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? 😁

  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    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.

    how do you find so cheap LTO drives?

    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.

    you could also do an RF IR remote bridge with two minimal Pis

    • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Ive seen LTO for sale in person at the $300 USD mark…but I admit that’s a rare occurrence / fire sale. So that “as little as” is probably not fair. Sorry and retracted.

      EBay shows some in the $1200-1500 USD range (and maybe closer to $3-4K brand new).

      That now makes me feel stupid for walking past one at $300 (“tape drive? Who the fuck needs that ancient shit”) but I’m willing to bet that wasn’t a lto-8, in hindsight.

      Even my LTO-3 claim is not as remembered; I can find a lto-3 for $60 USD here locally (not the $5 I jokingly claimed), with cartridges in the $15 USD range.

      https://ebay.io/m/1UST3Y

      https://ebay.io/m/Gcf77T

      Not bad, but not 12TB per cartridge.

      All of this to say; the DVD shuffler + pi intermediary (+ NVIDIA shield if needed) is probably the genuinely better version of this. Bizarrely.