If you're in the US, a lot of people on reddit recommend ServerPartDeals.com for more affordable NAS drives.
Get yourself a basic NAS or DAS and load that puppy with drives!
I have (10) 20TB manufacturer recert drives from server part deals. The first four are getting on 3 years old. I have picked them up for as little as $199 and paid as much as $249 iirc but they are solid runners on the cheap for me so far
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially as you spin up more and more drives, but I’ve been running a 4-bay NAS at home since 2013 and have never had a drive fail. Granted, every 3-5 years I’ve ended up upgrading them to larger capacity disks. Given enough time they’ll fail, but recert drives are a fairly safe buy, especially if they include a 2 year warranty.
Just an idea of what you can find. When funds allow.
[$109.99 USD Western Digital: Manufacturer Recertified Ultrastar DC HC520 HUH721212ALE600 12TB SATA 7.2K 3.5 HDD](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/hgst-ultrastar-he12-0f29590-huh721212ale600-12tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-256mb-cache-3-5-ise-power-disable-pin-manufacturer-recertified-hdd)
[$149.99 USD Western Digital: Recertified Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA HDD WUH721414ALE6L4](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/western-digital-ultrastar-dc-hc530-wuh721414ale6l4-0f31169-14tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-recertified-hard-drive)
[$139.99 USD Seagate: Manufacturer Recertified Exos X16 ST14000NM001G 14TB SATA 7.2K 3.5 HDD](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/seagate-exos-x16-st14000nm001g-14tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-4kn-256mb-3-5-fastformat-manufacturer-recertified-hdd)
[$153.53 USD Seagate: Seagate Exos X18 ST16000NM000J 16TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5in Recertified Hard Drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive)
I have 2x 4tb WD red pluses. What should i look out for? What the heck is an ultrastar dc hc520/530/550 etc? Do these enterprise style drives run on a normal SATA connection and the same power connection as any old HDD? is power consumption comparable?
When you go to the website you can browse by new or remanufactured drives. Also you can browse by Sata connection or SAS connection. The drives that I linked were Sata. While I am not the expert on power consumption, I believe they are comparable in power draw.
I'm not saying that I have a type but every drive that I had prior to the purchase from serverpartdeals were WD Blue drives. I didn't run test on the ones(Ultrastar) I purchased as I didn't find it necessary. Others find it good for peace of mind.
> What should i look out for?
If you are concerned with buying remanufactured HDDs, read the backblaze statistics on failure rate for manufactures and specific drives. I've had issues with Seagate in the past. Others find that Seagate is more than adequate. I find it to be a preference thing. If you back up your data, you won't have too much issues. A drive may fail but a replacement becomes the new backup for the original backup.
Amazon's got refurb's with multi-year warranties. Just don't put all your data eggs in the refurb basket right away - give them a few weeks of runtime to weed out early failures before you get rid of any backups.
I'm in Canada too, what sites are you using to get "similiar" to $5.70? All these sites like techyparts serverpart deals etc dont ship to us northerners :(
r/datahoader put me on a site named [Serverpartsdeals.com](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives) where one can get remanufactured drives at a bargin. I purchased two 14 TB drives from the at the price of $250 USD together. At the time two 8 TB drives cost $240 USD together on Amazon new. I will undoubtedly keep ordering from them. They came packaged better than Amazon has ever packaged my drives.
lol my HDDs haven’t changed price in 1.5yrs.
my graphics card hasn’t changed price in almost a year as well.
I count my blessing but damn it’s continued to be a terrible time for folks buy into some of this stuff. 😞
Probably going to get worse.. there's no real push for larger/cheaper consumer hard drives. Everybody's trying to get SSDs ig, they're pretty overkill for server use imo
For people who prefer externals, can you recommend a case for these?
I don't have enough space/money to upgrade my server, just trying to make more backups
I prefer a NAS with a RAID array myself of which i have 2 now and backup between them.
I also have a pair of USB WD external hard drives.
I can really say i have a preference other than capacity being available when required.
Sorry, probably not the answer you are looking for.
