42.70/month. I'm paying around €28 for a non-ECC i7-3770 and 2x3TB drives so maybe I should just upgrade. There are also some intermediate offers like 2x6TB etc.
If you're fine with Helsinki, then it is a good deal.
@willie said:
I see some amazing offers in Hetzner auction now, even at the relatively low end. Like Intel Xeon E3-1271V3, 32GB ECC ram, and 4x10TB enterprise drives in Helsinki for €42.70/month. I'm paying around €28 for a non-ECC i7-3770 and 2x3TB drives so maybe I should just upgrade. There are also some intermediate offers like 2x6TB etc.
@willie, let's split up one of those hetzner boxes and proxmox/nat it up? what do you say?
@vish said: @willie, let's split up one of those hetzner boxes and proxmox/nat it up? what do you say?
Hmm, I have some interest in that. What do you have in mind?
I'm flexible. I can do anything from the 4x6tb up to the 4x16tb.. you can put it on your account or I can use mine. don't matter to me. The $/TB is amazing on all of those right now. trying to get some storage before the price hikes come along.
PS - location can be either HEL, NBG or FSN, I have no preference.
How much space do you want? Would it be just you and me? I have a 2x3tb dedi now that I'd want to cancel, but I do sometimes use it for computing. Mostly idle, but occasionally a long computation (hours to days) on all 4 cores. Would that get in your way?
I let this sit for a week or so, and it seemed to "die a death", which is fair enough.
I'm probably still going to do the colo for my own needs but will limit it to 1U without the same potential for expansion. I'm going to re-think what to put into it, and if there's still spare space I might just offer that after the thing is running.
That sounds like a reasonable plan: although, a 1U server (not counting drives) tends to cost at least as much as a 2U, and in some data centers, an extra 1U of rack space doesn't cost much either (it's electric power and bandwidth that cost). So you could leave yourself some headroom. Anyway please keep us updated about what you do, even if there is no offer of space to others. Some of us like to keep an eye on this sort of option. Up til now colo just hasn't kept up with hosted storage, surprisingly.
@willie said:
That sounds like a reasonable plan: although, a 1U server (not counting drives) tends to cost at least as much as a 2U, and in some data centers, an extra 1U of rack space doesn't cost much either (it's electric power and bandwidth that cost). So you could leave yourself some headroom. Anyway please keep us updated about what you do, even if there is no offer of space to others. Some of us like to keep an eye on this sort of option. Up til now colo just hasn't kept up with hosted storage, surprisingly.
Yes, the server cost will basically be zero difference. The colo for 1U is approximately half 2U though, and that is the killer if I'm doing it for myself. I already have a (1U) DL360 at my house and I am tempted to move that to colo and replace it with a (2U) DL380 at the house, where space isn't a constraint.
Comments
My gut feeling would be to we wary of WD Red+ as the older ones weren't apparently not clearly labelled as SMR. This link claims the drive is CMR, but my suspicions are still high on it!
Purely because (a) they have a 5 year warranty and averaging the cost over the warranty period makes them less per TB/mo and (b) Backblaze have staff on hand to just swap them out whereas we have to get remote hands to do it.
Yes, the Hetzner option is the best alternative going and may make this unattractive to the point where there isn't enough interest. I fully agree with that and won't try to bang a square peg into a round hole. It is only ~24 hours so still just gauging interest.
The 2U pricing appears to include unmetered 1 Gbps. In that case I wouldn't care about the quantity of BW but more how the usage impacts other people being able to upload/retrieve their stuff. I guess that people would hammer it pretty good for a few weeks while uploading and after that people are going to get the full 1 Gbps most of the time.
Yea, that's a big selling point for me too. Transferring data to another continent and being subject to exchange rates and German electricity costs (I saw Hetzner just announced that prices even for current products will be increased) isn't ideal. Plus I'd ideally like to run some stuff like my [internal] VoIP server and cancel the some of the VMs I have in Dallas. Can't really do that from Europe.
Seems like about 10% from the FAQ, but not disclosed yet.
If your $1/TB is manageable then I would stretch to 4TB. I've no idea what the tax rate would be, so ideally $1 including tax, but if it's not too high I also might not care.
However, I think all the data I have, if de-duplicated, would be 6TB, including data I don't care about at all and I currently only back up off-site about 0.5TB important data, and 0.6TB of maybe useful data. Given how little data I have, I might well just be best served by continuing to use external disks for the "probably not useful data" and finding a new place to put them away from home (my off-site location used to be my office, but I now work for myself from home, so that's no longer practical).
I'd also echo some of the warnings. It could easily become a nightmare organisationally for you to maintain this server and for relatively modest savings, and I suspect my storage requirements are probably too low to make it worth the hassle for you.
Any idea how much the color space itself will cost? I'm having redouble seeing it much under $100/m (2 amps) so that's $1/tb right there.
Tax is 8.25% on most things. All warnings duly noted.
So that's $65 with tax for the colo. Maximum density I assume is 12x16TB drives, so 160TB usable which is $0.40/TB/mo. Minimum density is whatever we decide is viable, but for the sake of discussion assume it is 64TB which is $1/TB/mo, tax included.
