Storage Rental?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
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Hey,

Is anyone aware of somewhere I could rent a large amount of physical storage (either drives, external RAID or a storage server) storage very short term (like for a week) I could use to dump my file server to, and then restore it back, during a rebuild and reformat?

I've seen some corporate services, but their costs are ridiculous to the point where I could build a server from scratch for the cost of renting it for one month.

I imagine that there would have to be a demand for a service like this. I found one in the UK, called "rent-a-raid" but that's a little far away.

Is anyone aware of a service like this?

Thanks,
Matt
 
diizzy said:
Exactly what do you want to do on your server?
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Nothing right now. I'm just doing my research in advance. In the next year or so I am looking to add another vdev to my ZFS pool. You can do this without emptying the data from the server, but performance is better if you rewrite the data, s it spreads it across all the drives evenly.

I'm also starting to see some fragmentation, and ZFS lacks the ability to defragment. rewriting the data removes any fragmentation.

I'd be looking to dump some 30TB to rented drives/array/server, wipe mine, do my upgrade and write the data back, then return the rental.

I'd probably encrypt the data on the rentals so I wouldn't have to worry about overwriting it with garbage data many times before returning it.

I have my data backed up on crashplan, but that is really a last ditch backup only, as restoring it would take a month and the speed I think I'd get.
 
ToddW2 said:
Amazon S3? Glacier?
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The problem with online solutions is that I'd be limited by my 150Mbit connection.

I redid my calculation, and I actually only have 20TB, not 30, but even so, at 150Mbit/s that would take 13 days to send to the service, and another 13 days to restore.

Even if I temporarily up my speed to the max in the area (300Mbit) assuming I can max it out, that means about 13 days of downtime.

I can't have the system down that long.
 
So, you want me to rent you some HDDs and mail them..???I mean, I could, but that doesn't seem affordable in your situation unless I was sending you 5 or 6TB+ drives which are $$$$??? PM me if that is something you're seriously interested in.
 
Have you considered buying what you need, and then selling it on ebay afterwards? You could figure out how much of a hit you would take with the lower selling price, and compare it to the rental prices you are seeing.
 
JoeComp said:
Have you considered buying what you need, and then selling it on ebay afterwards? You could figure out how much of a hit you would take with the lower selling price, and compare it to the rental prices you are seeing.
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esp if you buy them used on ebay for a great deal already... less # of items to buy/sell so i'd look at 3-5TB drives, recent/new open box ones with warranty still will yield best resell / quick resell
 
Which is tremendously less than "I could build a server from scratch for the cost of renting it for one month" for 50TB.
 
I quickly browsed through some of the information on Amazon Snowball, but I could not find any significant information on retrieving your data. Since they let you keep the Snowball for 10 days, the ideal situation would be that you simply transfer your data in, then transfer it back out onto your reconfigured server.

https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/faqs/

But in my quick perusal of amazon's FAQ and getting started guides, I did not see any details about getting your data off the Snowball. Is it as simple as copying it back out again BEFORE it has been uploaded to Amazon S3? Or do they somehow lock it down so that you can only upload data into the Snowball, and not retrieve it until it gets uploaded to S3 and then you request another Snowball to get the data back out?

https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/

I also notice on the pricing page that they charge $30 per TB to get your data out of S3. I don't know if that also applies to getting your data out of the Snowball when you just transferred the data into the Snowball before it has been sent back to amazon.
 
Zarathustra[H];1042086017 said:
Hey,

Is anyone aware of somewhere I could rent a large amount of physical storage (either drives, external RAID or a storage server) storage very short term (like for a week) I could use to dump my file server to, and then restore it back, during a rebuild and reformat?

I've seen some corporate services, but their costs are ridiculous to the point where I could build a server from scratch for the cost of renting it for one month.

I imagine that there would have to be a demand for a service like this. I found one in the UK, called "rent-a-raid" but that's a little far away.

Is anyone aware of a service like this?

