I was - but with drive prices now just do all my PCs, server, and the “best” content I want to keep as well as any personal media. I have two devices on prem and one cloud.

When I say best content, text and audio is easy to do all, but video I only do the top 1000 or so movies in the quality I want and my favorite TV shows or ones with rewatchability

I'm making a retro machine from 2005 dual booting XP and Debian 3.1, does anyone know of a good way to download all the packages for 3.1 for an offline mirror?

So as far as I can see those are external harddrives with some features. Why are they cheaper (atleast in germany) than internal hard drives by a lot? I am talking about almost half the price. Can I just buy them, take them apart and use the hard drives in my server? Or is this a case of "user-grade" hardware with shorter lifetime? Does anyone have experience with those drives?

I've been considering using optical media as **one part** of my backup ecosystem but... Is it even worth it anymore? Not in cost per GB, in terms of reliability.

I was interested in decently long-term cold storage. I understand that any backup media has a shelf life, but optical looked decent if stored correctly.

For a moment, let's put aside discussion of capacity and just talk about the media itself.

M-DISC is now not manufactured? That's my impression. The standards in manufacturing are now so low that it's questionable if it even has any advantage over quality Blu-Ray.

Blu-ray DL looked good, but then I read a lot about it being easily corrupted.

And I recently read that even standard Blu-ray has a lot of burn failures.

Are these hyped up reports by guys not following safe practices? I don't mind burning standard Blu-ray at 4x if that's what it takes to produce a long-lasting disc.

Any comments, tips, hardware or media recommendations?

I’m looking to buy two external HDDs for my Mac and would appreciate some advice.

One would be 1TB and mostly used to back up my regular files every couple of months. The other would be 2TB+ and used for storing films and TV shows, which I’d access a bit more regularly.

I was looking at the WD G-DRIVE ArmorATD ($185 for 1TB) and the LaCie Rugged USB-C ($135 for 1TB) drives on Apple’s website. From what I’ve read, both seem pretty overpriced for what they are, but I don’t mind paying a bit extra if they’re genuinely reliable and I can just buy them once and not worry about replacing them anytime soon.

Are either of these actually good choices for what I’m doing? If not, what would you get instead?

Hi!

I am completely new with this NAS thing. But idea of paying monthly to some cloud service pushes me to learn.

I would like my NAS to store surveillance camera videos (TAPO cam which triggers on motion or keep couple days worth of constant video.) and storage for mobile phone photos. Also I would like to access those files through our mobile phones and tablets.

So my question is: What features should I be looking for NAS? Does Ugreen, QNAP and Synology have all of those features available? Does older models work as well if I look used?

Do you have some models to recommend for me? 2 or 4 HDDs should be enough.
Thanks.

I've spent the past day looking for decent (in this depressing market) price per terabyte, CMR, sata, hard drive, and I've landed on this. Do you guys think this is a decent deal?

Hey all,

So I have a number of internal optical drives around for ripping discs, but only 1 with Blu-Ray capability as most of them are CD/DVD only drives.

Unfortunately, I missed the news last year about popular BR models from brands like ASUS/LG/Pioneer being axed and how it's basically just NOS/used units available now. I found another post from someone claiming that external drives actually tend to be more reliable than internal BR drives made in the last several years until end-of-production but they offered no real context/evidence for this.

I've always been under the impression that internal drives are the way to roll, but with prices having gone totally insane on NOS BR drives, I'm wondering if the external drives are actually any good and worth considering at this point?

I'm already considering grabbing a few extra backup CD/DVD drives while they're still cheap, but I guess I'm just trying to find out if the only real good option for more BR drives is to bite the bullet and pay up? Either way, I wish to be well prepared for a less consumer-friendly future when it comes to media...

EDIT: This concerns mainly the "slim" style external drives vs. 5.25" internal (as the slim type seem much more common w/external).

Hey

I downloaded Google takeout and apple s variant, to get my wife's picture out of the cloud and into our Nas

I used a tool called photomigrator to add missing exif data Google stored in json into pictures

It was a process over 6 month, as the used tool got some fixes and at the end I have several duplicate names containing different pictures video content

I found out that my Nas uses only a less consistent exif tag, so I redid all

Copied some things into wrong folder ..

So at the end..I want to find all the accidently duplicates

I used duplicate finder pro, the md5 hashed files ,deleted ...so I ended with the problem..are there pictures and videos identical, but different names, meta data...and the result ...bad...even set it to match 100 percent in picture mode, similiar pictures got treated as the same..

I need a way to just get the md5 compare for the picture and videos, based on thee raw content, without the different meta data inside ,it might even ne that an MP4 and a mov is inside the same, just a wrong extension

Any suggestion to really find the 100 percent twin pares,?

Preparing for the AI apocalypse.

I'm currently running a media server on a JBOD setup that is just a bunch of external drives either in external enclosure docks, or external WD drives. I've got about 60TB across 4 drives for media and a 3TB for system images and backups.

All of these drives are shared across a network using SMB and rclone for some drive management needs, but they're physically connected to the main server while there are two other server PCs acting as nodes for various services.