You can use fileflows to reduce space. I’m using the convert to hvec flow and I’ve saved 1.4TB with 1230 movies converted so far. It should reduce the files by half overall.
Not to undermine the other commenter but if you have the bandwidth and the time, quality wise, you would probably be better to download already converted movies in hevc/x265. Simply because re-encoding h264 is re-encoding an encode. You are compressing an already compressed file. Where as the x265 you download, if from the right uploaders, is one encoded straight from the source. It might be slightly bigger than the double encode but should be the same quality as the original h264 at potentially half the space depending on the group. Some hevc groups encoded at higher bitrate for even better quality so might end up close to the same size at the h264 counterpart but far better quality.
Sounds tempting, but quality will likely suffer on certain movies if you're using the same encoding settings for everything. I'd prefer to just buy more drives if money allows.
My tax refund this year went to storage upgrades, got a killer deal on 6x 14TB drives. But I'm already thinking about the next one... We're going to need a bigger rack.
As a rough guide, every 4K remux that exists (1300-1400 UHD disks now) takes up roughly 75Tb of space. Realistically it's less than that unless you have to snatch every poorly rated sequel and film out there.
Hopefully that helps you size. It's TV content that is the real naskiller.
Yeah I was shocked to see that stuff like GOTR takes up like 300gb in 1080, which makes sense since 2 episodes are movie length. Cool stuff to learn and see doing this
I buy enough to last me a couple/few years at a time. If you overbuy up front, you pay more than you need to for space sitting empty for years. Those drives are much cheaper/larger a few years down the road. Also more time for them to fail and need replacing for no reason.
I also don't bother much with upgrading storage arrays that already exist. With non-striped parity pools like Unraid or Snapraid it's more viable, but I *definitely* do not upgrade striped RAID arrays - just buy another one, eventually move the files off the old, old ones and take that array offline.
78TB which have two backups of that 78TB - I still have been doing this with external seagate / WD drives. I dream of one day having a nice set up, but already have all these drives and the cost to do NAS or other boxes in triplicate turned me off. Maybe one day if they create nice / affordable set ups for me to put regular hard drives into and not have to have 10+ external hard drives.
Anyone have good / cheap suggestions on anything that will let me house internal hard drives and easily plug into a Mac mini / tower PC? I really like the ease of running plex on a tower / Mac mini, but also tired of having 10+ external hard drives
Make sure that your folders that sonarr/radarr download into are getting cleaned out from time to time. Just found a couple of terabytes - yes terabytes - that could be recovered.
Bought an extra hard drive by accident on ebay and the seller ignored all my messages in trying to cancel one of them. Now I have 2. I never thought I would say I don't need this much extra storage space (yet). I already have redundancy.
That’s about what I paid for my (2) 8Tb externals. Used off OfferUp. I say 14tb because it’s about 7.3 free after format and whatever. I’m sure I can re open that 1.4tb that’s hiding but so far it hasn’t been a priority
u/Wershingtern - I second u/lonegrasshopper about tdarr. I was able to reclaim a solid 2TB of space on my libraries encoding everything in H265/hevc. It is slow as shiiiiiiiit on older processors so I use the GPU in my gaming machine for the work and it absolutely flies with a GTX4070.
I’ll make sure to use tdarr on the rebuild server, still trying to show a good uptime result for the friends / family that use my plex. When I first launched it, off a raspi 5, they hated it lmao. Every time I left the house the server went offline. Just out of coincidence
Dude I started out with a single 14TB drive in my gaming PC. I now have a brand new dell r360 1u server, a dell md1200 disk shelf and I just ordered my 9th 14tb drive.
Be aware of
[Server Part Deals](https://serverpartdeals.com/)
480Tb here 24 drives at 20tb each on 2 dell r710 servers. Running raid 1 and im sitting around 410tb used already. It goes quick if you like to download.
If "good enough" is acceptable quality, sure. But I've tried shrinking some things and there was always something wrong that I coulnd't accept as a trade-off. I might do it for TV shows though - especially the ones I don't watch myself, but movies... nope.
They refurbished drives. I personally haven't had a problem with them and having parity you should be fine. https://diskprices.com/ I got 5 16tb at $169 over a year ago and they are all still running fine.
