that hard drive prices return to normal and think about all the things i can build.
silliness aside, i honestly sit there and plan it out. i wish i pulled the trigger and started earlier. i actually bought two mini pcs before this mess and have one setup running proxmox. o have this beautiful jellyfin -> jellyseer -> radarr/sonarr -> sazbd -> gluetun -> newsreader setup on proxmox and i founf 1 8tb wd red plus on sale that i put in a ugreen nas running truenas and its filling up quickly.
i wont move to nextcloud until i get a second drive for mirroring. i still have to find a place to backup those future files as well.
there is not really a point tp this post except i know people here feel my pain. how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
for now i find stuff and put price alerts on them. o have tried ebay but i dont always get what i pay for. like buying wlanlisting that says wd red plus cmr and getting a wd red (non plus) smr.
i fantasize about the cool rack setup i could build. right now everything, jellyfin stack, home assistant, glance dashboard, pteradactyl, netbird , anf any vm i want to play with all on one proxmox mini pc. next comes books
sorry for the rant but maybe you can relate
I have a good stack of 2.5" and a stack of 3.5" HDD, but most are in the 1 to 2 TB range with a couple that are 500 GB. They’re salvaged drives that I’ve just been collecting. I guess I could daisy chain them all together, LOL, but I’ve been just saving them for emergencies. I have an old Seagate ST-225 20MB, but I framed that one in a shadow box as a curio.
I recent noticed my drive is dying but it cost about the same as I bought it for, 12 years ago.
Do we need to dim the lights?
I use a hetzner storage box with borg backups for my backups. It’s pretty cheap and has enough space for my VM and LXC backups, as well as my proxmox host backup. I don’t backup my media collection because that would cost a lot, and I can always redownload most of the things I have if needed.
I am very happy that I managed to get two 20TB discs before the crazy, now I’m just sad that I didn’t get two more for the backup server.
how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you’re not getting the largest drives possible.

That’s maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it’s significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.
It’s still pretty much 2x. I managed to get ram bought before it went silly but I’m really short on storage.
Same boat, the exact same refurb 10tb drives I’ve got in my system are 2.5x my last purchase. But I did get a lot of fast RAM before the prices went nuts.
I was going to get proxmox myself but decided to go the debian13 route instead. I heard proxmox is like pseudo open source and kernel diverges a bit from the Linux kernel. Anyway, whatever the case, I’m happy on debian
I heard proxmox is like pseudo open source
Proxmox is open source. They use a customized Linux kernel (based on Ubuntu’s newer kernel) to add support for other features that are useful in datacenter environments, like ZFS and such.
The only thing they paywall is access to their enterprise production-ready repositories. But they still offer free access to their non-production repo.
Only thing I wish for Christmas is to be able to replace the RAM and mobo in one of my servers. It is failing with a kernel panic about once a week and it is an old DDR3 platform I planned to upgrade back in January. I have isolated the issue to a hardware fault but left without a solution…
Try increasing timings on your RAM?
I’ll try that next time it dies, see if it helps
How much do you need?
The server currently runs on 32gig but I was planning on upgrading to 64 or 128gig DDR5. Could go as low as 16 if need be, but the the price is still hurting more than having to reboot 2-4 times a month.
What do you want to do with the HDD’s? I have a bunch of crap saved on mine, but nowhere near 12TB. Also I rent some drive space (Hetzner Storage Box) for server backups. That adds up over time but you don’t have to spend a big chunk all at once, and HDD prices might eventually drop again.
Feel lucky that you want HDD rather than SSD. SSD prices have tripled or quadrupled while HDD has not even doubled, per the graph someone posted.
I can confidently say the HDDs I bought before Christmas last year are double the price I bought them for.




