"Unlimited" alternatives to Google Drive, what are the options?

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830

Also tagging @vashp2029 because they asked.

I calculated this with 24 x 18 TB Toshiba MG09 HDDs, which I can get new with 5 years warranty for 250€ each, so 6000€ for storage. Four of those drives will be parity drives, so in the end I will have 20 x 18 TB = 360 TB usable storage. I initially calculated with TiB instead of TB that's why I said 320 when it should have been even more.

I can get a cheap hot-swappable 24 bay 4U case + rails from a chinese merchant for ~315€ (including shipping) and get 3 used LSI 2008 SAS controllers for ~30€ each. I would use consumer hardware (ATX mainboard, intel 12th gen cpu, 2 x 2 TB NVMe SSDs in RAID 1 for cache, 64GB RAM DDR4 3200, a single 750W non-redundant ATX power supply (making sure to stagger drive spin-ups). Let's say an additional 1300 € for the hardware on top of the drives. I don't care about ECC RAM or redundant power supplys, as my use case is not that critical and I wouldn't even mind a few days downtime.

I can colocate with Hetzner close to my hometown for 120€ / mo for 14U rackspace with a 1 Gibt / s port and 2TB traffic. Additional traffic is charged with 1.19€ / TB. Ingoing traffic is always free. I expect far less than 10 TB egress traffic per month, but let's just calculate with an additional 20€ / mo for traffic. Electricity is expensive at a pricepoint of almost 0.54€ / kWh. I would probably spin down drives to save costs, but let's exaggerate and calculate with a constant power consumption of 200 W, this will add up to almost 80€ / mo. I won't need remote hands, as I can visit the datacenter myself, especially since longer downtimes are no problem for me. I neglect the cost of gas as I have no idea how often I would need to go there, but I don't think it will be very often.

In total:

Monthly Expenses [€]
Rackspace 120
Electricity 80
Traffic 20
Total 220
One-time Expenses [€]
HDDs 6000
Server Hardware 1300
Total 7300

If I annualize the hardware cost over two years (the system will likely live much longer, but that is the warranty period of the consumer hardware), I get 7300€ / 24 = 304.17 / mo, lets say 310.
So in the end we have 220 + 310 = 530 € / mo for 360 TB usable, which is 1,47€ / TB / mo.

and given the initial investment plus all the labor and aggravation this is certainly going to generate, I'd rather pay $2/TB/mo to iDrive e2 S3

I was not aware of this offer when I made my original comment and I tend to agree. However, after the first two years the hardware will be paid off and the cost will drop well below 1€ / TB / month, provided the consumer hardware doesn't fail. But even if something does fail after 2 years, it will be cheap to replace. And the HDDs have longer warranty. The only problem could be if the backplate fails because delivery times can be long for that, so it might be reasonable to buy a spare.

But cloud storage will probably also become cheaper over time. I think it is a decision that should be made under consideration of your individual requirements and of course your willingness to build and maintain such a project.

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831

That would be $0.26/TB/mo, which is well into "too good to be true" territory for me.

To aggravate suspicions, they only offer annual (or 3-year) payment (for the "storage" plans) -- custom-made for a rug pull.

I would not risk it.

832

Thanks @Hoptional for the great explanation!

That's an amazingly low price for a new enterprise-class drive, the cheapest I can find is $320 and that's USD and in the US -- IME stuff in Europe and quoted in EUR is more expensive.

Four of those drives will be parity drives, so in the end I will have 20 x 18 TB = 360 TB usable storage. I initially calculated with TiB instead of TB that's why I said 320 when it should have been even more.

This is prudent, 1 parity HDD for each 6. Good plan.

Like as with the HDDs, I think you are being a bit optimistic here as these prices are in EUR and for new hardware in Europe -- but I might well be wrong.

That really makes a difference. Lucky you!

With the caveats I pointed above, I agree. Let's not forget that iDrive charges in USD, tho -- so to compare dollars to dollars, your price/TB becomes $1.58.

If you're willing to pay yearly (which I'm not, see above, but given the alternative would mean a EUR 7300 -- US 7865 initial investment, it might make more sense in your case), iDrive e2 S3 is actually $1.67 -- which is just under 6% more per month.

You sound like you have a great, well-fleshed plan -- and living within driving distance of the datacenter is the kicker. If I were in your place, I would be hard-torn between the two alternatives.

Thanks again for sharing the details with us!

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833

So here's a summary of the "under $2/TB/Mo" metered storage options mentioned so far, ordered by cost:

Have I missed any, or does anyone know of other options?

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834

I'd say you need unions for more than 1TB. It's 1TB per user.

