I’m a bit of a data hoarder, a lot of content from YouTube or public broadcasters is worth saving, or is just a big favourite of mine. I’ve already been deleting more files than I like to.

I have a bunch of Fanxiang 4TB drives, eg S880. I didn’t set out to have so many but crucial, Samsung, etc all failed way too often in early life.

I bought a few on a lark and stocked up on those and pine 64 stuff to do a 36 node ceph cluster (if you figured i got the idea from Jeff Geerling you get a gold star!)

Last year my heat went out during below freezing temperatures and I lost three Toshiba drives, out of three total.

Cluster is almost 2 years old and I degoogled with it. I have an additional rack of raspis and orangepis that run my k3s cluster, Jellyfin runs on that along with some additional infrastructarr.

The k3s nodes run off of virtual iscsi images served by ceph, rgw gateway for s3 compatible api, and the only public exposure requires access to my zerotier network. My home router runs it, then my phone and laptop and that’s all within the zerotier free plan.

The Fanxiangs have exceeded my expectations and they are competitively priced. Watch their eBay store for the occasional bulk discount deal. Give one a try, I run my laptop and desktop on them now as well.