Data Hoarders Thread - The Scriptatorium of the Modern Age

[Betonhaus]

Does anyone have a recommendation for cases that can hold 8 drives or more? I had been buying rack mount cases, but I don't really need dual 1600 watt power supplies to run 8 hard drives.

I was looking at this one.

Jonsbro?

The vendor name is sketchy and I've only tried to stick to reputable guys. It was either this or a Fractal XL (but they are too big.) I'm trying to find something in the 8 to 12 drive range.

Generally unless you get a really elaborate system nothing will fully suppress the sound of all the drives going full beans which will be an intermittent drone that will be difficult to fully ignore. in which case you're going to want to stash it somewhere and expect it to have decent cooling.
The Rosewill Helium NAS has 10x3.5" drive bays (and 3x2.5" drive bays) which should in theory be more then enough drives, though most motherboards only have like 6 sata ports so you'll need an adapter or two. If you go with a full ATX motherboard instead of the MicroATX the Jonsbro supports you'll have room for more pcie slots, though you'd need to reaserch what cpus have enough pcie lanes to run anything (problably a used xeon kit off aliexpress)

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

Does anyone have a recommendation for cases that can hold 8 drives or more? I had been buying rack mount cases, but I don't really need dual 1600 watt power supplies to run 8 hard drives.

I was looking at this one.

Jonsbro?

The vendor name is sketchy and I've only tried to stick to reputable guys. It was either this or a Fractal XL (but they are too big.) I'm trying to find something in the 8 to 12 drive range.

I had a small form factor NAS built out of a Silverstone DS380

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/server-nas/DS380/

It's a bit of a squeeze to build into (one side isn't even removable) but it was pretty quiet once setup and stayed in my home office back when I was in a tiny apartment.

though most motherboards only have like 6 sata ports so you'll need an adapter or two.

If you're using an ITX motherboard and you need the PCI-E slot (for a 10Gb NIC or whatever), I'd suggest this style of M.2 SATA controller over the one with all the SATA ports on it:

https://www.newegg.com/p/1W7-00V1-009V8

With either style, always install all the cables first!. Those M.2 cards are small and there's no support under them on M.2 sockets, so it's easy to damage/crack the PCB without realizing it. Mine came with a warning sticker, but not all of them do.

 

[jeanblunt]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

I'm a cartoon collector, mostly. Western stuff tends to be harder to find in high quality than anime, where everything is just on Nyaa. So I usually grab it when I see it.

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

What do you guys even store?

I do movies, tv shows, and pop music for Plex. I'd like to do jazz and classical too (I hoard these), but Plex is fucked up when it comes to non-performer-centric music (classical is composer-centric). I've tried using that software to serve comedy, but it can't even do that well. It's worse still for audio books. It's image sharing is abominable.

I probably hoard books more than anything. I don't keep shit copies of books, so I have to do a bit of work... adding covers for pdfs, fixing epub structure issues, etc. I do the full range of software, applications and video games, from the earliest days of computing on up until modern times. I store what I have taken to calling "formulae"... these are files that describe or instruct how to make things: garment patterns, physibles (3d-printable objects), gerber files, house plans, blueprints, food recipes. I of course store personal documents (I've got digital paystubs going back to 2006 or so). I have another root-level bucket called "Data" where I store blockchains and similar. I was hoping to find some fingerprint databases, or maybe even a license plate database.

I've been wanting to collect digital "fine art". These would be just high resolution images of paintings and so forth, but I haven't settled on what guidelines for those I want to adhere to, or what artists would even be essential.

 

[Betonhaus]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

output of du on my media folder

 

[Pee Cola]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

On my hard drives, I have around 4TB of music, and around the same in TV shows, movies, documentaries and archived YouTube stuff combined. Then there's around 500GB of things like apps, operating systems, games etc (manly retrogaming and emulation). Finally, there's about 200GB or so worth of personal backups (documents, photos, re-installation images etc).

I have a second set of hard drives for backing up all of the above.

Note that I haven't included the 800 or so optical discs I have with some really old stuff on them. or are backups of the backups of the more hard to find video and audio in my collection e.g. my own off-air TV recordings from VHS/PVR back in the day, obscure music found only deep in the bowels of Soulseek etc.

I also make an extra backups of super important stuff like photos, home movies etc to optical discs, and there are certain things that others also hold a copy of e.g. Ex-Mrs Pee has copies of all of Junior Pee's baby photos and home movies etc.

