fluffy rambles: My ever-increasing storage pool

My ever-increasing storage pool

September 9, 2020 5:02 PM (3 years ago)

I remember around 15 years ago being impressed with the fact that the total amount of hard drives in my home had crossed the 1TB threshold.

Nowadays I have around 25TB worth of spare hard drives just sitting in a box. And quite a lot of capacity actually in use, too. Jeeze.

Just off the top of my head:

windowlick (Desktop iMac)
- 2TB “Fusion Drive” (128GB SSD + 2TB HDD)
- 1TB external SSD
- 6TB external hard drive for incremental backups
nodule (Desktop NUC)
- 1TB NVMe
attache (Synology DS920+)
- 2x10TB HDD (RAID, with two additional bays available)
- 1TB NVMe (read cache)
cadet (MacBook Pro)
- 512GB SSD
V (Eve V, a Surface clone)
- 512GB SSD
lunchbox (underutilized gaming PC)
- 256GB SSD (I think)
hegemony (mostly-unused ancient Mac mini)
- 1TB SSD (I think)
inkpad (mostly-unused Thinkpad X220T)
- 256GB SSD
literally just sitting in a box (leftovers from upgrades etc.)
- 6TB HDD (only a year old!)
- 3x4TB HDD
- 3TB HDD
- 2TB HDD (RAID degraded)
- 500GB 2.5" HDD (originally pulled from the mini, I think)
- many piles of SD cards and USB thumb drives of varying sizes
and who knows how much in my various game consoles and random beater laptops…

Which is to say, I have about 35TB of storage in active use (on computers), and another 24TB in a box, as a just-in-case sort of thing.

What do I even use it for? Well, music and video projects take up a lot of space, and I have a rather large media archive in general (music, movies, and photos being the primary consumers), but most of it is just space I have set aside for a rainy day or for incremental backups or whatever. Basically, storage has gotten so cheap and I keep on upgrading it without even thinking about it. It’s taking me a conscious effort to not just reflexively load up the DS920+ with all the drives I can.¹

Or in other words: does anyone out there need a hard drive? Heck, some of those computers might as well be up for grabs too. I have Too Much Stuff™.

Oh and I also have an older-but-still-decent Synology DS414 I’m going to be selling soon. It still works fine, although it’s diskless (it’s where I pulled a bunch of the above drives from, both from incrementally upgrading it and, as of now, upgrading to the DS920+). So, if anyone’s interested in that, please let me know. Heck, I’ll even fill it up with drives. (Specifically, the 3x4TB + the 3TB, for a RAID volume of 11TB. But I can’t speak to how long any of those drives will last at this point.) Make me an offer before I put it on eBay.

Heck, my original plan was to put 2x10 and then 2x6 into it, but then it turns out that Synology doesn’t let you grow a volume with a drive that’s smaller than the smallest drive in the thing and it would have been too annoying to juggle data around so that I could start on the 6TB disks first. So I’ll just be adding another 10 when I start to run low on available space, I think. ↩
Or maybe by then the $/TB will work out better with even larger disks…
And incidentally the DS920+ is a four-bay unit that can be expanded to a total of nine bays, and each bay can take a 16TB drive. Which is to say it has the potential of holding 144TB of disks, which would have a capacity of 128TB in RAID-5 or 112TB in RAID-6. Even with as much of a data packrat as I am I can’t imagine ever needing that much.