Joint Purchases

Ideas & Suggestions
1

Hello community!

One of the assets of this community are the hard drives, they are also a problem for many when choosing the right one (capacity, SMb, etc …)

If we have the idea of being an interconnected hive mind we could apply the same philosophy not only in the connection of our nodes.

It is only an idea that could be developed, but I had thought that the community (by country, by users with the same needs, etc …) could make joint purchases to obtain greater benefits.

Maybe we could have a few days a year where we could make a joint purchase. The idea needs to mature more, but the main thing is the union of the community.

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2

that would be logistically complicated but it could work.
One person gets a bulk delivery of drives and then sends them to other SNOs. That person would of course need to be trusted by the whole community.
I don’t know what the discounts are if you buy in bulk and if it’s worth it to then ship drives to individual SNOs as shipping prices can be pretty high.

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i kinda like the idea, no doubt it will be rather complicated to setup, but i’ve been thinking about getting into similar kinda stuff anyways… so i’m up for it…

ofc it depends on what kind of direction the project takes and what people want out of it… there would be a lot of possible advantage in regards to all kinds of savings, and just because we could go directly to a datacenter and take hundreds of hdd’s of their hands, and ofc make sure it’s great deals, stuff that individual SNO’s wouldn’t easily be able to do…

and the whole shipping thing may be mitigated in several ways…

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4

It would be kind of cool if we could send someone from Storj the money and then they make a bulk purchase and then forward the drives with savings to the community. Not sure if this would be too much of a hassle for them. Certainly a cool idea though.

There’s many drives though, so there might not be enough of the people wanting the same drive to make this worthwhile.

Fits in with the general idea of distributed communities.

Personal note: never read the title and assume without reading the whole thing.

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5

Could be interesting if we had to buy a lot of disks for storing hundreds of TB.
But because we’re no encouraged to put any money in Storj, and because creating nodes bigger than 20/30TB is not of any use, I’m not sure I’d be interested.
Just my opinion of course :slight_smile:

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doesn’t really fit into their corporate profile tho… i mean they got nothing to do with logistics nor much to do with hardware… i doubt they would be interested and even if they were, would we be interested in buying the hdd’s through storj.

i don’t really see what either part gains from that collaboration aside from maybe a bit extra bulk discounts, and then ofc if there is trouble with hardware they don’t really control… who do people blame…

not that i don’t think it would be cool, but i doubt it’s viable and worth it for storj.

i think a bit of a different approach might work tho… storj may also be interested in buying hdd’s for various uses… and if we can gather enough interest then a large scale purchase may have storj interested in participating on an equal footing… if they have any need for storage… which may not be the case… they may require more bandwidth / iops or simply outsource it to a datacenter…

but i think that would be the most beneficial for all involved, and they wouldn’t have the shitstorm to deal with when eventually something goes bad…

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7

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a good business plan. Neat idea though.

8

Maybe owners of 200TB arrays could sell a part of their collection with a discount?

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9

Maybe Storjlabs could increase efforts to get customers on board?

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I’m sure it’s among their top priorities you know, but customers don’t grow on trees :confused:

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11

It is hard work that’s why you need to put effort into it. I just don’t see much of that.

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of course not. you’re not an employee or “board member” of storjlabs :smiley:
Making customer efforts public is mostly not beneficial. You only hear about some positive outcomes and those are typically shared on their blog and on the forum. The latest was the filezilla integration with the free 1TB offer.

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13

I would be willing to organize this a bulk purchase. I have the space and time to break up a pallet of drives and send them to other SNOs. The question is that can we really save any money buying hard drives in bulk? I think the margins are pretty slim as it is on hdd’s?

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14

the best 2nd hand prices for large numbers of used drives, i’ve seen have been about 50% new of similar tho maybe a bit lower quality drive prices, rarely seen them lower than that…
and the price is with free shipping.

these are drives coming used from a datacenter, and not sure if it’s optimal… and prices are not always good… but the drives seem to work… ofc some of them will die… eventually, but mostly the ones i’ve lost was my own fault… cannot really blame a hdd for breaking when you bump the server… xD

so if we assume a reasonable 50% mark up from the 2nd hand seller, then their price would be like 33% cost pr TB compared to similar new drives.

is it worth it long term… i duno… ask me in 4 years lol
i think the real advantage to this will be the used market and being able to buy bulk when prices are low… also that SNO’s maybe able to have their ear to the ground and maybe scrounge up some interesting deals for the joint purchase project to consider.

aside from that within the EU one might be able to get some funding based on members, if it was run on something like a monthly subscription / membership type thing.

without a doubt it’s not going to be an easy puzzle to solve, but with some good choices i have no doubt it could be pretty successful.

i have ofc seen better prices on used hdd’s than 50% less than comparable new, but they have been limited supply or shipping killed the savings.

