Cheap 8TB Drives Are Hard to Find for Home Servers
10 posts across 3 communities in the last 30 days; 80% from r/selfhosted.
“I second this. I tried it on cloud and loved the feature set. And now I'm hosting it. Only "issue" is the overhead for backup compared to plaintext solutions like immich.”
“Starting to get rid of Google. I just can't afford storage right now. I'm paying for Proton Unlimited mainly for some of the other features it comes with, but it also includes 500GB of cloud storage. Does everyone recommend moving from Google Drive to Proton Drive as a temporary…”
“Fair question and the one I get most. Honest answer: partially solved, and the honest bit matters more than the reassuring bit. What survives me easily: the storage is DigitalOcean, paid from a company account, not a box under my desk. If I stop existing tomorrow the files sit…”
Several posts highlight challenges faced by users of self-hosted applications. These range from difficulties finding affordable hardware (hard drives) to issues with resource requirements (RAM), and unexpected behavior due to reporting discrepancies. The community seeks advice on cost optimization and troubleshooting installation problems.
SOURCES (47)
“Mh, yeah maybe at my parents could be an idea. Small NAS just to keep the offsite backup safe.I will update here when I have a solution. I guess a used thinkstation with a larger ssd could be a thing. [re: Good Bye SaaS -…”
“upgraded from a single 5tb wd elements drive i had going for ~5 years salvaged around 4 x 4tb seagate skyhawk drives from a few old dvrs and setup raid 10 with them submitted by /u/LitCast [link] [comments]”
“Really terrible time to buy large storage, but if youre just buying a USB storage device, the type of storage within it probably isn't that important to you. HDD are the OG's, but will most likely be slower than anything SSD. HDD is generally cheaper, as well.”
“A CLI would be more interesting to me, but at that point I'd probably want to understand what GlacierVault is adding beyond rclone plus lifecycle policies/scripts. The automated restore/warmup handling seems like the differentiator.”
“I just started self-hosting applications to replace Dropbox and use the extra storage for sharing with friends and family when available and I have a couple of security questions. I'm only on a single VPS for now but am planning to scale it up. I'm currently using Zerotier to SSH with keys into my single VPS that has all ports closed to the public except 80 and 443 for Traefik and a public connection to the app it is running. I want to replace Zerotier as there are limits to the number o”
“I actually started with Raid 5 btrfs on ugos for a few months but I felt like I wasted so much storage so I formatted the drives and made them individual xfs drives. Reason being I realized almost all of my data I can just redownload from qb if a drive fails and important files like personal photos etc I can periodically copy across all drives and have even better redundancy then raid 5 for what is actually important.”
“Hey anybody used SpaceSync? What are your views? submitted by /u/Obvious-Variation115 [link] [comments]”
“I run a pool of 12x 16 TB drives with 64 GB RAM. It works fine, the old “1 GB RAM per 1 TB storage” recommendation is far out of date.”
“with the prohibitive costs of the last years… just north of 66, 80 if external drives in abitual use can be counted. The disaster plan is to cough up and pay for (a) new drive(s)… important stuff and critical stuff is 3-2-1 backed up, the rest is on raid 6 with no backup and fingers crossed, worst of luck in case of a disaster a big % can be downloaded again and amen for the rest… I’m just a modest user compared to the average user here or on home lab and data hoarder subs!!”
“Now I wonder what more than 50 means. Do you have like approximately 50 or more in the 200 TB range? Do you have a disaster plan if some drives break and you have to renew them?”
“I second this. I tried it on cloud and loved the feature set. And now I'm hosting it. Only "issue" is the overhead for backup compared to plaintext solutions like immich.”
“Backrest is closer than you think. It's restic under the hood, and restic has a native Dropbox backend via rclone, so encryption, incremental, retention and the UI are all covered. The "doesn't work with docker" part is just that it backs up paths, and docker volumes are paths: /var/lib/docker/volumes/<name>/_data . Point it at /var/lib/docker/volumes and every new volume is picked up automatically, which is your autodetection requirement for free. Postgres is the one thi”
“Hey all I’m looking for a budget friendly option for offsite cloud backups of essential data from my unraid server, photos app-data etc easily under 1TB submitted by /u/GenericUser104 [link] [comments]”
“Hard drives prices are crazy, but even here in the EU at 40€/tb its still much cheaper than cloud cloud storage”
“Starting to get rid of Google. I just can't afford storage right now. I'm paying for Proton Unlimited mainly for some of the other features it comes with, but it also includes 500GB of cloud storage. Does everyone recommend moving from Google Drive to Proton Drive as a temporary solution? I'm hoping to get a NAS at some point. Also, has anyone used the UGREEN NAS units? Are they reliable? I'd rather not go with Synology. submitted by /u/JamesStrior [link] [comme”
“My 8TB drives have almost tripled in price. Paid around 130 i think for them and last check this week they were 320.”
“"Once you do it a few times" yeah...exactly. If not price of disks I would add another 30tb of disks formatted in linux compatibile format than trying to make ntfs DAS connected to server running on Linux desktop as network drives.”
“bluray at best holds up to 128gb data. It's nothing. I use a WD mybook 8TB with borg backup, works perfectly.”
“MergeFS + SnapRAID does exactly that. unRAID is a comparable commercial solution.”
“Yup that's what make up the majority of my 8tb drives, all the larger ones are from server part deals and the like. I just noticed that exos I linked was a sas version but they had 8tb sata versions for the same price in my quick search. More than the best sales but certainly not unobtainium like dude was trying to portray.”
“Yep I am setting up my own NAS power by 100% renewable energy from my house solar and battery and I’m going to self host something. Plus I can store 6tb of media for free.”