 

[Hantavirus]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

Books and DIY/trades infotainment videos off YouTube mostly. I also collect gray literature, particularly stuff related to my somewhat esoteric profession and scientific disciplines and hobbies I am interested in. Those have a nasty tendency to just...disappear sometimes, and it's nice to have an archive. It also makes it easier to find things if I need to refer to some white paper hosted on a company's website but not hyperlinked from anywhere on their site or an academic paper I had to email the author for a copy.

 

[Sneedmason]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

In this order.

1. Memes
2. Books (STEM and based stuff)
3. Software - SaaS has ruined any trust I have in keeping my computer work accessible in the future (OS, applications, code libraries etc)
4. Photos/Video - RAW stuff from my camera (projects stuff, but the "archive" is for my master files)
5. Some music*
6. Course material (entangled with books, but lecture videos + notes etc)
7. Some vidya (trying to keep it light since it's GOYSLOP to pacify you)

I avoid movies since it's the ultimate Goyslop and it takes too much space for what it's actually worth, same can be said about music but at least it's much smaller files and you can at least find non-pozzed music.

 

[seri0us]

What do you guys even store? I don't mean this in a negative way but seriously what do you guys hoard? Personally, I only have some movies, isos, and music. Which is less then 100GBs.

Most of it is cracked games or YouTube videos I've scraped over the years, a lot of it before Google started paywalling 4K versions and fucking with bitrate. I've been meaning to clear a lot of them out because I'm running out of storage and that stuff is just so silly and trite.

The stuff I'm actually sentimental about is less than 200 GB of photos, music, and memes.

 

[Billy_Sama!]

I don't know about you guys but I got into CDs in the past 5 years. I like to listen to them on my audio setup but I do get pleasure saving the albums on my computer and save on my backup hard drive and my modded Ipod.

 

[seri0us]

I don't know about you guys but I got into CDs in the past 5 years. I like to listen to them on my audio setup but I do get pleasure saving the albums on my computer and save on my backup hard drive and my modded Ipod.

>one copy on physical disc
>second copy on computer's hard drive
>third copy on iPod's SSD (usually on the go)
3-2-1 Backup strategy right there

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

Currently:

7.8 TB - movies
a lot of newer stuff is in 2160p+HDR10 with DTS, TrueHD or eAC3 which adds up fast
6.8 TB - tv
lot of rare 80s/90s stuff from MySpleen and other archival sites
331 GB - Music
decades old collection that includes mp3, ogg, even wmv. Everything new is FLAC. Lot of rare stuff I bought at shows)
134 GB - RAW photo
280 GB - personal videos from various cameras/projects
5.9 TB - archives
- general archives. Lots of stuff from the Internet Archive (some of which has been removed),
- full rips from paid content sites (locals, blaze, patreon) from people I've subscribed to before
1.2 TB - streaming (youtube, rumble, bitchute, odysee)
- I been saving everything I watch for a while using yt-dlp. I hate ads and the YT web interface and a good quarter of videos from <2020 are just gone now!
21 TB - porn
20 GB - old games I've ripped from CD
5.1 GB - books
14.8 TB - data mining of the fediverse (text only)
83 GB - memes

Now more than ever I feel it's important to archive everything. Especially if you do any type of esoteric research. Use strong encryption. ZFS has native encryption, or you can store other file systems on LUKS or VeraCrypt (although VeraCrypt had their microslop cert pulled and they can no longer publish windows updates).

 

[Hantavirus]

21 TB - porn

You could not torture an admission this haram out of me

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Currently:

7.8 TB - movies
a lot of newer stuff is in 2160p+HDR10 with DTS, TrueHD or eAC3 which adds up fast
6.8 TB - tv
lot of rare 80s/90s stuff from MySpleen and other archival sites
331 GB - Music
decades old collection that includes mp3, ogg, even wmv. Everything new is FLAC. Lot of rare stuff I bought at shows)
134 GB - RAW photo
280 GB - personal videos from various cameras/projects
5.9 TB - archives
- general archives. Lots of stuff from the Internet Archive (some of which has been removed),
- full rips from paid content sites (locals, blaze, patreon) from people I've subscribed to before
1.2 TB - streaming (youtube, rumble, bitchute, odysee)
- I been saving everything I watch for a while using yt-dlp. I hate ads and the YT web interface and a good quarter of videos from <2020 are just gone now!
21 TB - porn
20 GB - old games I've ripped from CD
5.1 GB - books
14.8 TB - data mining of the fediverse (text only)
83 GB - memes

Now more than ever I feel it's important to archive everything. Especially if you do any type of esoteric research. Use strong encryption. ZFS has native encryption, or you can store other file systems on LUKS or VeraCrypt (although VeraCrypt had their microslop cert pulled and they can no longer publish windows updates).

