I’ve been using renewed (refurbished) 8TB drives off of Ebay - SAS 8TB for $50-60 each. Not a single failure in over a year on the dozen or so drives I’m running right now. I’m running unRAID with a combination of unRAID’s native array drives (for media and “disposable” stuff) in a dual parity config, and ZFS (with snapshots replicated to a live backup on a secondary server) for important personal stuff (and backed-up off-site a few times a year).

Even if something were to perish, I have enough spares to just chuck one in and let it resilver without worrying at all. I’m content with this as a homelabber and when I’m not supplying critical service for a business, etc.

Just wish they were more affordable. The only reason for the crazy pricing is that it’s what big companies can afford to pay rather than home labbers. They’re not all that complex compared to other mass market tech.

Get a controller that works with SAS drives and buy them used and cheap from eBay. Consumer devices won’t run SAS drives on SATA controllers so they’re usually cheaper.

The fuck all cops? Heck ya. The same people who say this run screaming for help to cops as soon as shit goes sideways. Makes me laugh.

You appear to have issues Mr. Fuck all cops. And you amuse me.

Cave paintings aren’t video or audio. They’re pictures. You can print your photos or print grabs from your videos.

I’m a big advocate of unraid servers. Mix And match any size of drives you have available into a single large NAS with protection against drive failures. You can use old pc hardware you might have lying around. It’s commercial software but you can demo it for free. It’s good enough that I own two full pro licenses.

Storage is dirt cheap. Just add more. IT at work bugs out their eyes when I talk about adding more storage space. I have more at home than they do in the office. Lol.

I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST drives from eBay. Dirt cheap and haven’t had one fail yet.

Unraid natively supports full ZFS arrays in addition to unraid arrays since the last major release. Can mix and match both types on the same system as necessary.

All of my (easily replaceable) Plex media is native unraid arrays while my documents are all on a ZFS array on the same system with snapshots and such. It’s the perfect solution.

So you don’t know unraid has ZFS now then? Gotta keep up with the times.

And it’s worth every cent as commercial software. I bought 2 pro licenses because it’s just that good.

I get what you’re proposing but I’d respectfully suggest looking into unRAID on basically any hardware that can boot an OS.

It won’t necessarily be small and cute (though you can accomplish that if you wish), but you can make it do just about anything. I bought old enterprise hardware to run my main and backup servers on. I feel really comfortable with my data safety.

You know what will happen? I do. Apple will leave Europe

Want side loading? Buy android. That’s your choice.

It is infact Graphics Interchange format. Not Jirafics Interchange format.

I know the creator pronounces it Jif, but there are lots of people in the world who pronounce things wrong.

I offer up “niche”. It’s actually not nitch no matter how many people say it like that.

Lookit all the nerds I triggered. Popcorn time!

Love app stores pay to play and subscription models? Coming soon to every platform as fast as they can shove it down your throat.

Oh a homophobe. What a novel approach. Nobody has though of that before.

Go to any YouTube reviewer that’s paid by the click. There you go.

Someone who relies on sensationalism to drive clicks to his business is not trustworthy. Believe what you want.

Who cares what some doofus YouTuber thinks?

I went down the unRAID rabbit hole.

I never came back up, I’m happy here.

Look into unraid.

One upon a time I might’ve suggested FreeNAS/TrueNAS but now that unraid supports ZFS there’s not a really compelling reason except if you can’t afford the license fee (which is very reasonable $59-$129 for a lifetime license depending on the license you want. If you don’t want ZFS you can run a standard XFS file system that can be accessed by basically anything. Parity expansion and all the good stuff.

Just saw your additional comment. You can run dockers for Plex and more or full VMs.

They also sometimes do Black Friday discounts to buy a basic license and fully upgrade it).

Look at videos by spaceinvaderone for some examples of what it can do. I have two pro licenses and it’s easily the best computer purchase I’ve made in the last two decades.