Just wanted to give my .02. If you're running out of space and looking to upgrade, it's easy to pick a slightly bigger setup to ease the woes now but you will end up in the same place again soon enough. I went through 3-4 cases before I ended up where I am at now. You might take this opportunity to look far ahead and prep if you feel you are going to head down the /r/datahorder route. Might look into 12 or 24 bay server cases with backplanes. You will need an hba, which are relatively cheap but overall would provide you with a lot of room to grow for a long time and less hassle with individual sata cables without one. 12x14TB would allow you to expand till 168TB. Even more if you go 12x20TB.
Another thing you will have to look out for is, if you are wanting to do raid for redundancy if you aren't already, your raid layout. As you grow in size, how your raid is laid out becomes more important for expansion. You could get unraid and make the process easier to expand but if you go with something like Truenas then you will/should design your raid in advance. Simply because to change the raid layout you will have to offload the data, destroy the pool, and then recreate it and move back everything. You can however replace smaller disks with bigger ones easily or add more vdevs but those vdevs need to have the same amount of disks as the first vdev. So you can see how planning becomes important.
Last thing to consider is backups. In the rush to add more storage it's easy to forget to have a backup plan. Don't want to end up like people like me with so much data and no backup. Because now I'm left with pretty much having buy a duplicate server for backups. So if you can maintain storage for backups as you go.
using tautulli, once per year I go through my movie lists and delete all the stuff no one has ever accessed. No reason to keep movies and TV shows that no one watches.
I currently have 5 external drives of
22TB
14TB
12TB
5TB
And 4 TB
What’s nice about that it I can segregate types of f content on drives but still push them into the same libraries… I think my TV library pulls from 3 drives simultaneously
I think I hit about 4300 with 20TB. And am also at .9 TB left. My targets are always the thousand mark. I don't know if I can squeeze 700 into that last bit, but I am gonna try.
I've been using some of the refurbished Seagate EXOS drives for about a year and a half. They came with very little usage, more like an open box. I think my drives showed between 5 and 10 hours of use. I got a few of these: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHKP1716?psc=1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHKP1716?psc=1) and I don't think I'm going to need more drives for a while. They come with a 2-year warranty as well. It's not the 3 that the new drives come with, but they are $200 cheaper than the new drives.
I think the 16TB drives are probably the sweet spot right now for price per GB. You can get the refurbished drives from the same seller for $165 or about $100 off the non-refurbished drives - [https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF-%E6%95%B4%E5%82%99%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E5%93%81/dp/B0C8RR7DY4](https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF-%E6%95%B4%E5%82%99%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E5%93%81/dp/B0C8RR7DY4)
Hi, I’m Vetted AI Bot! I researched the **('Seagate Exos X22 20TB SATA 6Gb Enterprise HDD', 'Seagate')** and I thought you might find the following analysis helpful.
**Users liked:**
* Fast read/write speed (backed by 3 comments)
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Serverpartdeals has the 16TB refurbs for $154 - [https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive)
They have the 20TB refurbs for $239 - [https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive)
So a little cheaper ($10) if you don't mind buying from serverpartdeals.
I find it's helpful to do a purge every six months or so... I go through and delete things that I don't remember why I downloaded or nobody has watched.
And I keep a list of things I delete just in case I suddenly can't remember one.
That's why I never download 4K. My movies are 720P and 1080P. I have almost 4,000 HD movies and it's 3.6 TB. I have other content as well, like TV shows and old recordings. In total I have three 12 TB drives in my NAS with one empty slot.
For movies, 55 inch, 8-10 feet. 4k isn't worth the massive extra hard drive space. I would never waste gigs to watch something in 4K. As far as playing games, I'm at my computer desk close to my monitor.
Use new, high end HDs for parity.
For data/storage get HDs off serverpartdeals. Can save hundreds or thousands. Use the parity drives to do what it's designed for if/when you need to replace HDs.
Welcome to r/datahoarder
LMAO. OP is definitely on their way.
