Hey all you beautiful selfhosters,
What are your suggestions for frugally obtaining HDDs in the current economic climate? Specifically the EU (Netherlands).
I’m looking at second hand drives, but even those go for €100+ now, with bad sectors and all.
Can we organise a collective AI datacenter robbery and doll out some stolen drives? 😁


I think a big fuel for these storage anxieties is the very real situation we’re in right now, where we’re watching the “forever Internet” erode and crumble before our eyes, and getting rug-pulled from every direction service-wise, and losing access to media we don’t have a hard copy of.
I do wish there were a better way to pool all this storage for a common library of preservation…I mean I guess Internet Archive is like that but they’re constantly under attack. All this is under heaps of legal “gray area” and obviously the media titans want to force a rental-only-own-nothing world.
Right now we kinda have to become a scattered group of amateur historians and librarians, to preserve our culture.