Everyone asks "where do we get more storage?" and not "do we need to hoard all of this?"
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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The answer is yes.
Seconded.
Because the answer to the second question is a very clear "yes".
Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I'm going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn't as permanent as it was cracked up to be.
There's plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.
Aren't old games pretty small though? It's new ones that you may need a huge volume to store many of them. Depends how much we are talking of course. 2TB or 50TB?
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I have family photos starting in 2001, scanned/captured photos and video going back 50 years, music, and backups of all my Xbox DVDs (WTF is the original Xbox even called today?). But that's a few terrabytes. It can all fit on a few USB sticks. (Which I do as a third level backup.)
The real space killers are the TV shows and movies that I will watch at most once every 20 years. I could delete almost all of it. But I don't. Instead I keep looking for bigger storage options.
I've become much more selective with my video quality. I've found that 480p encoded from a raw source produces pretty acceptable quality, anything that isn't made to be eye candy I'll encode myself from a raw file down to 480p. There have been many things that have been very hard to find, so I feel it's more important that they exist, rather than be in the highest definition possible. Quality of pixels is more important that quantity of pixels.
This really depends on what you're watching it on. 480p can look fine on a phone but like garbage on a 65" OLED. I find that 720p is good for most shows that aren't visually stunning (like Foundation) while most movies look fine in 1080p on the aforementioned OLED.
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With how the internet is going, I don't think we will be able to get content from it in 5 to 10 years. It will be completely locked down, so all we have on our drives will be it. Back to mailing DVDs!
Usenet will likely still be around, and torrents are like playing whack-a-mole.
It will just be a lot harder to get to, and likely harsher laws put in place as well.
I mean, not allowing vpns for personal use would stop us all. Businesses would of course be allowed to use them.
"I mean, not allowing vpns for personal use would stop us all."
Yes and no. We'd go back to sneakernets. :)
... But that would be significantly more unpleasantly limited than the current ways of doing things...
And sneakernets would make personal archives more valuable than ever
I think a big fuel for these storage anxieties is the very real situation we're in right now, where we're watching the "forever Internet" erode and crumble before our eyes, and getting rug-pulled from every direction service-wise, and losing access to media we don't have a hard copy of.
I do wish there were a better way to pool all this storage for a common library of preservation...I mean I guess Internet Archive is like that but they're constantly under attack. All this is under heaps of legal "gray area" and obviously the media titans want to force a rental-only-own-nothing world.
Right now we kinda have to become a scattered group of amateur historians and librarians, to preserve our culture.
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People treat deleting like some dirty word, but all good collections need to be organized and pruned.
You donβt even necessarily need to delete either. If you have a ton of H.264 video you could convert it to 265 or AV1 with minimal quality loss, but huge space savings.
If you torrent that means stopping seeding tho
My only complaint is that lots of my streaming devices donβt natively support newer codecs. So if I convert everything to AV1, my server will end up transcoding basically everything. Smart TVs are particularly bad about supporting anything past h264.
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We wouldn't be here if we hadn't already answered the second question affirmatively.
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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.
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In my country we have a website that resells "old" and used server hardware, including HDDs for reasonable prices. Although that has gone up a lot over the last year or so.
Maybe you have something like that in the Netherlands? I recently bought an 18TB drive for around β¬400.
Storage is just expensive these days. Just like RAM.
Marty, we need to go back...to the future!
(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.
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Ebay, particularly GoHardDrives, or sometimes you'll find new drives from random sellers.
I also check ServerPartDeals. Drives are pricy these days, don't sneeze near your NAS.
Edit: I'm not sure if they ship internationally or not, however.
2/3 of the drives I received from GoHardDrive failed within 2 years and all I got was a pre-bubble refund.
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Honestly, Iβve been taking a chance on eBay. If the price is close to $10/TB and the drive is an enterprise drive that is listed as known to be working, with a good return policy, I take the risk. I just run tests as soon as I have it so far, all have been good (eight purchases).
