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

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1390

Please drop the cheap agressive rhetorics. We're not in any kind of pissing contest here.

a setup with 14x 16TB Disks which would consume around 70W-100W in idle

Not sure where you're getting this data, but here's mine, with references:

So, about 2.52+14.3+12= 28.82W total. Let's round it up to a nice 30W.

In the US the current electricity price is around 19cent per kwh, which would be basically only 150usd per year for the elecricity - even in the US.

Again not sure where you got this data; US DoE official data says it's just 16.3 cents average: Electric Power Monthly - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
And for the record, my friend (in whose house I plan on setting up my remote storage) lives in WA (which is not even the cheapest state electricity-wise) and pays less than 9 cents per kWh (I've seen his latest bill) .

What you are saying is that you can have electricity + internet for 284usd per year? 24usd per month? really?
Nope, i do not believe that.

Believe what you want, but I included URLs for all my data (which BTW you didn't), and here's my estimated total annual electricity cost: 365.25 days (the .25 is to account for leap years) * 24 hours * 30/1000 kW = 262.98KWh; 262.98 Kwh * $0.09/kWh = $23.66. And that is per year. So yeah, less than $2/month.

I would say the remaining 284/12-2= $21.66 per month ought to be enough to upgrade my friend's internet, given that a full 50Mbps DSL costs under $30/month over there (https://www.allconnect.com/local/wa), and once my data is loaded on these drives (which is not going to be done over the internet), 50Mbps is way more than I need.

By the way, you are paying for the time it takes to maintenance everything as well. if something is failing, it can be very time consuming.

Maintenance in this case is disconnecting the cables from the failed HDD (or, worst-case, the mini-PC), placing it in a box, slapping a shipping label on it, and dropping it at your nearest USPS/UPS/whatever. When the replacement hardware arrives, just revert the exact same procedure; all of this is done without using a single tool, opening up a single case/cabinet, or taking out a single screw. Where's the "very time-consuming" in that?

You could maybe compare it if you would buy serious server hardware, but you will need to pay a lot more if you like to have 14 SAS/SATA Ports.
and comparing a mini PC with 14 usb harddrives to a real cloud storage with 10k SAS drives is some kind of a joke.

The joke would be to use 10K SAS drives for an application that would never demand more than 100MB/s (which is the maximum capacity of a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home connection), and the setup I proposed can sustain at least twice that under sequential access. Likewise "serious server hardware" where a mini PC will suffice and in spades.

That said, please feel free to live in as expensive a place as you want, and spend as much as you want on overpriced and overspecced hardware -- it's your money, after all. But please respect the folks that, like me, would rather be frugal and spend only what's necessary.

1391

For what it's worth, I moved all my stuff local and my power spike due to adding local storage is really neglible.

I already pay for internet (no change) and already had a server running things (no change). My only captital was a bunch drives and 2 5 bay enclosures.

I pay about 12 cents per KwH and have everything feed into a UPS that I record the power usage.

In my setup, I see:

image
image780Ɨ284 23 KB

I use Unraid with 2 parity drives for some redundancy but in reality, if my data disappeared, it's just annoying, but definitely not mission critical.

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1392

Good data, @Animosity022 ! And these 127W average is the power your entire home lab (ie, everything plugged into the UPS, not only the 5*2=10 HDDs you use for previously-cloud storage) uses, right?

1393

In that, I have:

  • 10 drives
  • 2 USB enclosures
  • My mini PC - Meerkat - System76 (Love this company)
  • Dream Machine SE (my router)
  • USW Pro Max 24
  • My Verizon FIOS Modem

So basically, my whole 'basement' computer stuff is on that UPS. I have a few switches in the house and APs and other stuff, but that's the 'meat' of my environment. I have 10gb uplinks to switches (overkill) and my mini PC is 2.5Gbe (overkill). I enjoy tinkering so the upgrades are more future proofing, but definitely not needed for this setup..

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1394

That's one heck of a "mini" PC -- what's the processor TDP? 35W or more vs the N100's 6W?

Probably 7200 RPM drives, no

Anyway, great setup! Congrats!

1395

I have this CPU -> IntelĀ® Coreā„¢ i7-1260P Processor as I was 12th gen when I got this setup as I wanted something high enough to handle a few 4K streams.