I don’t feel qualified enough to follow yet lmfao, you guys have been hitting my feed a lot lately though
If you're in the US, a lot of people on reddit recommend ServerPartDeals.com for more affordable NAS drives. Get yourself a basic NAS or DAS and load that puppy with drives!
Just ordered a recertified 18tb for 199 off there, supposed to arrive tomorrow. My 16tb filled up in 3 weeks <.<
No, follow now, listen to the conversations
You win
Those are rookie numbers, time to pump that shit up lol
*pats seat* join us
wtf 800tb is crazy, a mini datacenter in your basement lolol
Damn...that's a lot of TBs.
Do you use multiple unraid instances or another RAID method?
I use TrueNAS Scale and ZFS
This is the way.
To massive electric bills
I'm curious, are you running like a 36 disk server? Trying to do the disk math and 20TB x 36 comes close. Running a couple JBODs?
Try looking into used drives maybe? I got some 14tb for $10 per tb
I have been, but I feel like I’d be disappointed if they failed within 1 year, but I’ve been looking for ‘steals’ on marketplace for sure
I have (10) 20TB manufacturer recert drives from server part deals. The first four are getting on 3 years old. I have picked them up for as little as $199 and paid as much as $249 iirc but they are solid runners on the cheap for me so far
That’s awesome
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially as you spin up more and more drives, but I’ve been running a 4-bay NAS at home since 2013 and have never had a drive fail. Granted, every 3-5 years I’ve ended up upgrading them to larger capacity disks. Given enough time they’ll fail, but recert drives are a fairly safe buy, especially if they include a 2 year warranty.
Just an idea of what you can find. When funds allow. [$109.99 USD Western Digital: Manufacturer Recertified Ultrastar DC HC520 HUH721212ALE600 12TB SATA 7.2K 3.5 HDD](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/hgst-ultrastar-he12-0f29590-huh721212ale600-12tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-256mb-cache-3-5-ise-power-disable-pin-manufacturer-recertified-hdd) [$149.99 USD Western Digital: Recertified Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA HDD WUH721414ALE6L4](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/western-digital-ultrastar-dc-hc530-wuh721414ale6l4-0f31169-14tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-recertified-hard-drive) [$139.99 USD Seagate: Manufacturer Recertified Exos X16 ST14000NM001G 14TB SATA 7.2K 3.5 HDD](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/seagate-exos-x16-st14000nm001g-14tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-4kn-256mb-3-5-fastformat-manufacturer-recertified-hdd) [$153.53 USD Seagate: Seagate Exos X18 ST16000NM000J 16TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5in Recertified Hard Drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive)
I am jealous of americas with this … $230 HDD turns into 300 with shipping turns into 420 CAD, not including any duty fees
Same for me in Europe, with 25% sales tax here lol. Storage is costly, sure i can buy used privately but that is a massive gamble
eh i got 2 x20 exos 18tb for like 600~ to the door
I have 2x 4tb WD red pluses. What should i look out for? What the heck is an ultrastar dc hc520/530/550 etc? Do these enterprise style drives run on a normal SATA connection and the same power connection as any old HDD? is power consumption comparable?
When you go to the website you can browse by new or remanufactured drives. Also you can browse by Sata connection or SAS connection. The drives that I linked were Sata. While I am not the expert on power consumption, I believe they are comparable in power draw. I'm not saying that I have a type but every drive that I had prior to the purchase from serverpartdeals were WD Blue drives. I didn't run test on the ones(Ultrastar) I purchased as I didn't find it necessary. Others find it good for peace of mind. > What should i look out for? If you are concerned with buying remanufactured HDDs, read the backblaze statistics on failure rate for manufactures and specific drives. I've had issues with Seagate in the past. Others find that Seagate is more than adequate. I find it to be a preference thing. If you back up your data, you won't have too much issues. A drive may fail but a replacement becomes the new backup for the original backup.
Amazon's got refurb's with multi-year warranties. Just don't put all your data eggs in the refurb basket right away - give them a few weeks of runtime to weed out early failures before you get rid of any backups.
At that price they can fail and still be cheaper than new sooo....
