that hard drive prices return to normal and think about all the things i can build.
silliness aside, i honestly sit there and plan it out. i wish i pulled the trigger and started earlier. i actually bought two mini pcs before this mess and have one setup running proxmox. o have this beautiful jellyfin -> jellyseer -> radarr/sonarr -> sazbd -> gluetun -> newsreader setup on proxmox and i founf 1 8tb wd red plus on sale that i put in a ugreen nas running truenas and its filling up quickly.
i wont move to nextcloud until i get a second drive for mirroring. i still have to find a place to backup those future files as well.
there is not really a point tp this post except i know people here feel my pain. how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
for now i find stuff and put price alerts on them. o have tried ebay but i dont always get what i pay for. like buying wlanlisting that says wd red plus cmr and getting a wd red (non plus) smr.
i fantasize about the cool rack setup i could build. right now everything, jellyfin stack, home assistant, glance dashboard, pteradactyl, netbird , anf any vm i want to play with all on one proxmox mini pc. next comes books
sorry for the rant but maybe you can relate
I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.
I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.
For example, I specced out a (very decent) “sneakernet” / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise…and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.
That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).
I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.
Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.
Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc…and I’m over here thinking “actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming”.
Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools…none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU…and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?
Turns out…pretty fucking small.
Honesty, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear…hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on “sale” for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.
Personally, I’m building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system… and because I’m paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.
Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my “DVD as back up server” idea.
TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game…or at least, play it by your own rules.
I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.
Not really. As far as server equipment, I like to ride the top of equipment using DDR3. I can get DDR3 cheap. Sure, it’s not cutting edge, but it works nicely for my purposes. Now I did provision a box that uses DDR4 which is expensive; $437 USD expensive. I’m now trying to get over the sticker shock of a 5090 GPU so I can use it as a local AI machine. The box came with 32 GB ram, so I topped it off with another 96 GB RAM
I wake up
I want to upgrade Proxmox
Open Amazon
Check the price of my wishlisted RAM
Cry
Go back to sleep
When will this end? 😭😭
I have a good stack of 2.5" and a stack of 3.5" HDD, but most are in the 1 to 2 TB range with a couple that are 500 GB. They’re salvaged drives that I’ve just been collecting. I guess I could daisy chain them all together, LOL, but I’ve been just saving them for emergencies. I have an old Seagate ST-225 20MB, but I framed that one in a shadow box as a curio.
I recent noticed my drive is dying but it cost about the same as I bought it for, 12 years ago.
how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you’re not getting the largest drives possible.
That’s maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it’s significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.
It’s still pretty much 2x. I managed to get ram bought before it went silly but I’m really short on storage.
Same boat, the exact same refurb 10tb drives I’ve got in my system are 2.5x my last purchase. But I did get a lot of fast RAM before the prices went nuts.
Do we need to dim the lights?
Only thing I wish for Christmas is to be able to replace the RAM and mobo in one of my servers. It is failing with a kernel panic about once a week and it is an old DDR3 platform I planned to upgrade back in January. I have isolated the issue to a hardware fault but left without a solution…
Try increasing timings on your RAM?
I’ll try that next time it dies, see if it helps
How much do you need?
The server currently runs on 32gig but I was planning on upgrading to 64 or 128gig DDR5. Could go as low as 16 if need be, but the the price is still hurting more than having to reboot 2-4 times a month.
I was going to get proxmox myself but decided to go the debian13 route instead. I heard proxmox is like pseudo open source and kernel diverges a bit from the Linux kernel. Anyway, whatever the case, I’m happy on debian
I heard proxmox is like pseudo open source
Proxmox is open source. They use a customized Linux kernel (based on Ubuntu’s newer kernel) to add support for other features that are useful in datacenter environments, like ZFS and such.
The only thing they paywall is access to their enterprise production-ready repositories. But they still offer free access to their non-production repo.
I am very happy that I managed to get two 20TB discs before the crazy, now I’m just sad that I didn’t get two more for the backup server.
I use a hetzner storage box with borg backups for my backups. It’s pretty cheap and has enough space for my VM and LXC backups, as well as my proxmox host backup. I don’t backup my media collection because that would cost a lot, and I can always redownload most of the things I have if needed.
What do you want to do with the HDD’s? I have a bunch of crap saved on mine, but nowhere near 12TB. Also I rent some drive space (Hetzner Storage Box) for server backups. That adds up over time but you don’t have to spend a big chunk all at once, and HDD prices might eventually drop again.
Feel lucky that you want HDD rather than SSD. SSD prices have tripled or quadrupled while HDD has not even doubled, per the graph someone posted.
I can confidently say the HDDs I bought before Christmas last year are double the price I bought them for.
