Hey all you beautiful selfhosters,
What are your suggestions for frugally obtaining HDDs in the current economic climate? Specifically the EU (Netherlands).
I’m looking at second hand drives, but even those go for €100+ now, with bad sectors and all.
Can we organise a collective AI datacenter robbery and doll out some stolen drives? 😁
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.
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.
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?
Depends what era but generally yes. Xbox 360 seem to be in the 3-6GB range, Wii / GameCube in the 1-2GB range. Older gens are ofc smaller.
My entire gaming library is approx 200gb, but it’s curated, retro / indy focused (early 2000s to mid 2010’s)
TIL Sid Meier’s Pirates was released on Wii.
Its a really good version too. My favourite is probably the OG C64 (first love and all that) but the Wii has some real hidden gems.