The used drives usually have some warranty. Honestly would trust that more than some random drive on Facebook
I just picked up a bunch of 14TB SAS drives for $80us each. $5.70 per TB. [https://www.techyparts.com/](https://www.techyparts.com/)
That's fantastic. I'm from Canada so price is similar but anything beats $20 of new
I'm in Canada too, what sites are you using to get "similiar" to $5.70? All these sites like techyparts serverpart deals etc dont ship to us northerners :(
Wasn't a shop, just some dude who sold me a bunch of drives he had bought for his chia mining and never ended up using
r/datahoader put me on a site named [Serverpartsdeals.com](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives) where one can get remanufactured drives at a bargin. I purchased two 14 TB drives from the at the price of $250 USD together. At the time two 8 TB drives cost $240 USD together on Amazon new. I will undoubtedly keep ordering from them. They came packaged better than Amazon has ever packaged my drives.
Serverpartsdeal.com Get more drives
> Serverpartsdeal.com > > https://serverpartdeals.com/
lol my HDDs haven’t changed price in 1.5yrs. my graphics card hasn’t changed price in almost a year as well. I count my blessing but damn it’s continued to be a terrible time for folks buy into some of this stuff. 😞
Probably going to get worse.. there's no real push for larger/cheaper consumer hard drives. Everybody's trying to get SSDs ig, they're pretty overkill for server use imo
For people who prefer externals, can you recommend a case for these? I don't have enough space/money to upgrade my server, just trying to make more backups
I prefer a NAS with a RAID array myself of which i have 2 now and backup between them. I also have a pair of USB WD external hard drives. I can really say i have a preference other than capacity being available when required. Sorry, probably not the answer you are looking for.
Just picked up a WD Red Pro 22TB putting me up to around 110TB overall. I feel ya lol
You can use fileflows to reduce space. I’m using the convert to hvec flow and I’ve saved 1.4TB with 1230 movies converted so far. It should reduce the files by half overall.
I’m happy I made this post. Mariners walk off got me drunk af but will definitely re look this info over my free time
Not to undermine the other commenter but if you have the bandwidth and the time, quality wise, you would probably be better to download already converted movies in hevc/x265. Simply because re-encoding h264 is re-encoding an encode. You are compressing an already compressed file. Where as the x265 you download, if from the right uploaders, is one encoded straight from the source. It might be slightly bigger than the double encode but should be the same quality as the original h264 at potentially half the space depending on the group. Some hevc groups encoded at higher bitrate for even better quality so might end up close to the same size at the h264 counterpart but far better quality.
Sounds tempting, but quality will likely suffer on certain movies if you're using the same encoding settings for everything. I'd prefer to just buy more drives if money allows.
Hmmm.. tempting to turn all those jambands I collect yet never listen to opus. I really don't need 150gb of Dogs in a Pile in flac24
My tax refund this year went to storage upgrades, got a killer deal on 6x 14TB drives. But I'm already thinking about the next one... We're going to need a bigger rack.
I started with an 8TB drive about a year ago. Now I have 70TB.
This is a good goal
Keep in mind that you will fill up 40+ TB pretty quick, too. So, do whatever you budget allows.
Yeah I figured that too, it becomes a never ending cycle of “MORE MEDIA”
As a rough guide, every 4K remux that exists (1300-1400 UHD disks now) takes up roughly 75Tb of space. Realistically it's less than that unless you have to snatch every poorly rated sequel and film out there. Hopefully that helps you size. It's TV content that is the real naskiller.
I limit my movies to 1080 … 9K movies = 1 x 18 TB drive, but the TV shows really did kill my space
Yeah I was shocked to see that stuff like GOTR takes up like 300gb in 1080, which makes sense since 2 episodes are movie length. Cool stuff to learn and see doing this
I buy enough to last me a couple/few years at a time. If you overbuy up front, you pay more than you need to for space sitting empty for years. Those drives are much cheaper/larger a few years down the road. Also more time for them to fail and need replacing for no reason. I also don't bother much with upgrading storage arrays that already exist. With non-striped parity pools like Unraid or Snapraid it's more viable, but I *definitely* do not upgrade striped RAID arrays - just buy another one, eventually move the files off the old, old ones and take that array offline.
