Hard drives - high $$ in Thailand and recommendations for server drives

[gamb00ler]

I'm setting up a simple centralized storage system for entertainment files.  Retrieval demands upon it will be low volume and slow, just fast enough for a single stream, perhaps two.  It will be also be the destination for active torrent downloads.  Content will be movies, TV shows, YouTube downloads and music.  Only the music and a handful of top notch video content will be stored for longer periods.  Most videos will be deleted after watching once.

 

My plan is to use a low power 12th Gen Intel box with 6 X 2.5Gb network interfaces (11k ฿) that will also be my main router.  For the hard drives I was thinking two 4TB Seagate 5400 RPM units.

 

I noticed that hard drives in Thailand are almost double the price in USA.  That seems kind of strange because Thailand is #2 in worldwide production volume of hard drives.

 

I may use the 2 drives to provide their own backup by using only ½ their capacity for live data and ½ for backup of the other drive.

 

Also Amazon will rent me backup disk space for $1/Tb per month.  Retrieval will take up to 12 hours, that's why it's cheap.

 

My questions are:

- why are HDD's expensive here

- is it better to use 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM HDD's for my low load setup

 

 

 

 

[bignok]

What are entertainment files?

[gamb00ler]

12 minutes ago, bignok said:

What are entertainment files?

you likely will have your own definition, so my files probably wouldn't mean anything to you.

Because you're special I will let you know that all of them would be acceptable in a public library.

[KannikaP]

I have two W11 PCs, one a tower in my office, the other a NUC in my lounge. They are both connected to my router via CAT cables. I have Microsoft One Drive with my subscription giving me 6 x 1TB storage for each 'member' of my family.

In my tower I have a 1TB Samsung SSD which is my One Drive folder ie all my docs,photos, music, videos, software,etc etc are sent there. I can decide which files are kept locally or just up on the Cloud. This SSD is backed up to a 1TB WD HDD via Aeomi Backupper.

When I download something via BitTorrent I can say to which folder it is saved and obviously all movies go to my VIDEO folder. This drive is shared on my network, so I can access files from my other NUC PC, and even on my FireTV stick via VLC, and on my Android phone which I have OneDrive installed. Files CAN be saved on my NUC, but as I have a 1Gb/s internet I don't bother. So I can watch any downloaded content on any of my devices almost instantly. And I personally have 1TB of storage, plenty because, I like you, delete stuff I have watched.

It all works very well.

[BritManToo]

Why not just use a NAS? 

My Zyxel NAS can download torrents, has2x internal drive bays and 3x external USB ports. 

[Mickeymaus]

"I noticed that hard drives in Thailand are almost double the price in USA.  That seems kind of strange because Thailand is #2 in worldwide production volume of hard drives." 

 

Is it like this? Do you have examples? 

[KannikaP]

15 minutes ago, BritManToo said:

Why not just use a NAS? 

My Zyxel NAS can download torrents, has2x internal drive bays and 3x external USB ports. 

My tower PC has 8 x 3.5 inch internal drive bays (all empty) and 6 USB ports, and can download torrents. It still works fine. 555

[recom273]

If you are just building a media server, then 5400 are OK.

 

If you aren't using the drives to store precious files then you could use 2nd hand drives, I hear they have jumped a little in price, but still better value than buying new. I think you can find them on shoppee. If buying new then 4TB wasn't the best value, you might want to try a couple of bigger drives for TB:THB ratio.

 

Not too sure what you are saying about 50/50 of the drive, if you are a after some kind of backup, you can just mirror the drive.

 

Im not a lover of using your server to route your traffic, are you thinking of PFsense or Opensense? I would run that on a separate passive computer.

 

If you are using an old machine, you aren't using RAID or anything fancy, check out CasaOS, I noticed the App Store contains a lot more software now - easy to set up and maintain. You can use duplicati, to mirror your drives.

[KannikaP]

1 minute ago, recom273 said:

If you aren't using the drives to store precious files then you could use 2nd hand drives

Who the f..k sells or buys second hand drives, and WHY? They could last 10 years, or 10 minutes.

[gamb00ler]

@KannikaP counting me there are 3 heavy consumers of media that will be stored digitally in our house(s).  The other 2 don't have much computer experience.  I would like to keep it as simple as possible for them.  I think that will be best implemented by one source for the media.  It will be easier for me to maintain it as well.  The others will use KODI or something similar for their access.

[fdsa]

1 hour ago, gamb00ler said:

I noticed that hard drives in Thailand are almost double the price in USA.  That seems kind of strange because Thailand is #2 in worldwide production volume of hard drives.

exactly. I have bought server grade drives from ComputerUniverse (Germany) and laughed when saw "Made in Thailand" because the very same drives cost here exactly 2 times more than in Germany including shipping and import taxes.

 

BTW I personally could not recommend ComputerUniverse because their packaging is shít even if you purchase a "premium packaging service" for €5 and the hard drives are very easy to come damaged. Luckily mine came intact.

But for robust storage such as SSD this store is great.

[gamb00ler]

14 minutes ago, Mickeymaus said:

 

Is it like this? Do you have examples? 

