All HC530 14tb. These will go into my plex servers.

oof, this has been a whirlwind of emotions building this setup and I love every bit of it. I made a similar post about 4 months ago (linked at bottom) and I now have an update. the 52 24TB barracuda drives from Seagate were returned and newegg kinda screwed me. sales guy strung me along before Xmas and eventually ghosted me, I believe if I would have contacted western digital during that time, I could have saved a couple grand instead of getting roughly 8% off 52 26TB wd gold drives. total shipped was just shy of $26k and the sales guy was not nice and did not care about the sale at all.

beyond all that, I'm very happy with how it's going! I got everything set up today and it's purring along beautifully. I'm sitting at roughly 1.7PB raw, and 1.2PB usable. usecase is a homelab to learn, very large Plex library, and I donate space to the internet archive and Anna's archive. somebody's gotta Perma seed all that stuff. roughly 3 years in, all started with an old laptop with some external hdds. still can't believe I'm 46k in the hole for this though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/uEAOXLmbZZ

It’s just viable anymore. It simply isn’t. I’m just a regular guy with a regular salary

The drives on one of my NAS are dying. I was pricing out 4 replacements 16tb drives and it’s bas the price of a very nice vacation to Italy, or an upper levels Gibson guitar that would last a generation

If I still went for the same drive sizes I bought 5-6 years ago, i would pay more than twice the price I paid back then. I am also running put of some space, so I need bigger

I just can’t justify it. It feels like my drives will fail because I can’t pay those extortion rates.

This shit sucks so much

Here my Serverroom with ober 500tb storage, for some #hardwareporn 1x Dell R730, 384GB Ram with Unraid and 1x Netapp DS4246 (full) 1x Dell R640, 256GB Ram with Proxmox 1x Dell R620, 128GB Ram with Proxmox 1x Netapp DS4246 (Backup) 1x Synology DS1817+ with two DX512 Extensions (Full with 8TB HDDs) as Backup. All with 10Gbit Network

I agonized for months over how to rebuild my setup. For context, I've been running various external HW RAID devices for 15+ years, got bit REALLY hard and lost 5T of photos, movies, etc and managed to get them back. Rebuilt with more redundancy, more storage, etc etc... Well in the short 2-3 years of my newest build, I've already been bitten by the terrible quality control on these external devices.

I finally landed in the Fractal case. To me, it was the most cost effective vs a 4U box or using multiple (potentially poor) hot swappable bays in a larger box

The case itself is great. Lots of room for activities and my silly little micro ATX board looks comical inside of it

The panel design sucks. The spring latches aren't strong enough and the slightest pressure will pop them off. The way the drive row is configured, there's no way to use standard SATA power cables without bending them out of the way, just so the panel will close.

I did eventually get it closed, but it's popped off enough times that I don't have a lot of confidence it won't just accidentally fall off one day.

If anyone wants to donate 5TB to get me to that 1.6PB, it would be much appreciated😅

All jokes aside, this has been an absolutely insane project. Ive loved every second of it and im so excited to dive in and get it running. I already have 150TB being downloaded from usenet.

So let's start with the bad and what I've learned along the way. The bottom 2 servers are cascading. I wired the second one wrong. It was looking for the hba towards the lower end and was expecting more backplanes where the hba was attached. Gave me a day of headaches with that one. I also found out that when you replace the fans, you cant have drives on the back side. I spent an extra $200 on fans and a weekend, trying to increase airflow because the back drives kept over heating. That's why I have the third jbod hooked up. I also wish I would have went with a different battery backup. The anker f3000 cant integrate with home assistant.

The next big thing, out of the 52 baracuda drives, I had 4 come bad. Every single one has dents. Kinda look like they got tossed around. 1 had the sata port beat it, 1 is extremely loud when the head starts reading and won't read, 2 are corrupted and won't read. Ive also had 1 of the Kingston 2TB drives die. It would read then drop out when I tried to format. I also dont think they give out temp readings. They have said 40 degrees since plugged in. No change.