Got a question for real packrats such as yourself. Do you actually KNOW, as in, have listings, of what you actually have? The thing about a lot of autistic data hoarders (also have a lot of crossover with being a troon) is bragging that they have all this stuff but refusing to share. Sharing helps keep this stuff alive. What are some of your "rare treasures"? What do you actually like to collect?

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

Got a question for real packrats such as yourself. Do you actually KNOW, as in, have listings, of what you actually have? The thing about a lot of autistic data hoarders (also have a lot of crossover with being a troon) is bragging that they have all this stuff but refusing to share. Sharing helps keep this stuff alive. What are some of your "rare treasures"? What do you actually like to collect?

I try to share a lot of my rare/old CDs I've ripped, but some of them were back when I used oggs and a lot of the good torrent sites only allow FLAC and mp3. I still have a lot of rare FLACs I really should get around to making torrents for. I have some torrents going for rare, out of print movies too. I listen to music from my collection all day at work (mpd+snapcast are a great way to setup every room in your apartment or house to sync music without using any cloud services). I've watched over 2/3rds of my movie collection.

I do know a lot of what I have. Most of the things I archived, I had to write the scripts to archive them myself. Most of them I wrote before the LLM era. For most websites, it involves going into your web browser console/debugger and finding the playlists (m3u8 files) and pumping those into yt-dlp.

 

[Flatline]

21 TB - porn

Lord have mercy.

 

[Ralph’s Shack]

I have a small setup right now im roughly at 30TB of total storage on unraid with 19TB used. Is it worth it to try and migrate to truenas scale?
I don’t have any major issues with unraid other than the “cap” on disks but I was wondering if the grass was greener on the other side

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

I have a small setup right now im roughly at 30TB of total storage on unraid with 19TB used. Is it worth it to try and migrate to truenas scale?
I don’t have any major issues with unraid other than the “cap” on disks but I was wondering if the grass was greener on the other side

What is your disk setup right now? Are you doing the piecemeal setup with an xfs array or are you already using ZFS? Also how much use do you make of docker/containers? Unraid makes all that insanely friendly to deal with, TrueNAS not so much.

If you’re already using ZFS, then depending on what the rest of your server hardware is Proxmox ( https://www.proxmox.com/en/ ) is worth looking at. If you’re hardware is up to it and supports IOMMU in a reasonable capacity you can virtualise TrueNAS under Proxmox while passing the SATA/HBA controller your disks are attached to and then using the remainder for Virtual Machines & Containers within Proxmox.

Another question- What Unraid license do you have right now? Did you join late and have one of those licenses with limited support/upgrades or do you have the old license?

 

[Ralph’s Shack]

What is your disk setup right now? Are you doing the piecemeal setup with an xfs array or are you already using ZFS? Also how much use do you make of docker/containers? Unraid makes all that insanely friendly to deal with, TrueNAS not so much.

If you’re already using ZFS, then depending on what the rest of your server hardware is Proxmox ( https://www.proxmox.com/en/ ) is worth looking at. If you’re hardware is up to it and supports IOMMU in a reasonable capacity you can virtualise TrueNAS under Proxmox while passing the SATA/HBA controller your disks are attached to and then using the remainder for Virtual Machines & Containers within Proxmox.

Another question- What Unraid license do you have right now? Did you join late and have one of those licenses with limited support/upgrades or do you have the old license?

I got the unraid license they advertised “before our rate hikes!!!1” I believe I paid 50$ and it was capped at I think 6 drives

And it’s all xfs one 6TB two 12TB with a 12TB for parity. I know if I moved to zfs I’d lose a drive and be to 12TB?(dont quote me im not up to date on zfs)

It’s an old 1230v2 DDR3ECC setup I got the “naskiller 4/5) and for containers I mainly use plex, FileZilla, and a few other low impact ones

Sounds like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze but I just hear all the good stuff