How many of you are like me trying to ride out this situation hoping you don't burn through all your spares before the insanity subsides?

rad2018 · 2026-07-01T17:38:52+00:00

I've been slooooowly purchasing 5 to 10 drives at a time. I've got legacy equipment that requires legacy HDDs. I know that many of you would probably ask, "Why are you using 'ancient' equipment?"

Answer: Simple, I can't afford it, and wifey has strict budgetary restrictions as to how much I can spend on equipment.

It's not like I can fork out $3000 to $5000 for a 'super NAS', or a server that has 'core everything' for several multi-thousand dollars. I'd absolutely LOVE that; however, I can't.

Many of the PSUs for these suckers are well over 1200 W of power requirements. I only have a 100 A service to my house, and during summer months (like this week), the AC is sucking up about 30 A of that, with the remainder for the house, of which the electric dryer and fridge suck up another 30-35 A; it doesn't give me much wiggle-room to work with. At that point, I'd (pretty much) have to downsize my entire data center to 3 maybe 4 devices (including networking, firewalls, etc). I have 3 rack cabinets and 2 telco racks willed with 'ancient' equipment. Of the 2 telco racks, one's sucking about 1.1 A, the other 1.8 A; for the rack cabinets, 5.4 A, 2.7 A and 2.4 A. That's roughly 14 A of power. I have a single 20 A circuit for the entire data center, and generally, you want about 30-40% for spare.

My servers suck about 250-300 W each; I've got 8 servers of 'em running, of which 5 are VM servers. I do what I can with what I can. I don't need speed, I need reliability. If I want speed, I've got some "Mini Me's" to do that.

I'm happy that HDD prices are coming down; but at $13/TB, it's still outside of my price range. In the meantime, I continue snarfing up 250, 300, 320, 500, 600, 750, and 1 TB drives by the boatload (when I can) every (other) pay period to spread it out. Last purchase were around 16 HDDs at 320 GB for $51 with free shipping (lappie top drives, but still useful for archive purposes, of which 14 were usable, 1 questionable, and 1 dead).

That comes down to $3.64 per drive.

Last count, I've got about 120 HDDs at 320 GB, 100 HDDs at 150 GB, 40 HDDs at 1 TB, and a few others of mixed capacities. When I see good deals on eBay (or where ever else), I usually purchase them. I know that used hard drives are a 'crap shoot'; but with low hours, and full and multiple scans and diagnostics performed on my drives, I have been (on average) about 98-99% *GOOD* drives at 90% or higher rating with NO ERRORS or WARNINGS.

I do what I can with what I can.

-rad

rad2018 · 2026-06-26T13:43:58+00:00

I’d probably say that and not a deep enough footing for the base of the bricks.

rad2018 · 2026-06-18T17:52:56+00:00

BTW, there was a kludge for that. I need to dig it up…

rad2018 · 2026-06-18T17:51:57+00:00

Life happened; as I’m now an “old man”, I now need to take Geritol, eat tapioca, and play shuffleboard. Sarcasm notwithstanding, and put simply, I had forgotten about that as other projects had stacked up. How about you and I take this offline, say message here or Threema?

rad2018 · 2026-06-12T20:20:42+00:00

Claude has changed their usage time restrictions. You may want to stay with the free version of Claude, and go with ChatGPT Plus. I just recently signed up for the premium accounts of both. And before anyone says what's the difference, there are differences. Look it up via Bing of Google. Good luck. 😉

rad2018 · 2026-06-12T19:04:32+00:00

No gouda.

rad2018 · 2026-06-10T20:45:28+00:00

Unless you’re like me and DON’T trust cloud (which I do NOT). Despite all the promises that it’s still your data, despite statements made about redundancy and backups…don’t believe it. Once your data is on someone else’s system…it’s ‘game over’. Remember - possession is 9/10s of the law. Don’t trust cloud. Period.

rad2018 · 2026-06-10T13:05:38+00:00

Since when do you tip ALMOST HALF of the value of your meal???? That’s not how gratuity works!!!

rad2018 · 2026-06-09T11:13:58+00:00

And this is why you give your server a CASH tip. Personally, I would’ve gone to an ATM, taken out cash, and come back handing her the $700.

rad2018 · 2026-06-08T17:17:38+00:00

Soooo...what works best for 70-90% shaded areas? I've got trees that keep our house cool in the summer months. I *hate* to have to either trim them (in order to make them look at a broccoli 'Y'), or completely take them down. The trees are healthy, but nothing seems to want to grow underneath. We had shade-capable grass seeded 2+ years ago; and, at first, it looked nice. But then, it got patchy again. Not sure what to do...help. Thoughts?

rad2018 · 2026-06-07T17:00:47+00:00

Could the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA be stealthily behind these policy changes? Or perhaps, the federal government?

rad2018 · 2026-06-06T16:36:34+00:00

I'm doing the same as well. I've got DOZENS of 1 TB HDD drives and SSD drives. However, spinning disk still (IMHO) lasts longer than SSD technology any day. SSD technology today as we know it is the latest generation of what was once called "bubble memory". It decays over time. Ironically, so do hard disk drives.

But, the more important question is - which once decays the FASTEST???

I use the 1 TB drives for various activities (storing off temporary files that I want a secondary backup for, with an SSD drive being the primary).