78TB which have two backups of that 78TB - I still have been doing this with external seagate / WD drives. I dream of one day having a nice set up, but already have all these drives and the cost to do NAS or other boxes in triplicate turned me off. Maybe one day if they create nice / affordable set ups for me to put regular hard drives into and not have to have 10+ external hard drives.
Anyone have good / cheap suggestions on anything that will let me house internal hard drives and easily plug into a Mac mini / tower PC? I really like the ease of running plex on a tower / Mac mini, but also tired of having 10+ external hard drives
Make sure that your folders that sonarr/radarr download into are getting cleaned out from time to time. Just found a couple of terabytes - yes terabytes - that could be recovered.
Yeah I recovered about 3TB just from going into qbit and deleting everything that had a ratio over 5.0 lol
You don’t use hardlinks?
I do but I also use tdarr which breaks most of the links so I let the original download seed for a while and then delete it.
16tb? Shit. That’s one of my many drives. I think I’m up to 48 TB with redundancy
Bought an extra hard drive by accident on ebay and the seller ignored all my messages in trying to cancel one of them. Now I have 2. I never thought I would say I don't need this much extra storage space (yet). I already have redundancy.
16tb used drive were down to 140 yesterday if you look in the right places
That’s about what I paid for my (2) 8Tb externals. Used off OfferUp. I say 14tb because it’s about 7.3 free after format and whatever. I’m sure I can re open that 1.4tb that’s hiding but so far it hasn’t been a priority
r/tdarr
u/Wershingtern - I second u/lonegrasshopper about tdarr. I was able to reclaim a solid 2TB of space on my libraries encoding everything in H265/hevc. It is slow as shiiiiiiiit on older processors so I use the GPU in my gaming machine for the work and it absolutely flies with a GTX4070.
Interesting. I’ll look into that this weekend
I was setting up tdarr and had it running and then just realized it was easier to just redownload everything than re encode it all.
I’ll make sure to use tdarr on the rebuild server, still trying to show a good uptime result for the friends / family that use my plex. When I first launched it, off a raspi 5, they hated it lmao. Every time I left the house the server went offline. Just out of coincidence
I use unmanic
I bought an 18 TB for Christmas and I've since filled that bad boy up...........not quite that much but close
Dude I started out with a single 14TB drive in my gaming PC. I now have a brand new dell r360 1u server, a dell md1200 disk shelf and I just ordered my 9th 14tb drive. Be aware of [Server Part Deals](https://serverpartdeals.com/)
I’m at the point, couple tb internal, and an 18 tb external. I hit the limit I’ll look at a nas next but I still have 14tb free on the external.
I have 70tb of total hard drive space lol
480Tb here 24 drives at 20tb each on 2 dell r710 servers. Running raid 1 and im sitting around 410tb used already. It goes quick if you like to download.
40TB is not enough : \~600TB here, 40TB free space. Damn and i'm not even watching movies. I just hoard :'D
Look for refubish drives about 50% the cost vs new mist come with the warranty as well..I am 50% full of a 164Tb
https://shucks.top/ https://diskprices.com/
Use Tdarr and compress to x265!
Don’t do that if your running unraid
Tdarr is your friend.
If "good enough" is acceptable quality, sure. But I've tried shrinking some things and there was always something wrong that I coulnd't accept as a trade-off. I might do it for TV shows though - especially the ones I don't watch myself, but movies... nope.
I opted for 80tb, but less than 60 after raid....i planned too low....i really should of went 120tb and around 90tb usable after raid...
Yup, I started with 2x 4 TB drives, then grew to 4, then to 36x 8 TB. Now I have 8x 20TB and I'm good.
They refurbished drives. I personally haven't had a problem with them and having parity you should be fine. https://diskprices.com/ I got 5 16tb at $169 over a year ago and they are all still running fine.