“How do you store your photos? A bunch of disks, external? NAS, gdrive? By year or by month? by event? by client? submitted by /u/colorplane [link] [comments]”
“Fair question and the one I get most. Honest answer: partially solved, and the honest bit matters more than the reassuring bit. What survives me easily: the storage is DigitalOcean, paid from a company account, not a box under my desk. If I stop existing tomorrow the files sit there until someone stops paying the bill. What doesn't survive me: nobody else can decrypt anything, because I can't either. Every key is destroyed once the certificate is delivered. So the failure mode isn't”
“Here's my take: - Use SSD for SO and services, HDD for cold storage/backups - Setup Forgejo and learn GIT. While at it, document your stuff - Skip Grafana and use Beszel - Use Wireguard - Use Traefik. Nginx is a nice idea but it get boring as time goes on - AI is your friend if you are willing to detail your request, provide context and have patience.”
“Hello! We're looking for some bulk storage that will live in a CMMC enclave. It looks like my fav NAS drives - Synology - aren't compliant. Seems like TrueNAS and Buffalo have compliant products - has anyone used these or could suggest another product? submitted by /u/cokebottle22 [link] [comments]”
“I recently got a spare drive connected too, so I won't even notice one drive dying, but the next one is gonna be fun”
“nothing's ever 0 sadly. and yeah, those rates, I see your point. and with storage prices being what they are..... fingers crossed that those drives last 10 years and have the decency to die at separate times🤞”
“Maybes it’s US only but the one I bought is still available at that price here - https://www.seagate.com/products/seagate-recertified/ - that is the lowest capacity and price they have for recertified though. At a $1k budget for NAS plus a few services I’d personally recommend any sub-$600 HDD and the beelink ME pro ($380 USD). It hold 2hdds, 12gb of ram, intel n95, and a 128GB OS SSD. That’s exactly what I’m running ZimaOS and my “no fuss, set and forget” stack on. Zima os does allow virtual ma”
“Manufacture refurbished/recertified for HDD. I got 22tb one direct from seagate for $550 just a few weeks ago. 8tb fills up quicker than you think once your arr stack is tuned in. I’m a year in at 14tb. Got a budget to share? That’ll help people recommend a good computer to pair with your storage. Ideally you’d avoid USB and to the HDD over SATA, but it is absolutely not a requirement, just more optimal. I started with casaos on a mini Lenovo just like this. Now I run ZimaOS on my primary NAS wh”
“The SQLite support & local recording storage is still default - S3 is an option for when you can't share a filesystem between multiple nodes”
“Thanks for the suggestion! This was one of the options I was looking at, but to get all the drives connected simultaneously I'd need to purchase the hardware to do so which was part of my dilemma in the first place. Weighing if I'm already going to spend do I just get a bigger drive. Could always keep an extra copy on these old ones which I hand bomb once in a while”
“Yeah I think this approach would be a little too risky for my taste haha. Better to split into chunks with some of sort of script I think.”
“I use Backblaze B2 which I think is more cost effective if you need to actually access the data. For Immich I only backup the upload library location and the database backups. It syncs periodically with rclone using a simple script.”
“Do you have a line dedicated to it or enough overhead on the general purpose? I have a dedicated gigabit direct interlink that stays saturated.”
“A follow up - I guess this is the answer? I opened a ticket with my CSP on Wednesday. On Thursday they asked whether the user was actually using over 1 TB or if OneDrive was simply reporting usage incorrectly (tickets getting passed to others wind up getting misunderstood / back and forth messages drag out support for days?) Trying to get the answer, I used Copilot for the first time! It quickly came back with: Yes — your licensing mix is exactly what’s preventing that user from going above 1 TB”
“I have an 8 bay terramaster for $150. If you're smart with buying used you could start off with a 10-14 TB for another $200 used.”
“I have a single terabyte hard drive and a 64gig thumb drive I back my model and all its files to, the back up runs nightly local and on my thumb, that's it, but I don't use my computer for anything but AI. I've tried various models but Qwen 3.6 27b has been all I need for a while”
“Lmao, I had planned to run it from NVME as a fun experiment but I don't think I can even fit it without totally clearing the drive. Dang, didn't anticipate 2TB drives being too small anytime soon. Guess I should have gone 4TB or something.”
“depends on the level of redundancy you want highly safe you want to go with 3,2,1, meaning 3 copies of your data, 2 different sites, 1 offline, this means you host storage at your own place and somewhere else, e.g. parent or friends house and keep them paired, and have a third copy that isn't connected normally, e.g. a once per month backup still very secure is something like 2 copies in 2 different locations, this guards you against things such as lightning strikes and house burning down, a”
“Tested my installer on a fresh 4GB cloud box today. It rejected it. "Need 4GB, found 3GB." Turns out a "4GB" VPS reports ~3.7GB to the OS, and my check rounded down. So it was refusing the exact server size my own site recommends 😅 Fixed. Ship, break, learn. submitted by /u/oilpatch_to_ai [link] [comments]”
“It's been a few months since I last posted about Agam Space here. I finally got some time to sit down and ship a few things I'd been meaning to add, so I figured I'd share the update in case it's useful to anyone. Quick reminder of what it is: a self-hosted, zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted file storage app. Everything is encrypted in your browser before upload, so the server (and whoever runs it) only ever sees encrypted blobs. The project is almost a year old now. What'”
“I would like to buy discs to expand my jellyfin library. Is it better to buy used disks, but with good redundancy, or to buy new disks by reducing redundancy to the bare minimum? Also, do you know of any online stores within the European Union that sell records at low prices? submitted by /u/Unhappy_Objective845 [link] [comments]”