The same Western Digital drive is 70 on Newegg and 135 on Lazada.  My friend alerted me to the issue and he has done a more thorough comparison and found the same results.

[ozimoron]

Why not just use a cloud s3 server like wasabi.com? $9 a terabyte, have a server in singapore and very reliable. They even have an AWS s3 compatible API if that interests you.

[KannikaP]

1 minute ago, fdsa said:

BTW I personally could not recommend ComputerUniverse because their packaging is shít even if you purchase a "premium packaging service" for €5 and the hard drives are very easy to come damaged.

I wonder in what packaging they came from Thailand to Germany safely.

[KannikaP]

6 minutes ago, gamb00ler said:

@KannikaP counting me there are 3 heavy consumers of media that will be stored digitally in our house(s).  The other 2 don't have much computer experience.  I would like to keep it as simple as possible for them.  I think that will be best implemented by one source for the media.  It will be easier for me to maintain it as well.  The others will use KODI or something similar for their access.

In my experience KODI is much more difficult to negotiate than having a One Drive Icon ie ONE SOURCE for the media on which you click to access what's on it.

Some of you guys seem to make things so complicated, just because you can. The OP is only watching telly and playing music, not mining for Bitcoin.

[gamb00ler]

2 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

Why not just use a cloud s3 server like wasabi.com? $9 a terabyte, have a server in singapore and very reliable. They even have an AWS s3 compatible API if that interests you.

Will their storage appear to be an SMB mapped local network drive?

[recom273]

Just now, KannikaP said:

Who the f..k sells or buys second hand drives, and WHY? They could last 10 years, or 10 minutes.

Apparently, the person who was telling me about SH drives said that a drive will either run for a very long time or fail within the first couple of weeks / months.

 

I have 4x WD Red 4TB drives I bought about 8 years ago, still whirring away in servers in this heat.

 

If you are just using them for a media server, why not? if the drive fails then you just let the automated software just re-DL the files for you.

[gamb00ler]

3 minutes ago, KannikaP said:

In my experience KODI is much more difficult to negotiate than having a One Drive Icon ie ONE SOURCE for the media on which you click to access what's on it.

But KODI provides information about the movies, not just a name in a directory list.  Assuming you have KODI use the movie databases accessible online.

[fdsa]

15 minutes ago, Mickeymaus said:

Is it like this? Do you have examples? 

I strongly believe so. Most of the "enterprise" drives I saw were made either in China or in Thailand, with rare exceptions such as Malaysia, Philippines or Viet Nam.

[KannikaP]

Just now, gamb00ler said:

But KODI provides information about the movies, not just a name in a directory list.

So does Pirate Bay and mostly all the other torrent sites. 

[ozimoron]

1 minute ago, gamb00ler said:

Will their storage appear to be an SMB mapped local network drive?

No, You can make separate buckets. S3 Is more of a bulk storage paradigm. I assume you have software looking for an smb drive? If up and downloading manually it works fine and it's searchable. Media files are typically stored in these things by large corporations.

[KannikaP]

9 minutes ago, gamb00ler said:

 counting me there are 3 heavy consumers of media

Each person can only watch ONE movie at any one time.......heavy users?

[ozimoron]

The current best high capacity storage drive would be the WD Ultrastor series in my opinion.

[KannikaP]

1 minute ago, ozimoron said:

No, You can make separate buckets. S3 Is more of a bulk storage paradigm. I assume you have software looking for an smb drive? If up and downloading manually it works fine and it's searchable. Media files are typically stored in these things by large corporations.

But the OP is only him, his Mrs and his kid.

[recom273]

1 minute ago, gamb00ler said:

But KODI provides information about the movies, not just a name in a directory list.

Try this

 

https://jellyfin.org

 

Very easy to setup

 

You can use Sonarr / Radarr and then use something like requestrr to allow your family to add.

 

You can also stream music using jellyfin, but Navidrome might be of interest.

[gamb00ler]

1 minute ago, KannikaP said:

So does Pirate Bay and mostly all the other torrent sites. 

The other users need a very simple process to review, select and start the movie/TV show they want.  Your suggestions are really not well suited to make their experience simple.

 

[KannikaP]

Just now, gamb00ler said:

The other users need a very simple process to review, select and start the movie/TV show they want.  Your suggestions are really not well suited to make their experience simple.

 

Click on OneDrive, click on VIDEO folder, click on what you want to watch. Done

[gamb00ler]

2 minutes ago, KannikaP said:

Each person can only watch ONE movie at any one time.......heavy users?

Heavy.... as in a large percentage of their free time.  Perhaps you can come over, interview everyone to determine their needs and abilities and come up with a better solution.

[ozimoron]

Wasabi can be cloud NAS, yes. I just had a look and found this.

 

fees are USD $6 a month.

 

https://wasabi.com/cloud-nas/

[BritManToo]

20 minutes ago, KannikaP said:

My tower PC has 8 x 3.5 inch internal drive bays (all empty) and 6 USB ports, and can download torrents. It still works fine. 555

And I bet it uses lots of power!