Nope. Bought my homelab 'initial kit' before the AI bubble took all the prices to the moon.

Have over 50TB of fully RAID4+0 storage over 2 trays.

My problem is 'jeeze, it was way too hot this summer', So I had to turn the array off.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-08-24, 17:23:

gerry wrote on 2026-08-24, 13:32:

Something i have learned in decades of downloads is that almost all the things downloaded will never be looked at..

True...

So true 🙁

I've been hoarding stuff since I can remember. First there was floppies, then CDs/DVDs and one time in 2006/7 I've got smarter. I realized that once I burn the DVD I never use it. It would be a hassle to find it, mount it and use it - it's still a slow media in the end. I decided to go with multiple HDD's. Firstly I need a big case... found one with 8x 3.5" mounts for hard drives. I slowly used all up with up to 1TB HDDs. This was good for a few years. But in the mean time I noticed the computer was too loud. 8 HDDs spinning can get quite noisy. So I decided to go with the HDD racks. Dismount the HDDs when not in use. Then finally USB 3.0 arrived and I jumped the wagon and bought an external USB 3.0 Dual HDD dock. Which BTW I still use now. The thing is perfect 😀 I replaced all the 1TB with 2TB... and later replaced 2TB with 4TB and so on... now I have a box of HDDs from 8 to 26TB. I organize the files that every HDD holds a different type of data and every HDD is duplicated.

In the end I still mostly never use anything... if I need something that is not that old and can still be found on the web, I mostly download it again 🤣

But this is my offline storage and I think it's pretty future proof.

Since it would be pretty hard to keep everything tidy. I use "Search Everything" with option to retain offline HDDs in the index. So when I'm in doubt I do a quick search. This program is perfect for this 😀 Just for the scale of how many files there is... the index file takes up around 2GB of memory when loaded (this is without the duplicate HDD's). But it searches very fast, practically in real time 😀

I still need a good duplicate file finder for the older data.

PS:
I had a plan on coping all the CD/DVDs to HDD and got stuck as some DVD's are not readable anymore 🙁 Probably my mistake as I've used the wrong type of pen to write the label on it. All the printable DVD's that I've written the labels with an alcohol marker can't read the files. Even those files that aren't near the label. Tried reading them with different DVD units and no go 🙁

re bad disk copies
perhaps this might help... It might not translate to data discs....
copied verbatim (no pun intended) from my own posts on another forum

-- quote
I replaced my Panasonic 4k player this year because it was having issues with some 4k discs. The Oppo also had trouble around the same time, but I kept it because it's a universal player. For the record, I smoke, and it's possible that smoke and general dust have shortened the life of these, but suspicioun points elsewhere if both started having issues at the same time, with one being much older.

I've been ripping all my discs to hard drives. So far I've ripped at least 5000 discs and had issues with about 75 (some of which I replaced). There's separation spots that look like water damage or mold, separation at the inner or outer edge but also in the middle of a disc, and several other issues. By far, the biggest issue is scratches on DVDs, which have a weaker surface than bluray or 4k discs. Sometimes I can get a disc to work by washing it with water and a bit of dish soap, then gently drying it with lens wipes or fine microfiber. Discs that have damage at the center are often a total loss, while others might just have tracks that fail.

I have 3 external drives attached to my PC: 4k, bluray, and a CD burner. Sometimes a disc won't read properly in one, but might work in another. Discs with small scratches that aren't read properly in the bluray reader are best read on the 4k reader with its finer laser and better tracking. But a few DVDs could only be read on the DVD disc writer, a burner specialized for writing with write speeds that are actually faster than read speed.

Even after trying all three readers, there's about 60 discs with bad tracks or complete failures. About 50 of these are DVDs with scratches from the discs coming loose in crappy cases, or those stupid cardboard book holders. About 10 have circular scratches, probably from closing the disc tray with the disc improperly inserted. The DVDs are up to 25 years old, about 250 are DVDR. While I had one or two issues with double layer DVDs in the past, nearly all of them were ripped a decade ago, and since then I always rip DVDR and BDR immediately to have a backup.

Last year, both Panasonic & LG stopped producing disc hardware, so I picked up extra readers and a couple of spare 4k players.

By far, the biggest issue is scratches on DVDs, which have a weaker surface than bluray or 4k discs.

...
I should stress that the experience above is mostly for computer drives. Some of those 60 failed discs play just fine on the players. The players are almost always better than PC drives for audio & video because the players (and probably the drives themselves) have much better error correction embedded in the software (firmware) specifically meant for what the player does, whether DVD, DVD + Blu-Ray, DVD + Blu-Ray + 4k, and then CD, SACD, DVDA, and those odd formats including writable discs. Disc readers/writers meant for computers are usually more generic and have firmware tied to operating systems. Of course players also have certain restrictions built in that aren't necessarily in every computer drive.

Also, reading the thread and going back through my own research elsewhere, it seems... well, the temperature has been pretty steady in my apartment (74-80F) for ever, and the humidity never goes above 40RH. I've read horror stories about collections of people living in humid areas. So YMMV.
-- end quote

In total, there were about 12,000 discs: cd, dvd, dvdr, bluray, bdr, 4k uhd. None of the above is for data discs. The main takeaway is to try vastly different drives, and attempt to clean where you can. While there's no cure for an actual bad disks, different error correction circuitry and also algorithms in different programs that use low level disc ripping can help in some cases.

Also, not a single CD was bad, though I was unable to get 2 or 3 tracks in total across over 1000 CDs, and they're up to 35 years old. It suggests the disks were edited in a way that computer drives couldn't understand. (Same as the disks and tracks I couldn't rip but could still play on the dedicated players.) All but 3 were commercial CDs. I also had a handful of CDRs, backups ripped from 1997-2001, all of which were perfect. TDK, but not from when they had a bad batch. I used a couple of them to restore my Win98 box software.

P.S. Revisiting this made me wonder whether using a DVD player might help in some cases, assuming you have a player that can read data discs and yuo can get it to stream the data bit perfect. Or maybe some smart vogon can figure out how to get the disc to work in a computer.

Yes I never dispose of old optical drives because of this. Sometimes old disks need to be read on old drives. (I have quite the collection now.)

I haven't tried data recovery from DVDs or Blu-rays, but have done so with CDs, with generally good results:

Data recovery from optical disks