[burtonator]

What's interesting is that 32TB is becoming more and more affordable and the research material is roughly staying about the same size.

That might change though as people start including video + data within papers and have new notebook formats that are live and contain docker containers/ipython, etc.

It's a shame we can't just mail these around.

[jbverschoor]

You can buy 48TB (4x12TB) for €1000. Store some index on an SSD, and you have another full node.

[washadjeffmad]

If you don't care about warranty, 8 and 12TB drives routinely go for $15/TB on sale inside WD Elements.

I picked up 32TB for just under $500 with discount over the holiday that way.

[ancientworldnow]

Even if you shuck the drive, as long as you keep the enclosure Western Digital will still honor the warranty.

[iwalton3]

I’ve heard that you can send the drives back without the enclosure and they have still honored the warranty. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/am9vdv/easysto...

[StavrosK]

Can you elaborate? What's the catch?

[flaviu1]

You need to take 10 minutes out of your day to remove the plastic enclosure. Depending on your setup, you may also need to make some minor modifications to the drive: google.com/search?q=3.3V+wd+easystore

The theory is that this is a form of market segmentation, where enthusiasts/companies are willing to pay more for a bare drive regular consumers.

[washadjeffmad]

The only catch is that it's a minor lottery which model drive you're getting.

For instance, I got all white label WD80EMAZs (256MB cache, non-SMR, same firmware as the Reds) in this batch, so I had to insulate the 3.3V pins.

There are also true Reds, 128MB and 512MB cache drives, helium filleds, 7.2K HGSTs slowed to 5.4K, and other variants.

[jbverschoor]

Or use a traditional power supply to sata cable.

[asdff]

When people publish data it's typically uploaded to a public repository anyway. Supplementary videos are a thing, but in my field at least they generally stay in the supplementary and aren't the raw data so file sizes are reasonable, while still images are used in the text. Journals are still printed works first, believe it or not.

[izzydata]

The bandwidth to upload to people can get expensive depending on where you live. Most home connections don't have bi-directional fiber so you are stuck with crippling amounts of upload bandwidth.

[kortex]

I feel like this is the crux of the matter. You could easily get 32 people on this site to volunteer 1 TB each, if it were just cold storage. However, making those resources accessible and searchable (with all the pitfalls of compliance, uptime, legality, etc) is a totally different ballgame.

Encrypted shards partially solves this, but then you hit the quandry of "But what if I have a shard of something illegal or undesired enough to upset the wrong people?" which has not been thoroughly tested in our legal system.