Yeah, I did -> Seagate IronWolf Pro, 20 TB, Enterprise NAS Internal HDD | CMR 3.5 Inch | SATA 6 Gb/s | 7,200 RPM | 256 MB Cache | for RAID Network Attached Storage (ST20000NT001)

A bit overkill, but unraid does a decent job at spinning drives down and my drive setup generally only spins up what is being served. Works very well for me anyway.

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1396

If you think you can run 14 external Harddrives and a mini pc, usb hubs and USP with less than 30W ... Then just try it out.
The numbers you mentioned are not reflecting the reality and are for internal drives.
USB Drives are a complete different story and you will end up having 10 times the amount of spin up/down cycles as if you would run them internally, besides that the drives will consume much much more power and every drive is doing its own AC --> DC conversion and each of your usb power supplies will consume more than your 0.18W idle lol.

If you are ok with 50Mbit/s, then the internet is cheap, even though, it makes nearly no sense for me having such an amount of storage which can be accessed with 50mbit. But yeah, you wanted to make a point about the money.

Such a setup is by far not comparable to a managed cloud storage - its the lowest level one could get and i would prefer just buying an 8-bay NAS with 20TB drives, instead of the cheapest external drives one can get -.-

My homeserver runs with Seagate EXOS, 8x18TB on a pretty good hardware, but i am doing a lot of stuff with it.
Never the less, i took the decicion that i take a very small internet package, save around 50ā‚¬ in comparison to the biggerst one availible and spend that money in cloud storage and a dedicated Server.
Everything i like to have access to at high speed is in the cloud, the rest is at one of my 2 home servers.

Your Setup sounds a little childish for me and not well thought out.
But everyone can do it as he wish.

Edit:
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B0CN2YH1L7
This is another offer with those external drives you are comparing to a real cloud storage.
One of the persons actually opened it and they are selling refurbished seagate drives with a custom firmware on it.
So 1. no 5400rpm, those are 7200rpm (i do not know where you get the 5400rpm in first place, as in the other amazon offer nothing is written about 5400rpm.
2. you get what you pay for, refurbished drives which will give you problems in no time if you run them 24/7 especially in those external enclosures.
comparing your parts to a professional cloud storage ... funny ... very funny ...

even if my drives are more expensive, i have a 5 year warranty and i already got 1 drive replaced, yes - they do break sometimes, but it was a nearly 5 years old 12TB seagate ironwolf pro and it saved me a lot of money in comparison if i would have needed to buy a new 12tb drive (5 years real warranty vs 2 years warranty of a strange reseller)

1397

I feel Animosity numbers are pretty on point from a personal use story, yet enterprise is kinda different. They really want to minimize spinning up and down drives as they might never spin back up and result in an outage. Yet they purchase power at a way discounted rate, so it evens out.
Yet lot of costs are left out. Datacenter costs are high, and require high skill labor which is not cheap, big UPS and diesel generators with diesel delivery contracts etc. Also cloud data is usually stored in redundant locations, so costs are duplicated. There's also development costs for the whole infrastructure and product development etc.

Now, saying its pure profit after one year is a complete lie, they also have very strict upgrade schedules, while my home server is like 7yrs old and still kicking, they usually change machines every 4 to 5 yrs on lease agreements.

Finally, let's not forget this cloud providers are for profit, and multiple business units needs to get funding from the product. Of course the more managed and "easy to use" the product it, more inherent costs are associated with the service.

For most users who use for personal stuff, local is great and most cost effective out of the original investment. Most do not need multiple gbit geographic redundancy of your data. And funny enough, people who do have no problem paying the real cost of the benefit.

Finally, even if Durval numbers were realistic, at $20 per month cost for 100TB of storage, the company would never be able to recoup the investment as $240 per year would not even cover the estimated 284 for power and internet that was allocated to the expense. With $50 per month (based on Durval numbers) basically coming in even after 8 yrs, which is way past due for a hardware refresh in any enterprise scenario.

I hate the amazing crazy unlimited data for $20 per month is over, I still miss it, but it was never sustainable and nobody can work the magic for it. Specially now that the hot topic is AI and it uses a crazy amount of storage.

