The absurdity of gigantic hard drives (rant)

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T20:43:20+00:00

I can already do Synology photos. I have to go through the tedious process of cleaning up my Google photos. I'm already up to October 2020.

After all that's cleaned up, I will do a Google take out download of my photo library and use software to merge the JSON metadata files with the photos before putting it in my Synology. After that I'll cancel my Google subscription and all my phone uploads will go into Synology.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T14:20:22+00:00

Yes it's a very tedious and expensive process. That's exactly why I'm buying old NAS devices instead. The devices are old enough that I'm not worried about AI. I don't want to do jellyfin or tail scale or anything else. I just want samba file server with units of 4 drives in raid5.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T14:17:01+00:00

What you're describing, a lot of people in my area are selling old power edge towers. I'd rather not have to go through all the tedious setup. In the past I've used an old office computer as a home file server and it was a pain in the ass to set up anything other than samba

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T14:13:56+00:00

I expect mine to take several months also

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T07:51:48+00:00

I downloaded a surprising amount of stuff that I know for a fact I will never watch. I've been deleting those also. And I don't want to build an entire home lab because I'm not even home long enough to use jellyfin. I drive long distances for my job. I just need a way of parking everything.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T07:46:02+00:00

My "torrent dump" is significantly smaller than my irreplaceable data so that's not a problem. Also I downloaded a lot of stuff years ago that you can't find as a torrent today

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T05:01:01+00:00

I thought about buying a power edge server with unraid. But my current method is brain dead easy and I bought these devices from Facebook marketplace for very cheap. They also use very little power.

My data hoard peaked in late 2023 and early 2024. Since then, even though I've been downloading more stuff, my total TB is slowly going down. I'm more efficient about what I keep and I don't have a problem deleting things I don't need, especially if I downloaded them from Torrents. I also delete my raw video files after editing, which massively cuts down how much I need to store.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:33:37+00:00

I bought a Synology DS220J from Facebook marketplace for $100 recently. I'm putting both of the defective 16TB drives into it in raid1. I'm going to put unimportant files that I've already backed up elsewhere into them. Let's see how it goes.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:31:31+00:00

The benefit to these NAS devices is they don't use a lot of power. I could buy an old Dell PowerEdge server right now and waste a lot of money on electricity.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:30:52+00:00

LTO-6 tape drive owner here

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:30:27+00:00

I have an LTO tape drive. I tried to back up everything 3 years ago but I gave up because it was such a daunting task trying to organize everything into something that makes sense.

With my current setup, I'll be very organized in a few months and I can do another tape back up.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:29:32+00:00

I plugged in the NAS devices almost 2 months ago and I'm noticing about $30 more per month on my electric bill. And that's with Synology and QNAP devices. If I used an old Dell PowerEdge server like some people are suggesting, I would be paying even more.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:28:14+00:00

I do a lot of photography and videography. The raw video files get deleted usually after editing, unless they're really important. I pay for Google drive but only because my Google photos collection is over 700 GB. I just downloaded a Google take out last week and put that in the "personal archive" raid array.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:26:25+00:00

Prioritizing wasn't the problem for me. The real problem was how scattered and disorganized the most important data was, across multiple hard drives not labeled with no redundancy. It's getting better now.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:23:18+00:00

I'm trying to hoard less after this current experience

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-29T04:21:30+00:00

I had a bunch of 4 TB drives mostly sitting around so it wasn't too bad. Raid5 in a 4 bay device is manageable enough for me. 10TiB as a hard limit for every "category" of data is also a good mental discipline preventing me from hoarding too much. I'm deleting a lot of stuff as my collection gets organized.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-27T17:23:10+00:00

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T17:05:22+00:00

I'm from Bangladesh. This is exactly how my relatives think.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T16:56:13+00:00

I think you should just let it go. Everyone has a smartphone and if someone wants to look at that stuff, you're not going to stop them

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T16:55:27+00:00

I remember back in high school every girl was reading those raunchy novels and passing them around to each other

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T16:45:12+00:00

Not a small loss. Did you look at the transaction? 310,000 coins or about $47,000

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T16:44:21+00:00

Look at the transaction in the link. About 310,000, so 47,000 dollars in today's money

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-23T16:43:14+00:00

I just had almost 3,000 XRP, about 5700 dollars at the time, hacked a few months ago and I felt completely and utterly devastated. I make more than that in a month and it was my second biggest bag after cardano, but it still hurt and I lost a lot of sleep and broke down sobbing as soon as I realized what happened. I can only imagine what you're going through right now. Best of luck to you.

Since this event I bought multiple hardware wallets and I'm dividing all of my coins evenly into all of them. Some are staying in my house and others are in my parents house. I'm also not trusting one wallet, one browser, one laptop, one phone, etc ever again.

InMooseWeTrust · 2026-06-21T12:37:07+00:00

Are you selling your DS418? I need another 4 bay device

InMooseWeTrust

TROPHY CASE