I thought this video was rather interesting, because at 12:27, the presenter crunches the numbers to find out how many years it would take for a new computer purchase to be more environmentally friendly (in regards to total CO2 expended) compared to using a less efficient used model.
Depending on the specific use case, it could take as little as 3 years to breakeven in terms of CO2 if both systems were at max power draw forever, and as long as 30 if the systems are mostly at idle.
Check serverpartdeals.com for HDDs. They’re used enterprise drives so they’re much cheaper, but there’s always the possibility of getting a bad drive so they should be tested first. If you’re just storing pirated stuff the risk isn’t super great since you can just find the files again. The next best option is shucking external drives like WD Elements/Easystore/MyBook as they’re typically half the price of the bare WD Red drives and are virtually the same thing with a different label. I have bought about 15 drives using both these methods and haven’t had any issues. The shucked drives have been in use since as far back as 2018.
I am a hobby photographer and usually take a few hundred GBs of photos every year (I shoot in JPG+RAW), I have other media as well, but I am mainly concerned about my photos.
I have them currently saved to a single HDD in my computer, which has worked ok, but I have seen bitrot in some files…
So I was reliable storage, currently thinking of a zraid1 with four normal disks, one parity, one hot spare and one cold spare, I am looking for it to last a minimum of ten years with normal maintenance.
I will probably put 64GB ram in the server, and possibly an SSD cache over time