If cold storage is an option, there's AWS Glacier Deep for $1/TB + the cost to access (which I'm not sure the price).

And there's Jottacloud unilimited plan for €8.25 but upload speed is progressively throttled starting from 5TB, dropping to under 1MB/s after 10TB, under 0.5MB/s after 15TB... I'd say it's usable at least up to 10TB, but even if you define it as a 5TB plan it's still under $2/TB.

835

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I used prices I can find in reputable German online shops and I already have shopping carts with everything I need, so the prices are indeed realistic. I even added a 100 € margin to arrive at the 1300 €. But I have to admit I forgot the initial set-up fee for the colocation, which is an additional 120€ one-time charge.

Thanks! I really am hard-torn. I think in the end I will do it, even if it is just for the experience. If I can save some money along the way that's great. If not, I will at least not lose too much, I think.

836

My team didn’t get any email from Dropbox yet. We did get the extra TB and support told us we’ll get it again this month.

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837

You should open a thread dedicated to the project and tell us how it goes. If you do, I'd love if you could tag me, as I'd like to follow it.

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838

Thanks for the clarification. You seem to be employing all due diligence -- it makes your plan look even more solid.

I second @ashlar suggestion, please let us know how it goes! if a separate thread, please tag me too so I don't miss it.

A self-administered server with its own HDDs would be a perfect answer to all the shenanigans/rug-pulls the cloud storage companies have been springing up on us... and if you have any spare capacity to sell please let us know, depending on the margin you add I'm sure there will be takers!

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839

I bought PikPark 10TB premium for one month to test all functions, but it cannot be considered as an option. Their application is similar to terabox. It's a bad app, slow, and of dubious origin. Sharing is also bad, the video player is not great, in short, everything is very bad. For those who are used to using google drive, dropbox, mega.nz, box, or even onedrive, it cannot be considered an option.

840

You know there's a PikPak remote for rclone, right? PikPak

Have you tried it? Sorry if I'm asking the obvious, but I can't see it mentioned in your post.

841

Does not sound good. hahah. Tarabox is "famous" scam. It "works" - but you will never upload 100GB even if you pay for 50TB as it is slow beyond anything. It is a bit like these 100TB SSD disks from ebay for $20.

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842

This is exacly like that "It is a bit like these 100TB SSD disks from ebay for $20"

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843

this is good. it's great. You receive this message. either with a single transfer, or --transferes 4, --transferes 4 8 simultaneous. Failed to copy: failed to create a new file: Error "task_run_nums_limit" (11): The number of tasks in transmission has reached the limit, please try again later.
I was able to send 3.4GB in 3 hours through the app.
zero k via rclone

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844

Thanks for the report. Pikpak is out, then -- will try and update my post to reflect that.

845

In case anyone still has the illusion of using pikpak. Since September 2023 have included the following limitation.
Your PikPak account already includes the following basic transfer quotas:

 Cloud Download Traffic - 100TB/month
 Downstream Traffic - 1200GB/month (including online playback, viewing, and download traffic)
 Upload Traffic - 400GB/month

But my account started having error with less than 5GB of upload, not 400GB

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846

Sure, I will be happy to create a thread, once I get started.

I don't think that I could offer a lot of capacity or something very flexible, unfortunately. And since I will have little redundancy I cannot guarantee a very high availability. I am not sure if that would be very attractive for anyone. That said, there will be space for more servers in the rack, so if someone would be interested in having their own separate storage server (still with the caveat of no guarantee for high availability), maybe we could work something out once my setup is up and running well.

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847

Did anyone received any feedback from box or did they removed the restrictions for anyone?

848

Well, yes... We have just received a "feedback". Sounds like a joke...

Screenshot_20230906-234347_Gmail
Screenshot_20230906-234347_Gmail1085×2048 121 KB

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849

I've got the same now. I opened a ticket a few days ago, because my "limit" should have been lifted at 31 August, as stated in the mail i got. Support was a complete joke and waste of time. First they let me make videos of the "issue" and trying to make me think the problem is on my side. I asked them what they are searching for, it is your API which is giving me the 429 errors and i didnt change my setup. All of a sudden he sends me the same fair use policy text, but this time with 30 days, valid until 30 September. I asked them why i got another "limit" and that i didnt upload anything since end of August, but i didnt get any explanation, its like suck it or quit...

I guess they are buying time because they run out of space. From my point of view, it would be easier to just say the truth about the space issues, which everyone would understand and give them time to fix it, and not send out stupid fair use policy mails which only make peoply angry. I mean how do they think people are supposed to migrate their data, over a period of 2 years? A complete joke...

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