Second hand, cheap, free 4-6 TB nas Drives?

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Calranthe

Calranthe

Calranthe

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I need between 1-9 4+TB drives to rebuild/build a NAS+ backup, Does anyone know anywhere that has access to or might these kind of drives.

Those that know me on the forum know my story, in 2019 I was at the "END OF LINE" of my life, but in march I started streaming/vlogging and such like as therapy it worked I am still here, my channel on Youtube contains over 2000 videos/vlogs and streams, covering gaming, mental health and cancer, helping me deal with ADHD, Grief, Bi-polar type 2 and Higher functioning Autism, something about being on camera and connected to the world means I can cope and survive daily, even my Consultant is going to visit after covid is dealt with to begin co-writing a paper with me about Games and technology/VR as an alternative to medication and long term hospital stay.

IN 2016 I built a 16tb nas using a synology diskstation at the time this was for my Wife so she could watch all our films/series no matter if in hospital, home, on phone, TV, Tablet, notebook. After her death this became my location to store all of my videos/vlogs/streams in case my not having a filter between my brain and mouth meant that my Youtube channel went down so I could re-upload, this is an important story and history of how gaming and technology can bring someone back from the edge and I get messages and comments on my videos all the time about how I inspire people.

It is now 15.1TB and close to maxing out.

I need to do a rebuild and rework of my storage, create a secondary nas to offload 15.1 TB onto (that will become the actual backup and not be connected to anything except once a month) and up the diskstation which is the 1815+ and can take 8 drives.

It currently holds over 3179 video files my entire life experience since march 2019.

I am currently shifting and deleting items on my computers and will be able to squeeze maybe most of it between my main and backup pc because a follower sent me an 8TB WD NAS Red Drive.

But this is only a stop gap measure.

I can finish the rebuild of the synology with one more 4TB drive (I had 2 non nas 4tb drives not ideal but they are ready to go in that will make 3 total added to the 5 already in)


but at that point I will have no backup for the Nas.

Unfortunately the only money coming into my house is Disability (PiP) and I have sold nearly everything I can in the house to build the streaming pc and setup, which is pretty much my lifesupport now.

Does anyone have any ideas?
 
Have you looked into online backups? Crashplan allows the backup of external drives, like a NAS, and doesn't have any real storage limitations. Sure, the upload might take a while, but it's only £10 a month to backup everything you have.

If you just need the storage temporally in order to shift things around, then you might be able to cancel after the month - job done for a tenner.

If you want to maintain a backup long term, then it's either stump up for storage or hope people keep giving you freebies. A 14tb drive is around £200.
 
doug_1986 said:
Have you looked into online backups? Crashplan allows the backup of external drives, like a NAS, and doesn't have any real storage limitations. Sure, the upload might take a while, but it's only £10 a month to backup everything you have.

If you just need the storage temporally in order to shift things around, then you might be able to cancel after the month - job done for a tenner.

If you want to maintain a backup long term, then it's either stump up for storage or hope people keep giving you freebies. A 14tb drive is around £200.
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The only problem with online storage is the upload, while I do have 80 down 20 up, I spend my life streaming and even with limitations on upload speed it does affect what I do but I will have a look at Crashplan. thank you.
 
I'm not sure how tight your budget is, if it's as low as I think it is, you could try some asking some electronic recyclers if they are getting any disks in.
Old drives are sometimes straight discarded, although it might not be practical to JBOD them together, likewise you sometimes see groups on facebook marketplace giving them away.

Otherwise what doug says sounds about right. The free tiers on services arn't what they used to be anymore. Could have sworn dropbox provided more than 2GB historically.
 
Donnie Fisher said:
Are you needing your old files to be full res? Could you not recode them to be h.265 and a lower resolution and bit rate which would markedly reduce the size of them and the space they take up? It was something gamers nexus a while back.
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I have dropped most to 1080 below that it would affect the quality if I had to re-upload to another service.
 
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but having built a home storage server recently and scoured the internet for drive deals, they're expensive. The best deals I managed to find were second hand drives from the bay and they worked out at £8-10 per TB. Most go for the same prices as new. For the new, high capacity drives I bought, per TB, £13.xx is a great deal, £14.xx is good and £15 - 16 is more average. These prices assume you're happy to buy external drives and shuck them. Otherwise you're looking at prices starting at £18 a TB for internal drives.
 
Calranthe said:
I have dropped most to 1080 below that it would affect the quality if I had to re-upload to another service.
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The resolution isn't directly linked to file size - data rate is.

H.265 (HEVC) can basically squeeze a lot more quality out of the data rate. So an h.265 at 5mbps will look lots better then an h.264 at 5mbps, but the file size and resolution will be the same.

If the h.265 at, say, 2.5mbps looks the same as the h.264 at 5mbps, then you'll have the same quality and resolution, but half the file size.

A good HEVC encode can take a long time depending on your hardware and settings used, but it's a very good suggestion from Donnie, and could well be your solution.
 
doug_1986 said:
The resolution isn't directly linked to file size - data rate is.

H.265 (HEVC) can basically squeeze a lot more quality out of the data rate. So an h.265 at 5mbps will look lots better then an h.264 at 5mbps, but the file size and resolution will be the same.