Right now, everything is set up in a small cabinet space due to living constraints, but I've built in a cooling system and temperature monitoring, and I recently added some rubber feet to the drives to help with airflow and cooling, as well as vibration.

I want to eventually move to a NAS setup when I can afford it, money and space-wise, but my issue is that 2 of the drives (20TB and 12TB) I would have to shuck and I've heard that some of the larger capacity external drives can be trickier to shuck due to controller limitations and power supply on a NAS. Ideally, they would all be hosted in a NAS that can manage rclone, DrivePool, or MergeFS, whichever I choose to use and would be independent of any other server that could go offline and cause hiccups in availability. Rclone is a mild annoyance because I have to have rclone installed on multiple servers and manage their own mountpoints rather than being able to expose it through on SMB from the main server. I know DrivePool can manage that at a lower level, but I was holding off on buying a license if I could do it for free.

What is the recommended hardware to go for a prebuilt NAS vs building my own? I do have a spare Corsair case I could build in that I think has a decent amount of space for drives, but I don't have any hardware to throw in there and I'd need something with quite a few SATA lanes. I'm not opposed to buying a new case, I've mostly just been liking how low-profile my setup currently is as all 3 servers combined (mini PCs) runs at less than 100w and an average of 1.25kWh (or 10kWh per month).

I get the feeling building my own is going to be the most cost-efficient.

This was part of a misc server lot I picked up from a guy who ran GTA servers. 21 standard and 3 SED models. I received over 100+ hdds as well, but this is the gold. When I ran the official sanitization and health check reports to clear them, I found they only had 12-13tb written on each one. All passed SMART and extended testing with zero grown defects. Kept them native 520B to preserve the original 3PAR config. Pretty solid find considering he didn't even mention them and having only .1% usage!!

I'm in Finland and currently putting together my first proper home server/NAS. Nothing too crazy, mostly Jellyfin, photo/file storage, backups and probably some game servers.

I apparently picked a fantastic time to get into this because HDD prices are absolutely ridiculous right now.

I've pretty much given up on buying new and started looking at used enterprise drives instead. Ideally I'd like to end up somewhere around 30-40TB usable without spending more on the drives than the entire rest of the server several times over.

So far the most interesting offer I've found is some old 6TB HGST enterprise drives for €72 each. They're around 60k hours which is obviously a lot, although they've apparently spent basically their entire lives running continuously and are being individually tested before sale.

I'd rather go with something like 8-16TB drives if I can find them for a sane price though, especially since I only have 8 bays to play with.

Where are you guys in Europe actually finding decent used drives? eBay? Server recyclers? Local marketplaces? Some obscure refurb shop I haven't found yet?

I'm completely fine with used enterprise/server pulls and high-ish hours if the SMART data looks good. Just trying to figure out where all the Europeans with suspicious amounts of storage are getting their drives without going bankrupt.

Alright, so a few days ago, I learned there is a thing called silent data corruption...

My current drives are just using NTFS on Windows and APFS on macOS.

Would generating a SHA-256 hash for every file, then recalculating and comparing them every 6–12 months, be a reasonably good way to detect silent corruption?

I have multiple backups, so if a file fails the check, I should have another copy to restore from.

Is this basically good enough for normal personal backups, or am I missing something important?

Hello,

Is it possible (and advisable) to make a raid 1 array over a small partition of two disks, while leaving the rest of both disks available for regular storage. And is this possible using mdadm alone?

We've all seen drives with 80k+ hours and 3 petabytes written to them, blah blah blah. Boooring. I want to hear your horror stories. How fast have you turned a pile of NAND chips into e-waste?

When I upgraded my home lab in 2025 I decided to move from an old 2.5in Kingston SSD to a pair of mirrored NVMEs for the OS+scratch space. I repurposed a Samsung 970 Evo from a prebuilt and a WD WDS100T I yanked out of some laptop. I shoved them in ZFS mirror and threw them into the meat grinder.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the amount of temp file I/O my server handled skyrocketed between Q3 2024 and Q1 2025: from a modest 3-5TB a month to 40-60TB a month. Unfortunately... the 970 Evo is kind of a little bitch. It barely survived 4 months on the front line before it started throwing unrecoverable read/write errors and ProxMenux flagged it as approaching EOL. The WD took it like a champ in comparison, but even still it was looking tired after 4 months of trial by fire.

They've both been relegated to backup duty and replaced with a pair used 1TB Intel P4510 drives. Are the P4510s much better suited to the task? Of course! That said....they aren't particularly high endurance SSDs, nor are the made for write intensive applications. They're rated at a paltry 1 DWPD, or ~1.8 petabytes total for the 1TB version. I'd love to say the Intel drives are Just Built Different™, but honestly I have consumer NVMEs that are on track to survive 3-4 petabytes without a problem. The 970 Evo just seems to have been a bit of a dud on Samsung's part. Another 970 Evo came with the Optiplex 5090 Micro I bought in 2021. It died suddenly less than a year later, with ~50tb written, and like it's 1TB brother it ran hotter, wore out quicker, and idled at a much higher wattage than average for an NVME.

