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I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash. “Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfull

by sneak 1y ago

I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash. “Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking. Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.

Pxtl 1y ago
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
SlowTao 1y ago
Apple hearing they have an excuse not to add more storage, cue happy shareholder noises
throwaway2037 1y ago
I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations? Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
- cesarb 1y ago
  > I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. You must not work with video. Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more. Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
- diggan 1y ago
  > I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on. Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly. > Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
- sneak 1y ago
  I always carry at least that much cash on me. You never know when you might need to flee a collapsing country on short notice or bribe a cop. https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ Can’t do that with your debit card. In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary. Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.
addandsubtract 1y ago
Who is your HDD dealer? Hmu. Do we have HDD taxis yet?

by sneak 1y ago

Pxtl 1y ago

I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.

SlowTao 1y ago

Apple hearing they have an excuse not to add more storage, cue happy shareholder noises

throwaway2037 1y ago

I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations? Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?

cesarb 1y ago
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. You must not work with video. Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more. Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
diggan 1y ago
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on. Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly. > Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
sneak 1y ago
I always carry at least that much cash on me. You never know when you might need to flee a collapsing country on short notice or bribe a cop. https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ Can’t do that with your debit card. In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary. Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.

addandsubtract 1y ago

Who is your HDD dealer? Hmu. Do we have HDD taxis yet?