Data hoarders. I'm in a plex group on fb and there's people there with libraries that they could never personally watch all of. It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.
You hear of media companies that delete old music and video from their own archives. People saving what they can may have the only copy left in existence.
Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes.
I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.
Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.
I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).
Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)
A couple decades ago I came into posesion of some late model compaq servers, some fibre channel equipment, and a stack of small FC disks. Thanks to my MSDN sub I then had the necessary bits to build a proper MS server cluster. Thanks to that home lab I build the experience necessary to land a very good job and eventually ended up as a MS Server Clustering SME for a giant tech company doing work for one of the major CC companies. Home lab can be great because you can just break stuff on purpose to see how things work and what system resiliency looks like.
This is correct, I personally aim to have all the highest quality versions of all movies, ie original Blu-ray. I have plenty of people that make use of it, it’s a hobby.
> It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.
Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.
If you run all the drives 24/7 I would guess you are looking at somewhere around 400W assuming a power sipping minipc as the host. This can be extremely optimized if you intelligently spin down disks when idle, probably down to >50W average.
Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.
dghughes|1 month ago
bayindirh|1 month ago
I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.
Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.
I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).
Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
hsbauauvhabzb|1 month ago
lanthade|1 month ago
stingraycharles|1 month ago
overfeed|1 month ago
Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.
hrimfaxi|1 month ago
tuananh|1 month ago
PeterStuer|1 month ago
Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.
bayindirh|1 month ago
A close friend of mine runs a single beefy server at home, which is currently ~35% of his monthly bill if I'm not making mental-math mistakes.