I hope this post is okay - think many members here can remember my name from my different activities
Running over 40 nodes has made me constantly hunt for the best HDD deals. Over time, I found the existing tools frustrating or incomplete—so I decided to build my own lightweight disk price tracker to make it easier to spot good deals.
The tool:HGSoftware | Innovative Software Solutions
It aggregates prices for HDDs and SSDs from multiple Amazon and eBay regions. Data is updated daily, but right now not every drive is indexed yet (fetch jobs are still running).
I’d really appreciate your thoughts before I add more features:
Which parts feel useful so far?
Anything that feels unclear or could be improved?
What extra filters or features would make this genuinely helpful for you as a Storj operator?
This is a solo side project, so I’ve kept it simple for now—but I’d love to build it further based on feedback from real users. Comments here or via the email on the contact page are both welcome.
I think this is completely against the StorJ spirit, of using only hardware that’s already online. I think that’s a shame, because it actively promotes StorJ as a mining alternative, which it’s very much not, and the last thing we need are additional low quality StorJ node operators
Then again, you have a complete miners mindset, so it makes sense.
It’s not against any spirit of Storj - this tool doesn’t dictate what the space is used for. Any drive that’s “already online” has to be purchased in the first place
If a SNO has a server running, and they happend to upgrade disk A to a larger one (disk B), then disk A can be used for storj. Who is to say they dont want a tool like this? Why does that have to be a miners perspective?
I have been in storj for a looong time - im not a “miner” or what you like to call me.
I like the project and actually would love it if crypto was not part of it.
I dont really get your harsh criticism of me - now criticism of the tool is fine. But what have i done wrong?
Agreed on this one - i say this allowed server owners getting their new shiny drive cheaper, for their own use case - meaning a disk will be available for storj faster.
Now thats what im talking about! Great and amazing feedback - and yea its a little rough around the edges - and i agree with most of the points you make here - and half is on my TODO list
Cool! Brings me back to the early days of ecommerce when I would watch for deals on Pricewatch. (https://web.archive.org/web/20050601004321/http://www.pricewatch.com/) Don’t know that I would use this for Storj drives, but possibly for watching deals on drives which I could use to upgrade my personal fileserver that I could then hand-me-down the removed drives to my Storj nodes.
And I would say if someone wants to gamble on used drives, which is one of the selectable options, that could be looked at in the spirit of Storj if added to a system that is already online. By buying used you’re not encouraging manufacturers make stock replenishment… you’re taking something that has had a prior life and giving it additional life instead of collecting dust or being scrapped. I’m all for reduce/reuse/recycle in that order.
Some quick refinements I would like if possible:
select between consumer/enterprise drives
for spinning disk select RPM
for spinning disk select between CMR/SMR
improved searching or searching tips (e.g., searching for “ultrastar 12tb” gets no results despite there being multiple drives with “ultrastar” or “12tb” in the title)
omit specific sources option (I have personal issues with Bezos…)
Some of that could be tough without cross referencing to a detailed list of drive models which I don’t know if that is part of this project. And of course feature creep could rob you of the fun of building/maintaining this. But, your search as it is can help to get people in the ballpark with some models to look into, and if they pick out a specific model they like and want to hunt for that specifically I would think they can use your included “search drives” feature to dig into just that model.
Looks great the page, but this is strange - the page is showing Toshiba 18TB for 195€ if I select Amazon and eBay, but when I click the Buy button, it is over 300 for the 18TB model.
Might have that been some sort of a sale perhaps? And if so, would it be possible to add a day to the table at which was the data scraped?
Nice looking page. Here is my feedback.
I tried the Capacity (TB) min filter. I set it to 20 and clicked Apply filters. It does not filter the search results. I also tried changing source to Germany, UK and Sweden, but once UK have been selected I can not get rid of the UK results again by removing UK from source.
Hello all! sorry i have not been able to answer all the replies in this post, i have had a pretty busy week.
The feedback here was incredibly helpful, so I wanted to circle back with an update.
Based on your suggestions, I’ve been refining the web tool and just launched an iOS app. The mobile experience felt necessary since I’m often checking prices while out and about—figured others might be in the same boat.
What’s improved since last time:
Better deal detection algorithms
A little better ui for web.
Mobile-first design with the new iOS app
iOS version has currency conversion ability (sorry for a low cost - api aint free for me)
Still working on:
Android version (coming later this year - i hope)
Adding more retailers beyond Amazon/eBay - This is a BIG wish for people.
Better disk detection - don’t want to list stuff like enclosures and such - can still be better.
better filtering and search functions.
In the future i want:
Way better country / region / source selection
More mobile features (notifications?)
Maybe price history - to see if something is actually a good deal compared to normally.
I’m curious—for those who tried it before, does the mobile app change how you’d actually use something like this? And for newcomers, what’s your current process for finding good disk deals?
Always appreciate the honest feedback from this community. You can check out the updates at the same link, and the iOS app is live on the App Store now.
I will try to spend time making it better from user feedback, i have some holiday lined up and hope to get back after to work on the android version.
For me seller reputation is more important than saving $20. So I have a list of a handful of reliable sellers I vetted over time, and if I need disks — I check those sellers, and get whoever sells cheapen on that day. Knowing that some suspicious newcomer undercuts the market by 40% is not useful to me. I don’t want to pay under market price only to wonder where am I being screwed over. Disks are commodities, any wild price discrepancy is a suspect. I’d imagine adding filtering by specific sellers on eBay or Amazon would be feasible, but this still would dramatically reduce the usefulness of the app: I already have them bookmarked.
And secondly — platform app only makes sense if the usecase requires access to features not available to web app. Searching cheap hard drives is not such use-case. So I won’t be installing an app. Moreover, I will be very wary of anyone pushing the web app for something that web page can do just fine, what are they up to?
The tool: HGSoftware | Innovative Software Solutions
