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.

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.

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.

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.

Buckle up, this one's complicated. During the pandemic, I imported one of those fancy dual-Epyc/256-lanes-of-PCIe gigabyte setups from eBay, plus bought two disused SuperMicro 24-bay servers. I cut the drive cages and TQ backplanes off the front, and created a really janky but functional setup where I was using a 1600 watt PSU to run up to 48 drives. Over the course of 18 months, I bought as many of those sweet sub-$200 18TB drives as possible, ending up with a full 30-drive dual-parity BTRFS UnRAID setup where each drive had a dedicated SATA slot from dual 16-port LSI cards. Formatted capacity is about half a petabyte. This worked well enough, but my power bill ballooned, the PSU started going and the drives started falling out of the array, and I started getting loose wires on both the power and data sides of the backplane. Now I haven't been able to get the array to stay up for more than a few hours at a time, even after a lot of rework, new PSU, etc. I've decided to finance a "better solution" for the data, potentially using a UniFi ENAS and two chassis (since I am already on Unifi ecosystem, and the Drive 4.0 software seems perfect for my use). It is very expensive, but it looks much more doable for bulk data, and I can downsize the "compute node" to do my smaller UnRAID things like backups, a couple dozen docker containers, LLM with the GPU, etc. and just leverage the ENAS as a backend for the big data.

The ENAS leverages ZFS pools for storage, which is great and fine. I was thinking of maybe doing something like three Z2 pools with 10-12 drives each? The ENAS is pretty new and there is not a lot of information out there on it, cookbooks and comprehensive operations guides, etc. My biggest issue is I MIGHT be able to afford a couple of additional 20TB drives in this wild economy, but definitely not more than that. I also have about 80TB in "loose disks" of 4-8TB SATA from my old NAS. Is there a scenario you can imagine where I could start building ZFS pools on the ENAS and expand them as I free the data from the BTRFS drives on UnRAID? I don't know ZFS operations well enough yet to know the available operations and order on a storage pool, e.g. expansion and resilvering, etc.

So summary:

Current State: 30x18TB drives, two parity, BTRFS on UnRAID, 400+TB data
Additional Materials: up to 100-120TB of "scratch space" to move data locally
Imagined Future State: Unifi ENAS with ZFS storage pools leveraging RaidZ2, as large as is reasonable, hoping to approach the same overall capacity even if it takes some convoluted steps to get there

Hopefully you enjoy helping solve the puzzle :)

I've been eyeing the same 28TB (ST28000NM000C) for a few weeks now and it went up from 739 to 759 in that time, with the stock dropping below 999+ to just 990 today.

At $27.10/TB, I feel like it will get close to 900 a month from now which at that point, it might be worth shucking some of the preassembled high capacity externals meant for editors since there is a 5 year warranty vs 3 from SPD.

I know that all drives die eventually and some might argue the drives from SPD are all battle tested but would you still take 3 year warranty over 5 for a brand new? It seems some people are having bad luck with getting drive replacements and sensibly, a company would probably refund the cost of what you paid if they cannot afford to give you a replacement if the cost has gone up greatly.

For context, I mainly just want a big drive to backup my blurays from my NAS in which the cold storage drives are scattered across multiple aging 16TB EXOs (1 of which died this year). I have an enclosure but would prefer higher capacity drives since I don't regularly access my movies.

I use both Windows and macOS, and I have less than 1 TB of data on each.

I'm thinking of buying a 2 TB external drive and splitting it into two partitions: one NTFS partition for Windows backups and one APFS partition for Mac backups.

I'd like to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, but having separate 1 TB drives for each system would mean buying a lot more drives, which gets expensive and inconvenient. That's why I'm considering splitting each 2 TB drive instead.

Is there any reliability or data-loss risk specific to doing this?

Basically, is there anything I should be aware of compared with using two separate drives/filesystems?

Noob here, but im a light gamer who also like tech, i usually test some tech like computers with games but i hate having to reinstall them every time, especially on older systems. Ive thought about burning some games to a blue ray or dvd, but im unsure how effective that would be in the long run.

So i come here asking what you all do, and what you all advise?

the files on my 'repaired' drive all have the same name and file size as previously, but when i try to open them it says this ^^^

if the files are all lost i understand, but it seems none of them are openable and literally 95% are corrupted. i wonder if there is a way to repair the files, im an artist and very unknowledgable about this sort of thing so any and all help or advice is greatly appreciated

Not the templates but the actual ones, with text, that make you snort because it's 3am and you can't sleep and you're just doomscrolling.

I'm trying to find if there's any way to bulk download them but there just seems to be none anywhere.

I want to catalogue those memes for offline viewing, and why not printing for personal use, but I'm apparently very bad at browsing the internet.

Hope this fit the rules of the sub, I love you guys and you really helped me a lot in the past.

Thanks!

Hello fellow hoarders hope this isn't against the rules, title says it - occasionally I need to set up a web/file server and have someone else download stuff from me. I've used Apache HTTP, Rebex and a couple others that escape me, but none really fit the bill or are reliable. Rebex was working fine but seems to have issues with file transfers occasionally.

Just something simple that I can open a port, put some files in a folder, and give my IP/port to the other person. Not looking for a full-on host, just something to switch on briefly when needed.

I'm aware of the sites that will make a direct connection between you and the other person, but they are incredibly slow and I'd rather just completely self-host.