I have 50 TB useable in my home server. This requires a total of 6 drives (raidz1) for let’s say $300 each.
Upfront storage = $1800
Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.
On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.
I can get 18TB (Toshiba MG09ACA 512e) for 260€ (tax included) which would put me at usable 90TB.
The cheapest drive starting at 10TB is a DC HC520 12TB SAS for 185€
I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.
I made a storage server a few weeks ago. I experimented a bit with various HDDs before choosing, and the difference in noise seemed kinda massive depending on what model you go with. I tested with some Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB and WD Red Pro 20TB, and they were indeed pretty noisy. Clearly too noisy to have in a room where people live. On the other hand, the WD Red Plus (only 14TB max though) are surprisingly quiet. I put 11 of those in a good case (Fractal Define 7), and the whole thing is barely audible. Even with some heavy I/O task going on (e.g. ZFS scrub), you could hardly guess that the server is running over the background noise of my fridge and ventilation.
Not your storage, not your data. Ask Justin Roiland.
Never hurts to keep even a USB key of your most essential files and rotate every 5 years. All cloud storage providers have a single point of failure, which is the organisation that runs them acting in obtuse ways. This won't matter the vast majority of the time, but most people have data they care about enough that they shouldn't be trusting just one company to store it. Doesn't need to contain much, maybe family photos, recovery keys, things of that sort.
I also keep a little bit of cash on hand, not much, but history is full of tales of institutions reliably offering essential services until one day they don't, withdrawals are frozen, and people realise that they're screwed.
Also while the cloud is a great value for giving you geo-redundant internet accessible well secured data at a bargain price when you need maybe ~2TB which is more than most people will ever need, once you get up to around ~200TB both the cost and the speed of accessing cloud data gets to be a problem.
Upfront storage = $1800
Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.
On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.