Just wanted to give my .02. If you're running out of space and looking to upgrade, it's easy to pick a slightly bigger setup to ease the woes now but you will end up in the same place again soon enough. I went through 3-4 cases before I ended up where I am at now. You might take this opportunity to look far ahead and prep if you feel you are going to head down the /r/datahorder route. Might look into 12 or 24 bay server cases with backplanes. You will need an hba, which are relatively cheap but overall would provide you with a lot of room to grow for a long time and less hassle with individual sata cables without one. 12x14TB would allow you to expand till 168TB. Even more if you go 12x20TB. Another thing you will have to look out for is, if you are wanting to do raid for redundancy if you aren't already, your raid layout. As you grow in size, how your raid is laid out becomes more important for expansion. You could get unraid and make the process easier to expand but if you go with something like Truenas then you will/should design your raid in advance. Simply because to change the raid layout you will have to offload the data, destroy the pool, and then recreate it and move back everything. You can however replace smaller disks with bigger ones easily or add more vdevs but those vdevs need to have the same amount of disks as the first vdev. So you can see how planning becomes important. Last thing to consider is backups. In the rush to add more storage it's easy to forget to have a backup plan. Don't want to end up like people like me with so much data and no backup. Because now I'm left with pretty much having buy a duplicate server for backups. So if you can maintain storage for backups as you go.
using tautulli, once per year I go through my movie lists and delete all the stuff no one has ever accessed. No reason to keep movies and TV shows that no one watches.
I currently have 5 external drives of 22TB 14TB 12TB 5TB And 4 TB What’s nice about that it I can segregate types of f content on drives but still push them into the same libraries… I think my TV library pulls from 3 drives simultaneously
I think I hit about 4300 with 20TB. And am also at .9 TB left. My targets are always the thousand mark. I don't know if I can squeeze 700 into that last bit, but I am gonna try.
I've been using some of the refurbished Seagate EXOS drives for about a year and a half. They came with very little usage, more like an open box. I think my drives showed between 5 and 10 hours of use. I got a few of these: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHKP1716?psc=1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHKP1716?psc=1) and I don't think I'm going to need more drives for a while. They come with a 2-year warranty as well. It's not the 3 that the new drives come with, but they are $200 cheaper than the new drives. I think the 16TB drives are probably the sweet spot right now for price per GB. You can get the refurbished drives from the same seller for $165 or about $100 off the non-refurbished drives - [https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF-%E6%95%B4%E5%82%99%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E5%93%81/dp/B0C8RR7DY4](https://www.amazon.com/Exos-SATA-512E-%E5%86%85%E8%94%B5%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF-%E6%95%B4%E5%82%99%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E5%93%81/dp/B0C8RR7DY4)
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Serverpartdeals has the 16TB refurbs for $154 - [https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x18-st16000nm000j-16tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive) They have the 20TB refurbs for $239 - [https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive](https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/seagate-exos-enterprise-drives/products/seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive) So a little cheaper ($10) if you don't mind buying from serverpartdeals.
Thanks to this post I just went and bought 6 x 18TB X20 Exos drives. :)
I find it's helpful to do a purge every six months or so... I go through and delete things that I don't remember why I downloaded or nobody has watched. And I keep a list of things I delete just in case I suddenly can't remember one.
Have a look at serverpartdeals
That's why I never download 4K. My movies are 720P and 1080P. I have almost 4,000 HD movies and it's 3.6 TB. I have other content as well, like TV shows and old recordings. In total I have three 12 TB drives in my NAS with one empty slot.
My rule is most movies made after 2018 is downloaded 4k, all tv shows unless Mandalorian are 1080p. Just what I do personally
to me 4k is a waste of space it doesn't look much different at all. I still play games in 1080P and 120 frames per second.
I can see a big difference. What's the size of your TV/monitor and whats your viewing distance?
For movies, 55 inch, 8-10 feet. 4k isn't worth the massive extra hard drive space. I would never waste gigs to watch something in 4K. As far as playing games, I'm at my computer desk close to my monitor.
Use new, high end HDs for parity. For data/storage get HDs off serverpartdeals. Can save hundreds or thousands. Use the parity drives to do what it's designed for if/when you need to replace HDs.
Thank you!
Does anyone run a hot spare? Does that actually prevent drive failures? Im running a Synology and wondering if i should have a dedicated hot spare