If the h.265 at, say, 2.5mbps looks the same as the h.264 at 5mbps, then you'll have the same quality and resolution, but half the file size.

A good HEVC encode can take a long time depending on your hardware and settings used, but it's a very good suggestion from Donnie, and could well be your solution.
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I use (H.264 on OBS 18000 cbr, recording and 1440p for upload to YT ) and then I handbrake down to 1080p 30fps for storage. drops a 50gb file to around 6-10 gb I have a 3950x cpu for the grunt work. 3000+ video files is going to be a large storage no matter what sadly.
 
Calranthe said:
3000+ video files is going to be a large storage no matter what sadly.
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Yep, you're not wrong there. I'm a pro video editor and I've had over 1.4PB of proxy media before, to make 10 x 1hr programmes.

Still, 6-10gb for a video is still hefty. I tend to keep HEVC copies of my final TV shows / films that I've made, and using quite a simple, lightweight encode in Media Encoder gives me a file that's about 4.4gb for a 1hr show. It could certainly go smaller if I wanted to leave it encoding all day and night, but that's fine for me. And that would be plenty enough quality for you to keep as your master.

So unless those 6-10gb files of yours are 2hrs or more long, there's certainly a lot of space you could free up.
 
doug_1986 said:
Yep, you're not wrong there. I'm a pro video editor and I've had over 1.4PB of proxy media before, to make 10 x 1hr programmes.

Still, 6-10gb for a video is still hefty. I tend to keep HEVC copies of my final TV shows / films that I've made, and using quite a simple, lightweight encode in Media Encoder gives me a file that's about 4.4gb for a 1hr show. It could certainly go smaller if I wanted to leave it encoding all day and night, but that's fine for me. And that would be plenty enough quality for you to keep as your master.

So unless those 6-10gb files of yours are 2hrs or more long, there's certainly a lot of space you could free up.
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My streams/recordings are between 1-3 hours long :cry: 2 hours is the average.
 
Calranthe said:
My streams/recordings are between 1-3 hours long :cry: 2 hours is the average.
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Ha! Ok, fair enough. Point remains though - convert to h.265 and you will save space.

I guess the only other thing to consider is whether you actually need your own copies. If they're hosted on YouTube, that's effectively free storage. If you ever needed then again you could just re-download as and when.
 
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doug_1986 said:
Ha! Ok, fair enough.

I guess the only other thing to consider is whether you actually need your own copies. If they're hosted on YouTube, that's effectively free storage. If you ever needed then again you could just re-download as and when.
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Seen too many channels blanked over crazy stuff, the whole thing with no filter between mouth and brain and no editing means well for example during a live stream a month ago an old nursery rhyme from the 70's popped into my head that we used to sing in primary school and I just managed to stop myself before I sang the bit about catching a darker skinned person by his toe and if he squeals let him go. That would not have gone down well, meant nothing by it, totally innocent rhyme that was sung by both blacks and whites in my class and we had no idea of the context or concept, stuff comes into my head and goes right out the door, but growing up in the 70's means things can get interesting if my mind goes down certain paths.
 
Calranthe said:
Seen too many channels blanked over crazy stuff, the whole thing with no filter between mouth and brain and no editing means well for example during a live stream a month ago an old nursery rhyme from the 70's popped into my head that we used to sing in primary school and I just managed to stop myself before I sang the bit about catching a darker skinned person by his toe and if he squeals let him go. That would not have gone down well, meant nothing by it, totally innocent rhyme that was sung by both blacks and whites in my class and we had no idea of the context or concept, stuff comes into my head and goes right out the door, but growing up in the 70's means things can get interesting if my mind goes down certain paths.
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You could always consider YouTube the backup then. If your drives go down, you can re-download from YouTube. If YouTube gets wiped, you have your drives.
 
If you build an unraid server.

Which is a normal desktop pc with loads of sata ports. You can add SATA ports to pcie lanes too using cards.

Then have a parity drive. If 1 hard drive dies you can build the whole array by simply removing that drive and replacing it.

If 2 drives die at the same time then you will lose data.

So I suggest that you look into unraid and use that to host your videos.

Also convert all the videos to h265 it's twice as efficient as h264 so a 100mb file should only take up 50mb in h265
 
Psycho Sonny said:
If you build an unraid server.

Which is a normal desktop pc with loads of sata ports. You can add SATA ports to pcie lanes too using cards.

Then have a parity drive. If 1 hard drive dies you can build the whole array by simply removing that drive and replacing it.

If 2 drives die at the same time then you will lose data.

So I suggest that you look into unraid and use that to host your videos.

Also convert all the videos to h265 it's twice as efficient as h264 so a 100mb file should only take up 50mb in h265
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H265 isn't supported by any popular streaming service or OBS or Streamlabs, from what I can see sadly and I think my Synology hybrid raid is comparable to unraid, it has 8 bays and 2 of them can be the parity or fail over drives, up to 2 drives can die at the same time on the synology and it will be fine plus then you just hot swap out the dead disks with 2 more and those become the safety net.
 
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