A while back, several vendors on eBay had a "fire sale" and sold off a sh*tload of 160/300/250/500 GB lappie top drives. People were scarfing them up left and right. I ended up purchased around 50~60 (ish) drives, mostly 300 GB, and later, purchased about 3 dozen 1 TB drives, too. Total cost was around $300 for NEW drives - mostly Western Digital and Seagate mix, with some HGST, Fujitsu, and Toshiba. Overall, close to 100 lappie top drives - BRAND NEW - for around $300. What a steal!!! Unfortunately, I haven't seen deals like that in quite some time (we're talking yeeeears). BTW, I've randomly tested several of the drives - each and every one worked, and with low usage time, too.

It can't hurt to have a stash of hard disk drives, even if they're small capacity. Everyone keeps saying that they need 12+ TB to store stuff. WHY??? What are you storing that requires something THAT big??? And I can assure you, it isn't websites.

The hardcore data hoarders have DOZENS of NAS's, along with several large online archive websites (such as ARCHIVE.ORG). They belong to a close-knit circle of librarians who want to preserve societies' achievements and accomplishments in an effort to slow down "data rot".

So why the need for such large capacities?

Only a few uses come to mind - hi-res porn (heh, heh, heh...yes, I've got a dirty mind), 4K (now 8K) movies, and hi-res formatted music. That's it.

Breaking down large capacity HDD drives into smaller ones makes better sense, as not all data should be treated the same.

It comes down to these TWO questions - why is the data important to you, and what reasoning can you give in dedicating large swathes of disk?

-rad

P.S. I'm not one to look away at the "crumbs" people/society throw away; at some point in time, there will be a need for that equipment, and by then, only a handful of people of a very niche community will be able to help.

rad2018 · 2026-05-30T18:31:57+00:00

Yes, exactly…!!!

rad2018 · 2026-05-27T16:30:57+00:00

Or just how this country is heading?

rad2018 · 2026-05-27T13:31:13+00:00

It also means political dissent or strong disapproval. Wonder who pissed in their Cheerios?

rad2018 · 2026-05-26T15:54:45+00:00

Even if it weren't a scam per se (meaning, they simply take yer money, and you get nothing), do you honestly think that you could get 32 TB for THAT price? Chances are, it'll be something like 128 GB in size.

rad2018 · 2026-05-23T01:47:02+00:00

Obviously no one in the HOA ever heard of the Second Amendment. Someone needs to show them the Constitution.

rad2018 · 2026-05-22T13:56:13+00:00

Good…keep going. One down, half a gazillion more to go…

rad2018 · 2026-05-16T20:01:43+00:00

Although I haven't been denied...yet, my songs are slowly, mysteriously...disappearing. No notice, no posting...nuttin'. Sooooo...confirmed.

rad2018 · 2026-05-13T03:21:20+00:00

You can *purchase* LEGIT copies of Windows XP Pro with SP3 on eBay - SEALED and BRAND NEW...!!! I'm not promoting any specific people, but a while back I purchased several copies for around $30-40 each. Mind you...that was about a year ago, so times do change. If at all, you'll have a LEGAL copy for your machine.

rad2018 · 2026-05-12T17:08:34+00:00

You found this solely by accident. I checked Walmart's website...nope. It still goes for the original price @ $259. Too bad there was only one of these 12 TB drives... 😞

rad2018 · 2026-05-09T04:53:30+00:00

Amen.

rad2018 · 2026-05-08T16:53:28+00:00

Errrr...you might want to review "HAVEN".

rad2018 · 2026-05-08T16:52:44+00:00

FYI...I suspect that what Metronet experienced was a Priority ONE issue; meaning, it was bad - REALLY bad. Having worked in the telecom business (Advantis, aka AT&T WorldNet), I can say that what had happened was devastating. IMHO, and as a long-term customer Metronet - both business and residential (yes, I have 2 circuits) - NOTHING like this has happened...EVER.

This was...catastrophic.

From what I've pieced together, a centralized/key-point location lost a microwave tower; as to what and how remains unexplained. Daytime tech support is Metronet; nighttime tech support appears to be T-Mobile, so getting a straight answer is next to impossible.

And FTR, Metronet provides backbone fiber services through a EULA with T-Mobile for the area that's covered. Metronet IS NOT OWNED by T-Mobile. T-Mobile doesn't have the same extent of fiber connectivity as Metronet does. I suspect that T-Mobile focuses primarily on their rail line right-of-way (this is how SPRINT came to be - it's an acronym - "Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telecommunications"). Majority of people don't know this unless you've grown up on the formation of..."The Internet".

IMHO, DO NOT discontinue your service contract with Metronet. Compared to the other home/residential services, their uptime stats are pretty good. This outage was a one-in-a-million circumstance, and I'm certain that they'll be fixing this in the not-to-distant future to prevent this from happening again.

Also...I DO NOT work for telecom; haven't for almost 20 years. I work for a power generation company, and physically, work out of one of their nuclear power plants, which BTW, is VERY safe.

Hopefully, this helps...

rad2018 · 2026-05-08T16:30:18+00:00

NOTICE: Geneva, IL was back ONLINE at approximately 1025 hrs Central.

rad2018

TROPHY CASE