If there's really not much demand, then we can drop to 1U for $30/mo+tax.
That is an amazing colo offer. 3 amps is 262 KWH/month if my math is right, so that's about $.23/KWH counting zero for the rack space and network. I'd worry about them trying to jack up the price after a while.
I do think for a 12 drive dual cpu server, 3 amps are probably needed. For a 4 drive 1U server, 1 amp may be just barely possible using a low powered processor. What do you expect to spend on the server hardware? That has to be counted too.
About raid-5, the idea of a 12-drive raid-5 array (11+1) seems doomed. At minimum the system should be taken offline while any rebuild is in progress, since user activity during a rebuid slows the rebuild a lot. I'd prefer 10+2 or even 9+3.
What would the timeframe for this be? Later is better for me since I want to avoid significant expenditures for the moment.
I have an old 1U dual cpu Opteron server with 4 drive slots that I can donate, but it weighs a ton and probably wants at least 2 amps, so may not be cost effective.
Another note, you don't need a Turkey gift card or credit card to get the discounted pricing. You don't even need a VPN. If you set your country to Turkey at checkout, you can use a regular Visa credit card without needing a VPN.
FroCDN Files - Anonymously upload up to 15GB per file for free with unlimited bandwidth. FroCDN Paste - Paste text to share with others, fork of Hastebin. Also completely free to use.
Enterprise drives are becoming a lot cheaper, most drives 10-12TB+ are NAS/enterprise already.
If you're fine with refurbished, you can get 16TB's for as low as $180 and 14TB's for as low as $150
Refurb:
https://www.amazon.com/Arsenal-7200RPM-3-5-Inch-Drive-Renewed/dp/B08K3TR9HD/
Although, the deal you pointed out is quite good 🤝
FroCDN Files - Anonymously upload up to 15GB per file for free with unlimited bandwidth. FroCDN Paste - Paste text to share with others, fork of Hastebin. Also completely free to use.
What is this thing about Turkey?
I see some amazing offers in Hetzner auction now, even at the relatively low end. Like Intel Xeon E3-1271V3, 32GB ECC ram, and 4x10TB enterprise drives in Helsinki for €42.70/month. I'm paying around €28 for a non-ECC i7-3770 and 2x3TB drives so maybe I should just upgrade. There are also some intermediate offers like 2x6TB etc.
They might (who knows what happens to future prices), but I'm not too worried. There are similar offers from others. They are going to assume that not everyone will max out their power allowance 100% of the time. Anyway, my retail cost is something like $0.15/kWh.
I think it is pretty clear there will not be enough demand for 12 drives at least for some time. This is my actual usage on a dual-Xeon DL360 with 4 drives over the past 24 hours (blue = average, red = peak):
The server itself, under $500 (refurb, obviously) for a 12-bay DL380 with 2x E5-2630 v3, 32GB RAM, redundant power supplies, P840 RAID controller. Was already counted in all earlier numbers. This is one of the smallest costs (like $8/mo over 5 years, but it will definitely be ready for retirement then). Just the two parity drives for RAID6 would cost that much again.
After the first couple of posts, numbers have all assumed RAID6. This really hurts the $/TB for 4 drives, so if there is low demand maybe it gets revisited.
I'd probably aim for a go/no-go decision in the next few weeks, but to actually put it in production maybe mid-October. It would be kind of nice to give people time to copy stuff off BF deals in time to cancel them in an orderly way.
It is a nice offer, thank you, but yeah it probably isn't worth trying to save too much on that.
If you're fine with Helsinki, then it is a good deal.
@willie, let's split up one of those hetzner boxes and proxmox/nat it up? what do you say?
Hmm, I have some interest in that. What do you have in mind?
I'm flexible. I can do anything from the 4x6tb up to the 4x16tb.. you can put it on your account or I can use mine. don't matter to me. The $/TB is amazing on all of those right now. trying to get some storage before the price hikes come along.
PS - location can be either HEL, NBG or FSN, I have no preference.
How much space do you want? Would it be just you and me? I have a 2x3tb dedi now that I'd want to cancel, but I do sometimes use it for computing. Mostly idle, but occasionally a long computation (hours to days) on all 4 cores. Would that get in your way?
I let this sit for a week or so, and it seemed to "die a death", which is fair enough.
I'm probably still going to do the colo for my own needs but will limit it to 1U without the same potential for expansion. I'm going to re-think what to put into it, and if there's still spare space I might just offer that after the thing is running.
That sounds like a reasonable plan: although, a 1U server (not counting drives) tends to cost at least as much as a 2U, and in some data centers, an extra 1U of rack space doesn't cost much either (it's electric power and bandwidth that cost). So you could leave yourself some headroom. Anyway please keep us updated about what you do, even if there is no offer of space to others. Some of us like to keep an eye on this sort of option. Up til now colo just hasn't kept up with hosted storage, surprisingly.
Yes, the server cost will basically be zero difference. The colo for 1U is approximately half 2U though, and that is the killer if I'm doing it for myself. I already have a (1U) DL360 at my house and I am tempted to move that to colo and replace it with a (2U) DL380 at the house, where space isn't a constraint.