Mirror a couple TB of anna's archive

Sell it. Buy beer. If you start to regret it, drink the beer.

Give it to me? 👉👈🥺

There's no 'wearing it down' - age is age.

If anything, unpowered drives die faster because lubricants slowly harden over time. Ah least a running drive is unlikely to suffer that fate.

Also, any drive can lose magnetic cohesion on areas of the platter - with a running drive that's maintained by a system like ZFS, these areas of magnetic loss can be automatically discovered and corrected.

Everything I've read (and from my own anecdotal experience) drives on a shelf die every bit as frequently as running drives, if not more often.

But in the end, don't go doing anything just because you feel like "you have to". I have a dozen smaller drives (500GB to 1 TB) that are just waiting for a purpose. I have a plan for them, but it's not urgent. Eventually they'll go in a Proxmox/TrueNAS/UnRAID box, when I can find a motherboard for the right price with low power draw (the drives will be the worst power consumer anyway).

I always preferred (pirated) streaming services over local streaming

I suggest having a backup of some of your favourite media anyway. You never know when a service will be taken down.

What services are you using, if you don't mind me asking?

Back up your digital photo library, download your favorite youtubers' entire channels, get an offline version of wikipedia...there's so much you can do! I wish I had 14TB lol, I only have like 3 right now. I'm running a jellyfin server and lyrion music server.

You could just use it as cold storage. Put a bunch of stuff on there as backup and then put it in a closet.

That's a helium filled drive, so it's got a limited lifespan whether it's running or not. I would at least set it up as a NAS and use it to store your backups.

Jellyfin, em, I mean future AI training library...

If you're not usng it for your own purposes, I doubt you'll do what a bunch of strangers on Lemmy will tell you to do.

It needs to be running, either in your possession, or someone else's, so sell it and make some profit from the recent price rises. Put a minimum sell price on ebay and it'll go eventually.

save everything you like from the internet. nothing lasts including youtube videos

Run a Peertube.

I can take some of those off your hands arrh

I'd be more worried about not using it, personally.

That said, storing videos isn't the only use. I have a... fairly large NAS, and it has photos/videos I've taken (including the raws for some of my dslr photos), its the storage for my VMs, where my backups are stored (really a different NAS but appropriate for the discussion here) which are then backed up elsewhere as well, local git repos, etc, etc.

Is streaming all you do? If so, no, you don't need it.

But if you do anything else, its a good place to store that data.

Keep it spinning and put stuff on it, or sell it, probably for more than you paid for it. Drives on the shelf tend to fail.

10K POH is a little more than a year, so it may still be under warranty.

"Anxious to use it" in colloquial English means that you are eager or in a hurry to use it, btw. The opposite of being afraid to use it, which might be what you intended to say.

Back up as much of hugging face and/or civitai as you can before corporations lock it all down.

Get a bunch of security cameras and have rolling 2 months of footage if u like. Or download the entire netflix library forever.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

[Thread #81 for this comm, first seen 18th Aug 2026, 12:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Bought low? Sell high! Or will you somehow extract more value from it before it dies??

I bought like 4x12tb disks for 150 euros each at the time. I'm already using like 27tb