Submitted 3 weeks ago by 
Smurfi@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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? 😁
datablocks.dev is a Dutch company.
It looks like good prices. But every single one is out of stock
I see 14 SKUs in stock. They explain how they get stock, just need to be patient.
That said, OP is asking for something around 100 EUR which is pretty low and not many enterprises or SMBs will buy drives that small. That just sucks if you need something like 4Tb.
They have good deals on 10+ Tb drives tho.
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago Amazing! Thanks
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 €400.
Storage is just expensive these days. Just like RAM.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago 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.
2/3 of the drives I received from GoHardDrive failed within 2 years and all I got was a pre-bubble refund.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago Oof. 🙃
They do, but there may be better local alternatives, since the shipping can be quite high.
Honestly, I’ve 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.
What sort of tests do you run?
I attach it to my unRAID server as an unassigned device and run a SMART test.
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 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.
I use snapraid for parity on top (OMV7). Works nicely with mergerfs. If a drive fails it can be easily rebuilt. You can use older smaller drives to do split parity (I got 3x 8TB as array and 2x 4TB for parity)
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.
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 usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they’re a bit smaller than I’d like them to be, but in 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.
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago Also true for me
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.
yakko@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago 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 £100…
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago I reckon I need about 10TB of RAID 1 for a decent Jellyfin media server
If you’re willing to run at least 4 drives, RAID5 is good too. You get 75% of the space and as long as only one drives dies, you can rebuild the array without data loss. Ideally.
I have a 2tb ssd for my media server. I haven’t filled it yet, but I do sometimes delete things. Don’t tell anyone.
Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago trash bins 😅 sometimes you can get permission, other times not. 🤷 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!
what kind of place has those trash bins?
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.
Serverpartdeals?
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago €356 excluding USA to EU shipping… Oof!
This is where I go. It’s ridiculously expensive right now, though. I just paid nearly 2k USD for three large capacity drives for our local UnRaid box.
Do you happen to live in zuid holland?
I have 2 unopened Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN006 that I’ll be happy selling.
No idea what a fair price or your budget would be.
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago I’m in Hilversum but new, unopened drives will be out of my price range. I’m only capable of sub €50 purchases at the moment
Ah ok, I’ve had these drives for a while now but ended up using SSDs instead so they just sat in my parts drawer reminding me of a bad purchase xd.
Crazy how they are like 3x the price now from when i bought them in 2023
Have you tried Tweakers Vraag & Aanbod yet?
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago Yeah, I have it opening every morning to see if there are any new ads
Enterprise decommissions, workplace, stuff ehere they just want to get rid of it quick
Depends on the size you are looking for, but I saw some good deals for ~4TB on Vinted
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
[Thread #32 for this comm, first seen 29th Jun 2026, 14:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I picked up enough used SAS drives to build an 11 drive RaidZ3 pool. 100 USD each shipped. DIF formatted so had to low level format to native 4k sectors, then run a full run of badblocks, and finally a long smart test to verify no errors. Had a couple bad drives that the seller replaced no questions asked when I provided the smart logs.
SAS controller and backplane opens up a lot of drives that SATA controllers can’t touch.
My old pool drives will be repurposed for a FrigateNVR storage point and a storage point for some other stuff as well as spares for other pools.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago There was someone here not too long ago who purchases HDD with bad sectors. I think the idea was to instruct Linux to not use the bad sectors. I am unclear about the mechanics of how it’s done, but the concept has been rolling around in my head ever since. The drives in question were purchased knowingly with bad sectors and came with a warranty.
When a drive has bad sectors, the rest of the drive will likely also be near EOL…
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago I thought the same thing, but whomever the chap was, was buying 15 TB+ drives and didn’t seem to have issue. I questioned him about exactly what you said, and again, they didn’t seem worried about putting over 15 TB of data long term, on a drive that had bad sectors. The reason it came up, was because I was scrolling through New Egg and came upon some relatively cheap drives, however the seller was upfront about there being at least 25 bad sectors. I asked ‘Who would buy such a thing?’ and that’s how the convo started. I’ll have to go back through my comments and see if I can find it.
Vinted has some nice deals every so often.
But look at German sites for better HDD deals then NL.
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago Any recommendations?
I’ve got a 12tb sitting with a dead control board. looking for parts to fix it with tbh.
I’m sure there are folks selling drives like that online.
Hiro8811@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago What size are you looking for? I paid ~150€ for 12tb refurbished and ~200 for 8tb new. Don’t think you could get a high capacity drive for 100 even before the crisis
Smurfi@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago Ideally 2 or 3 10Tb drives but I would even be happy with 4Tb for now
Might keep an eye on sales at best buy/Amazon or any other tech part store for shuckable drives.
You can buy a secondhand laptop on marktplaats for under €100 and take out the hard drive then sell the rest. I got one with 256GB for €15 not long ago.
It takes time to build out capacity to increase HDD production, but when operating margins are approaching 30%, somebody is going to want cash in. If the new reality is that every company wants to harvest and retain as much data as possible at all times in case it has potential as training data at some point in the future, then additional capacity will eventually be built to tap into that.
I know it sucks if you need storage now, but I think the smart decision is to hold off until the market stabilizes. You might even get lucky; the bubble might burst and the market will be flooded with cheap excess HDDs.
somebody is going to want cash in
Maybe. The hard drive makers have long experience with boom-bust cycles. They are likely trying to figure out if this is real, or just a blip and in a two years (when the new factory opens!) demand drops again.
If there is new capacity in the future my guess (guess!) is that this is a case of a new factory to replace the old, and they just keep running the old for another year instead of scrapping it right away.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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 you, atop lying to yourself) to free up space for things you do actually need.
True, but it’ll be nice to have enough space to let the future arr stack I plan on spinning up, roam free
So is there a raid 12 for my 13 500GB drives?
unit327@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Don’t forget the power bill, even if they sit idle most of the time. 12 drives * 5 watts * 24 hours * 365.25 days ~= 525 kwh. That would cost me $157 aud a year for electricity.
If I instead bought a 6TB drive brand new I’d break even after 3 years, assuming the 500GB drives are $0.
RAIDz2 for 5.5TB with 2-disk redundancy.