1398

I rather pay for idrive and donate monthly to rclone.. i mean i love how just things " JUST WORK " without the hassle of configuring, buying, maintaining and fiddleling with bare metal stuff, the cloud is the last frontier and people should embace it :slight_smile:

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1399

Truly unlimited storage does not exist, and affordable monthly costs are disappearing rapidly. Even if you find an unlimited provider, you are likely to experience a ā€œrug pullā€ or limited upload after X TB.

I keep media locally and backup pictures / documents online as these are most important. Last checked I am storing 520 GB on Storj. (1.53 GBP last month.)

I have a nice ZFS build (with two mirrored 2 TB drives) as a central hub which is backed up regularly to external hard drive, then rclone makes a heroic appearance to backup (rclone copy) documents and pictures to Storj and S3 Glacier (archived annually) ā€“ encrypted of course.

I frequent the data hoarders subreddit and wonder what the hell are these people storing online: hundreds of TB of (likely) downloaded media. What a waste of money keeping stuff they wonā€™t revisit. You canā€™t take it with you when you pass on, and will their family want to keep paying to keep these data in perpetuity? Probably not.

Cloud is a great backup tool and everyone should utilise it, especially object storage, but please use it sparingly.

1400

I think the main argument in favour of keeping big storage items online is needing a cloud server where a local server would not be feasible or practical.
This was the resonant point made in the recent discussions in the Plex forums.

Reasons for needing (or preferring) a cloud server (and associated cloud storage) might be not having enough space to keep a local server (small flats, too noisy), electricity costs, cgNAT, inability to pay a huge amount of money up front for server + NAS + drives vs. a much smaller amount per month which fits nicely with other monthly expenses, and the unwillingness to be bothered with the physical security and the maintenance involved.

Well you can't take local storage with you either. As for family, if you have friends and relatives who are, for example, avid media consumers from your own server, they may well want to take on the cost (of course for the younger people here, no one knows what this self-hosting landscape will look like a few decades down the line).

With regards to the topic, of course you are right that truly unlimited cloud storage does not exist, but some things come close.
An rclone union of multiple MS 365 Family OneDrive accounts scales easily up to tens of TB for arguably small price per TB and works perfectly well for HD content. OneDrive is more flaky on high-bitrate 4K content, so that can be put in things like iDrive or Jottacloud. Again, as an example, if you didn't mind leaving your cloud server to upload up to 10TB at the reduced Jotta rate, you could use 2x Jotta accounts for 200 Euros per year for 20TB, not a bad way to store files (I've not tried Jotta so not sure if it can handle the high bitrates).

1401

Which ones? Any issues running RAID over USB? Has unraid been stable enough? What made you pick it over TrueNAS? Or even mergefs+SnapRAID?

Thanks for sharing your experiance.

1402

I have 2 of these.

https://a.co/d/6xzbeA8

I went with Unraid for ease of use after I tested a few out there as it does good docker support.

For my use at home, the simplicity and ease of use really sold it for me.

I like the hands off approach and the simpler, the better.

1 Like
1403

I just had an email from NordVPN offering me 1TB of cloud storage for $0.79c/month if I pay for two years in advance.

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1404

That sounds like a great bargain, but it's not on their website. Can you share more details of the offer?

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1405

Yeah, as long as it's a permanent offer. If it goes up to their 'normal' price after these 2 years (see below) it would wipe off all the savings (and then some) in less than 6 months, and that would definitely be Not Fun(TM).

but it's not on their website. Can you share more details of the offer?

+1. At nordlocker.com, best I can see is $22/2TB/month which works out to a horribly expensive $11/TB/month (we have great options at less than 1/5th of that price).

1407

NordVPN seem to have perpetual 'sales' with 83% off if you sign up for two years.

I wasn't offering it as an option to replace unlimited Google Drive just as an example of how much a commercial company will price a TB of storage,

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1409

I would be interested in that, but if it's not a public offer then there isn't much I can do with it.

1410

Howdy Folks!

Been a bit since I've last posted. I've been utilizing Quotaless.cloud and, for the time being, am happy with it. Speeds are consistent, no real issues, and support is quick.

Yes there is setup costs every 10TB, but that's one time, and the monthly fee is rather low.

Data is stored in multiple locations, and has cloudflare for a proxy.

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1411

ā‚¬60 /month. You would need a LOT of data for that to be worth it.