Dying of prosperity, 14TB HDD left unused
I got into self hosting almost a year ago. Since then, I bought (low) hundreds of dollars worth of hardware, but I've never used any of my services outside of testing. My server is left unused since may (I think).
Now I've found a use for my server, but my HDD, (which I bought for a good price ($150 for HC530 14TB, 10k POH) for european standards in last November) isn't really being used. To be frank, I never really used it, I don't need a NAS, I always preferred (pirated) streaming services over local streaming, so I mostly had it just to have it.
I kinda know what I can do with it. I could set up a proxmox backups on it or run a nix cache (I run NixOS on my desktop PCs, I would be using the cache, but it would be annoying to set up and cachix free tier is enough for now).
I'm also anxious to use it, because I'm scared to wear it down, but, at the same time, I know that it will degrade if I don't use it. I might want to sell it, but my previous sales on online marketplaces were abysmal and I know I might regret it if I change my mind and decide I need so much storage.
What would you suggest? If I want to keep it, how should I treat it?
47 replies
Bought low? Sell high! Or will you somehow extract more value from it before it dies??
Mirror a couple TB of anna's archive
Just out of curiosity, how legal is this? Do you need to hide in complicated ways?
Not (depending on where you are). However, in my opinion it is absolutely ethical.
Depends on where you are. For most people, yes you need to hide it, but it needn't be complicated. You can just bind your torrent client to a (trustworthy) VPN.
That said, these things always carry some risk, and that's yours to take.
A vpn is enough for eu/switzerland, as far as I know
Sell it. Buy beer. If you start to regret it, drink the beer.
Sage advice for life, friend
At current HDD prices, that'd buy a lot of beer.
Give it to me? 👉👈🥺
There's no 'wearing it down' - age is age.
If anything, unpowered drives die faster because lubricants slowly harden over time. Ah least a running drive is unlikely to suffer that fate.
Also, any drive can lose magnetic cohesion on areas of the platter - with a running drive that's maintained by a system like ZFS, these areas of magnetic loss can be automatically discovered and corrected.
Everything I've read (and from my own anecdotal experience) drives on a shelf die every bit as frequently as running drives, if not more often.
But in the end, don't go doing anything just because you feel like "you have to". I have a dozen smaller drives (500GB to 1 TB) that are just waiting for a purpose. I have a plan for them, but it's not urgent. Eventually they'll go in a Proxmox/TrueNAS/UnRAID box, when I can find a motherboard for the right price with low power draw (the drives will be the worst power consumer anyway).
I suggest having a backup of some of your favourite media anyway. You never know when a service will be taken down.
What services are you using, if you don't mind me asking?
I use none. My homelab has never been operational.
Had success with yams.media. Gives a basic arr-stack to begin with
Protip:
If you use real-debride, it's basically a cloud cache. Meaning - after it fetches your stream / you finish watching it, it retains the download for you (30 days?) - or at least the index. So if you pop over to real-debride thereafter, you can download and store what you watched locally right quick.
There are tools that integrate the *arr stack to do just that...if you're looking to have your cake and eat it.
I meant the streaming services.
Whatever is on top of fmhy.net list. I can link it if you want
Back up your digital photo library, download your favorite youtubers' entire channels, get an offline version of wikipedia...there's so much you can do! I wish I had 14TB lol, I only have like 3 right now. I'm running a jellyfin server and lyrion music server.
You know jellyfin does music right?
Yes, but Lyrion syncs devices throughout my house, like a not-shitty Google home.
I see, that is the bit I miss from subsonic
Yeah, I really recommend it! If you have old smart phones, laptops, rasp pies etc laying around you can use them!
Nice, when I used subsonic I had snapcast setup. Thats now part of music assistant, an in home assistant
You could just use it as cold storage. Put a bunch of stuff on there as backup and then put it in a closet.
No.
Cold storage is really "no storage". A cold drive can't tell you when an area of disk fails, or when the controller itself fails.
May as well just throw away the data, because you have no idea how much will be there when you try to power it on.
I have 8TB of data, and I get bit flips - if the drive were cold, I'd never know.
And cold drives fail just as often as hot drives.
I didn't mean to suggest it would be the only point of backup. If you plug it in and it works then it saves a lot of time downloading from some off-site backup.
But you don't know if it'll even power up, or if the data is valid.
That's a helium filled drive, so it's got a limited lifespan whether it's running or not. I would at least set it up as a NAS and use it to store your backups.
What's the failure mode? Higher operating temperatures?
The helium slowly leaks out over time. That will increase drag and decrease thermal conductivity. It will run hotter and use more power. There is a SMART attribute that will warn you when the helium is running low.
But if that is the problem, can you not just refill it? Maybe not at home if you don't want to risk it, but a disk repair shop should do, no?
disk repair shops aint cheap. you go there when you lose data and NEED it back, not to top up on Helium like party balloon. Also balls expensive. You'd need a clean room just to open the thing. AFAIK there are no service ports to just chooch in more helium.
Jellyfin, em, I mean future AI training library...
If you're not usng it for your own purposes, I doubt you'll do what a bunch of strangers on Lemmy will tell you to do.
It needs to be running, either in your possession, or someone else's, so sell it and make some profit from the recent price rises. Put a minimum sell price on ebay and it'll go eventually.
Run a Peertube.
save everything you like from the internet. nothing lasts including youtube videos
I can take some of those off your hands arrh
I'd be more worried about not using it, personally.
That said, storing videos isn't the only use. I have a... fairly large NAS, and it has photos/videos I've taken (including the raws for some of my dslr photos), its the storage for my VMs, where my backups are stored (really a different NAS but appropriate for the discussion here) which are then backed up elsewhere as well, local git repos, etc, etc.
Is streaming all you do? If so, no, you don't need it.
But if you do anything else, its a good place to store that data.
Keep it spinning and put stuff on it, or sell it, probably for more than you paid for it. Drives on the shelf tend to fail.
10K POH is a little more than a year, so it may still be under warranty.
"Anxious to use it" in colloquial English means that you are eager or in a hurry to use it, btw. The opposite of being afraid to use it, which might be what you intended to say.
Back up as much of hugging face and/or civitai as you can before corporations lock it all down.
Get a bunch of security cameras and have rolling 2 months of footage if u like. Or download the entire netflix library forever.
I'm pretty sure this is larger than 14TB?!
In 144p it should be doable 🔥🔥
1080 might manage it
I have around 130TB redundant and it wouldn't equate to Netflix. Though I store in higher quality than most, but you'd need low quality like 720p utilizing h.265 or AV1 to save space to hold all that. Likely anything you download would be h.264 so you'd need to convert all that media too.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #81 for this comm, first seen 18th Aug 2026, 12:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Where has this bot been all my life? So many cryptids dropping undeclared acronyms everywhere at all times.
I bought like 4x12tb disks for 150 euros each at the time. I'm already using like 27tb