Same. I use these drives in a mirrored setup or to hold data that's replaceable. If they make it a few months without showing errors they might get entrusted to something more important. I'll shell out for a new drive for my constantly in use drives, luckily I read the warning signs and bought a few 20tb HDDs when ram and SSDs started skyrocketing. I'm kicking myself for not grabbing a few backup m.2 nvme and 2.5" SSDs, because I'm already doing the hardrive shuffle in my mini PCs. I'm fine living life with networked rusty spinners, but I really really don't want to go back to spinny boot/high throughput drives.
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Frugal and recycled. Using a mix of old disks in OMV8 with a mergerfs array, suprisingly they amounted to 20TB, so saved a few bob.
If a disk fails in Mergerfs you loose the data on that disk only and not the array as you would with a pure jbod array.
There is a remove disk utility in the OMV8 mergerfs plugin that allows the data from a failing disk to be copied back to the array, if enough space is available, retaining the data from the failing disk. The disk can then be physically removed. If the array is short on space, add a disk to expand the array before removing the failing disk.
I've only ever used it with a failing disk, not a failed disk, I would guess that a backup would be required in that case.
The same applies to mergerfs outside of OMV8, this was easier for me.
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I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.
You know the fun part is you could just about use a 750 zip disk to steam video. Read speeds are about 7.5mb/s...enough for 1-2 simultaneous 480p Jellyfin streams.
Shit...everybody about RAID and here we are suggesting RAIT. No school like old school.
I still think the "DVD shuffler clockwork JF server with AI upscale" idea would be more fun to build tho, because as stupid as it sounds, the maths adds up. It would be gloriously cursed, but 3000+ hours of video is 3000 + hours of video.
I used to have a DVD duplicator. Picked it up at an auction many, many years back then turned it for twice what I had in it. Something similar to this:
I usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they're a bit smaller than I'd like them to be, but on the other hand they're free except from the minor work and documentation involved in ensuring that no company related data remain.
Wish my company allowed that. Everything goes to a licensed secure destruction service that literally puts them through an industrial shredder. Awesome to watch, but wasteful as all hell.
Well, there's a footnote on my end: Me taking the drives home is a bit of a grey area, as the procedures say that the drives are to be mechanically destroyed when no longer needed. It doesn't specify needed by whom. And I do attack them with my angle grinder, so it's in accordance with company policy.
And yes, my employer knows and is OK with it. We go through a ridiculous amount of drives due to large storage needs, so pragmatism tends to trump bureaucracy.
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My work sells commercial tier drives that were used by customers in NVRs for $10/TB. It's honestly a great perk of the job for a data hoarder like myself with a fully redundant 100TB of stuff (aka 200TB of drives). I also got a dope 16 bay server chassis with slides and a few other components from them. I fully intend to drop like 2 grand on HDDs if/when I move to a new company, assuming they don't fire me for AI or something first.
I've had good success buying second hand on eBay, but I bet you could also do worse than getting used parts off Gumtree, look for anyone selling a broken or outdated computer - or in the free section - and spend some time going through a pile of ewaste, shucking all the drives, and then running tests on them.
Well let's start with how much you need.
Then we can all cry. Currently looking at replacing HDDs with SSDs and significantly cutting down on my data storage requirements - basically uninstalling all those games I haven't played in a long time and probably won't. Plus it's easier to avoid getting sucked into playing ESO and wasting money on it if it's behind a 100+ GB download. Majority of games I actually play are under 5GB so I could go pretty heavy. Couple second hand 512GB SSDs perhaps? Under Β£100...
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trash bins π sometimes you can get permission, other times not. π€· I've gotten permission to dig in this one trash bin, and it had a ton of decent 3tb hdds from server rack. pretty hard use and 1/3 of the ones I picked was overheating but the rest were still good!
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Personally I just track sales constantly. I know I don't want less than my smallest, so I look for 14TB and up. If I come.across an upgrade for the right price, I buy it even if I don't need it right now. The drive I replace moves to another array, so its not wasted. Hell I'm still using some 2-3TB drives in the (much larger in qty) backup array.
The only thing I'd point out with the DC is they may not even have the hardware in there - there's a stupid amount of money that is being counted against product not even installed (or even shipped yet) in the stock value game these narcissistic scumbags are playing.
Get lucky - just as this was starting I saw a failed disk notification on my NAS so I ordered a new drive just before they went up. Then I realized it was a stale notification for the drive I replaced a year ago so I have a spare should one fail.
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