Thanks,
Matt
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The cost of hard drives would only be $600. I would pay the $600. But you might have a local ISP what would do the work for you for that price.
 
balance101 said:
or just buy some refurbish hitachi 2tb http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...667&cm_re=hitatchi_2tb-_-22-145-616-_-Product

use them as media storage later on.
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The only issue with that is even in a raid 0, you'd need approx 12 of them to store the data. You'd have to have a lot of room on a raid controller free to handle that many drives. You'd basically end up with a refurbed Dell MD1000 DAS and a SAS card to get that kind of space. You could probably find one cheap but shipping would kill the deal.


@OP: 4TBs would probably be the cheapest route, but you're still talking 6 of those. Same scenario where you'd need a lot of ports available, but if you're already using pools then it would be possible to make a single pool that is large enough.

Are you already using compression? Is that 20TB compressed to disk, but 30TB of actual data? If not you might be able to check to see if there is additional benefit in compressing data. I'm glancing over dedupe, but that just sounds like a mess and it will require way too much memory for it to be feasible even if only for a short period of time.
 
Am I the only one who,would just buy the needed drives and just return them to the store? As long as you have the up-front cash, you could do this for free. Maybe a little questionable ethically , but w/e. You could either buy multiple externals (maybe even from different stores) or just buy all the internals from one place and say after testing they didn't meet your speed requirements bla bla. To the best of my knowledge most stores return policy has no special category for HDDs (as opposed to CPUs, video games , etc.) so you should have 30-90days to get money back.
 
MySongRanHills said:
Am I the only one who,would just buy the needed drives and just return them to the store? As long as you have the up-front cash, you could do this for free. Maybe a little questionable ethically , but w/e. You could either buy multiple externals (maybe even from different stores) or just buy all the internals from one place and say after testing they didn't meet your speed requirements bla bla. To the best of my knowledge most stores return policy has no special category for HDDs (as opposed to CPUs, video games , etc.) so you should have 30-90days to get money back.
Click to expand...

Good way to screw a local store into taking a loss. And people wonder why local places close.

But most stores only allow you to return 1 or 2 of a particular item before you are blacklisted.
 
staticlag said:
Good way to screw a local store into taking a loss. And people wonder why local places close.

But most stores only allow you to return 1 or 2 of a particular item before you are blacklisted.
Click to expand...

So you order on-line and only get 1-2 drives per store....
 
MySongRanHills said:
So you order on-line and only get 1-2 drives per store....
Click to expand...

then return all of them via the website and pay return shipping fees?

Even if you return them to local store, that store taking a hit. They still have to sell them at a reduced rate to get rid of them.
 
Nate7311 said:
Either way, "renting" items like that for short term use is called return fraud.
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It is. As I said, ethically questionable. It is not however, illegal as best I can tell.

http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/...turn-fraud----and-how-the-criminals-do-it.htm

"A practice known as "wardrobing," though not illegal, per say, is also a form of return fraud that's affected 56 percent of retailers. Wardrobing describes the consumer who intentionally returns merchandise that's not defective, but that has been used. For instance, buying a prom dress, wearing it once, then taking it back for a refund (this also happens with high-end electronics like digital cameras)."

Each person needs to let their own conscious be their guide. Personally I'd look for other ways but if they all cost a shit ton, as a broke college student I'd do it and not lose much sleep over it.
 
No don't buy drives so you can return them later. That is not cool. Use blackblaze or some temp cloud storage, even if it takes you a month to upload your shit there.
 
Do you live in London?

If so, I might be able to help.

I have a DAS (eSata/USB 3) with 2x8TB+2x6TB HDDs.

How long would you need it for?
 
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Isn't there where someone tells you to simply restore your data from your backup after you've rebuilt and reformatted? ;)
 
You might want to consider this an opportunity to actually create a backup array. The Seagate 8TB archive drives are cheap (~$200-220), and you'd need three. I'd get four though and use one as snapraid parity (the drives are not suitable for hardware RAID-5/6 use). They slow down on sustained writes, but reads are as fast as regular 5900rpm drives.

Other than that, your only option is P2P help on [H] or somewhere else.
 
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