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Likely, the largest benefits would be if it could be done at the local level, especially if a local business was shutting down or doing a large upgrade. They would save costs by having the group (Co-Op?) purchase the drives and handle logistics (most likely amongst members separated by no more than a few hours drive who would just pick the hardware up). If drives have to be shipped it can get pretty hard to compete cost wise, especially when there are occasional deals for new hardware (Best Buy just did a $189 promo for 14 TB EasyStore drives). One argument is, this would likely be enterprise hardware; but it also comes with the caveat that it has likely seen enterprise loads.

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maybe we should just make a thread tracking deals on hard drives hah

The problem with buying old datacenter drives is they are usually at end of warrenty. For example i’m running a super micro where i bought 36x12TB seagates, 3 of them came with SMART errors from the begining.

The other issue is looking at the long term outlook on StorJ. I really don’t want used drives as i’m planning to spend a lot of time/effort managing these nodes long enough to amass a significant amount of data - at which point i want that to last for years.

I’m still on the raidz side of things, not doing one direct drive per node, but again, for longetivity sake.

I’m setting up 3 more servers with 36 drives each in the next few weeks, so i’m keen to do a group buy if anybody is interested. I’ll be ordering the drives to denver, so if anybody is local that makes it even easier.

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17

I think the best would be to buy new drives with warranty. I don’t know what quantity is needed to get bulk prices though…

18

i doubt there will be any advantage in new drives that will outperform the shipping costs… remember the hdd manufactures will sell new hdd locally so no logistics needed… sure bulk will save a lot… but each SNO or most SNO’s will want 1 or 2 maybe 3 hdd’s at a time.

then shipping becomes a large factor… however if you can buy bulk used drives for 33% or less prices, then the savings on large capacity drives become substantial…

sure there is a certain reliability concern, but really one gets 3 times the capacity, while only 1/3 would be essentially required for the lowest level of redundancy… and lets be fair… hdd’s can be very unreliable when one is having bad days.

ofc it’s all smooth sailing when everything is going well… but then a cable gets bumped, or one adds a hdd thats incompatible with the controller and all hell breaks loose.
been there already because i ran sas with sata in the same array… and yet zfs and it’s raidz kept me from loosing any data at all, my successrates suffered a bit… but ill take that over a dead node any day of the week… remember if you expect to run nodes for years like joe says, then you will have stuff wear out or simply get outdated…

is used drives a good idea… i duno… i’m running used drives… so far i got like 15 most from a reliable 2nd hand reseller, and the two or three drives that are bad, i think is mostly my fault.
i did also throw a couple of new drives into the mix, of the exact same models working on the exact same array… so will be interesting to see how that affects life span…

i think their capacity will become useless before they wear out, which is kinda why i bought them in the first place… the only reason i bought the new ones was because it was the only way i could get a matching model for the raid setup i wanted to do, because i don’t want to wear the disks out by using mismatched models in my raid arrays.

if new drives was an option for collective purchases i would without a doubt be up for that… but i don’t think the savings can get even remotely close to competing with local prices when considering the logistics.

i think my hdd reseller is current selling 14tb… so if we imagine buying those directly from a datacenter, doing some checking and such on them sorting out the bad ones, bought at lets say 25-33% of new costs… at 10$ pr tb just to make the pricing future compatible or current … been a while since i checked prices here.

so that leaves maybe 15% for logistics if we want to keep the SNO buy prices at 50% of new, maybe it can be cheaper i duno… 15% of a 14tb drive value is like 20$ roughly which doesn’t leave much room … but still it should be possible if we have some sort of logistical network across the globe and maybe sell in pairs which would ofc nearly half the logistics because a good deal of that would be handling and “recertification”

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and if SNOs are in the same area they could maybe organize one single delivery.
However I don’t think there are enough people interested for this to be worth it.

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I tend to agree.
Thanks @NuclearM2 for suggesting this though.
It might be still a good idea on a more local scale.