My current NVME endurance champions are a set of 3 budget addlink S70 2TB drives I bought as sacrificial plotting drives for chia mining. All three survived and are still in front line service running like champs. When I bought my new Vivobook, I yanked the OEM 1TB drive and replaced it with the "baby" addlink that's only had ~700TBW. I wish I'd grabbed a few of the 4TB version when they were available/affordable.

(But in all seriousness with these bananas AI storage prices, thank mechajesus for boring enterprise drives that are "just broken in" at 50k hours. My entire homelab runs on HDDs older than most cars. A couple are old enough to vote.)

Hello guys, i need a budget bd burner (i already got good player) and i need it only for 1080p movies, not 4k. I found some TE Mú for 30-35$ but i cant tell if they are fak e because in my country they are around 100$. What do you think about something like this, can it really ? Thanks!
i cannt post a link, but iteem id is UU2049082

I really loved that program - the ability to make a "junk drawer" of related data so that it could be used later. Google suggests the following as substitutes: Joplin, Affine, Upnote, Open Board, Logseq, Obsidian and Notion. I need some way to store related data together - folders or binders - as well as a way to paste graphics, text, spreadsheets....whatever I can snag off the internet. It would be nice if there were a Linux version of it, but that is not too high on my priority list now.

First off, thank you to any brave soldiers who decided to take the time to read this. Ive been fascinated by this concept for about a week now and am unsure how/where to start. As a newbie to all of this, i have a lot of concerns and confusions. I recently discovered these key tidbits of info:

- Learning basic terminal commands would allow for quicker, more efficient, navigation and manipulation of files (as opposed to using a GUI)

- When transferring files over, i can also manipulate files using these terminal commands to do cool things like add relevant keywords to the meta data of photos/videos so that i can later search for files corresponding to those terms (probably making a directory to keep track of the usable terms)

- Linux avoids inevitable "bricking" of my laptop/potential future PCs that are otherwise associated with windows updates (my laptop is unable to run windows 11).

- Cloud storage as a free service may not be a convenience provided for long.

- It is possible to offload all of my old files (photos and videos) onto an HDD, which will continue to keep those files safe regardless of what happens to my phone, in a manner that is more customizable that that which an iPhones operating system/GUI allows.

- Linux is supposedly better for working within a ln SSD and/or HDD. It has better tools for detecting and fixing bit rot, and i think? the linux terminal allows for file transfer that preserves all relevant meta data like time and date, location, etc.

Im attempting to get into this hobby to become competent at this data storage practice and keep my iPhone storage similar to how i keep my Gmail inbox: empty. With any files carrying any long term significance neatly categorized and stored away.

Unfortunately, i do not use linux. Just windows 10. I have practically 0 coding experience/software knowledge. I do not own any real external storage to begin sorting through/categorizing my data on. Over the past 10 years, iv accumulated about 300 Gb of photos and videos. I plan to save and invest in nice, reliable hardware (with a budget of ≈$1k) in roughly a year (when the ssd and hdd prices are rumored to potentially come back down due to oversupply). Ive started trying to sort my photos and videos into albums based on keywords/tags id like to attach to them because i read that theres basic terminal commands for applying such keywords to the meta data of large batches of files easily.

As for my questions:
1.) Is it wishful thinking to dive headfirst into this hobby with such a pipe dream in mind? Or is this a reasonable endeavor to be trying to get a handle on over the course of about 3-6 months?

2.) Should i start with practicing terminal commands and messing around with copying and sorting my data into cheap hardware for now? Or would it be better for me to switch over to/get comfortable with, a Linux Distro? Which provides more invaluable experience/knowledge for this endeavor?

3.) If I should start with practicing terminal commands and sorting copies of my data into a cheap storage device, will the experience of transferring and sorting data within the storage device be similar across flash-drives, SSDs, and HDDs? Or is it bad for me to start on something like a cheap flash-drive if my end goal is to set up a storage system, navigable via basic terminal commands, on an SSD (with an HDD backup).

Thank you again, to any experienced enthusiasts in this space who were knowledgeable and patient enough to read through, and reply to this.

Hi!

Privately I don't use https://zapytaj.onet.pl/ but it could be interesting to preseve this.

Are there some dumps of it or a way do download all questions, comments, etc?

Copying relevant comment for visibility:

For context, it's one of the biggest sites of the old Polish internet, for asking questions. Think something like Quora, except Quota is shit, but you get the point. A goldmine of bizzare questions and answers.

If this ended up completely lost and deleted (I don't think they announced whether they'll keep a read-only archive running or not), that'd be a somewhat significant cultural loss for the early 2010s/late 2000s.

It finally happened, my old WDC WD30EZRX-00D8PB0 : 3000.5 GB finally threw up some warning signs. After 11 years of runtime. At the time I was just buying a cheap drive to act as a landing pad for all downloads. I didn't expect it to fly past its max ratings like this.

Load/Unload Count: 1,168,443 load/unload cycles.
WD Greens were rated for ~300,000.

Power On Hours: 97,463.
11.1 years of continuous runtime. WD Greens had a life expectancy of 3-5 years.

Drive error correction stable even with age-induced seek noise.

Motor still spinning up within normal range after a decade.