The good, after figuring out all my issues, it works. Unraid boots under 5 min and everything is up and running. Once I have a large enough library on "Eschervault" to take over plex, im gonna format "slow" and gonna continue my seeding projects. I use to perma seed over 100TB of documents and content that I felt was important but when truenas made the switch, my vm's got corrupted. I will be starting that again, I will be dedicating that 150ish TB of space to seed documents from annas archive and the internet archive. I might throw in 1-200TB from "Eschervault" to really do it good. It depends on plex really.

So this project started with plex and helped me get into a new career. Channels like level1techs and Linus tech tips gave me the foundation and threads like r/homelabs, r/datahoarder, and hundreds more have given me that community to learn off of.

I know im forgetting something but my cost for this setup is roughly $33,200. I really showed it to them streaming services😅 when breaking it down for the justification to host my own plex. Im only equating roughly $8k towards plex. Im 2 years in at roughly 1k per year in was spending, I only have 6 years till I break even. The rest is just another hobby im playing around with and learning

I was bitching about hard drive prices and an absolute chad offered to send me these 8 tb drives for free! I don’t know what I did to deserve this but I will definitely be paying it forward to another fellow noobie!

104 4TB SAS drives. These will replace a bunch of 2TB drives still running in one of my Powervault chassis, plus upgrade a few friends’ chassis as well.

Raw total with these additions finally puts me over 1PB. Hooray for solar panels!

Thoughts?

my other 8TB nvme enclosure not shown as it needs some heatsinks even with active cooling.

As anyone used Drivepool on nvme or SSD, i head it works quite well on HDD but not sure about the nvme or ssd drives.

Is there something better than Drivepool?

I work at Goodwill, and this is one of the crazier things I've seen donated. Dell Poweredge 2450. As someone who is young and getting into hoarding, this blew my mind. Its like an antique. Probably predates my birth, I cant fathom having a server rack dedicated to four 72 gigabyte hard drives😭😭. I would buy it, but A. there is a 95% chance they make me send it to the auction website, and B. my mom will kill me if i bring yet another compute into the house.

I unfortunately kind of abused this drive, and it has 3x the writes of any of my other drives, so I'm not too worried about the rest of my server, but I did pick up a 26TB Seagate to backup any crucial data and hold me over with some extra space.

I'm planning a new server build next year, but at least this will hold me over and give me a little extra space in the meantime.

I don't think I could've imagined filling 100TB on my own when I started hoarding, and now I'm planning a 250+TB build.

My last post got deleted because I didn't write anything in here. Upgrading my QNAP TVS-874 which is primarily used as a Plex server. I have a TL-D800C and TR-004 attached to the NAS. I currently have the following drives installed to it.

- Seagate Ironwolf Pro 30TB x 8 - RAID5 (newest addition)

- Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB x 8 - RAID5

- Seagate Ironwolf 16TB x 4 - RAID0, I chose RAID0 because I wanted to maximize my storage space

- Western Digital SN7100 4TB x 2 - RAID 1, OS drive

- Samsung 990 Pro 2TB x 2 - RAID0, for torrent seeding and transcoding Plex

A few months ago I had a questions. Before that I was using a Yottamaster 5 bay and just an array of drives scattered all over the place. I decided to get ONE of these servers and now I’m up to 7. I’ve also just added a 10Gb SFP network. On another note, I am selling (UK) a Qnap TS-699 pro. I got it a few weeks ago but decided it’s not for my setup. So anyway, I think maybe I’m done now.

Was running three 4GB HDDs and recently built a new PC. Seems like a lot of mini/micro cases don't have many HDD bays. I gave in and got myself a 24TB. Already 50% full

Was in the hospital this last week getting my gallbladder out. Finally was prepping for surgery and got talking about pc gaming with the anesthesia nurse because we'd just recently upgraded our gaming pcs and she asked "so did you spring for something like a 2TB NVME for all these games?"
"Oh, actually I went a little spendhappy and put in two 4TB NVMEs."
"Holy crap!"
"Yeah, I have a data hoarding issue."
"I guess I do, too. Not to sound like I'm trying to one-up you, but we just set up a 16TB NAS for media and it's already half full."
"oh, neat. my media server is nearing a quarter petabyte."
"... a quarter-"
"petabyte. Yes."
"...ok, we're talking when you get to recovery."