Technology

I stopped buying seagates when I had 4 of their 2TB barracuda drives die within 6 months... constantly was RMAing them. Finally got pissed and sold them and bought WD reds, still got 2 of the reds in my Nas Playing hot backups with nearly 8 years of power time.

My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.

The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.

Back then that was very impressive!

I'm here for it. The 8 disc server is normally a great form factor for size, data density and redundancy with raid6/raidz2.

This would net around 180TB in that form factor. Thats would go a long way for a long while.

Not sure whether we'll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don't, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they're trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it's going to get and the price per cell isn't going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it's been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.

OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.

Yes. You'll have to learn some new things regardless, but you don't need to know how to program.

What are you hoping to make happen?

The easiest way is NextCloud.

Not programming skills, but sysadmin skills.

Buy a used server on EBay (companies often sell their old servers for cheap when they upgrade). Buy a bunch of HDDs. Install Linux and set up the HDDs in a ZFS pool.