You made a mistake somewhere. 120/5*100 is only $2400

Also, there are plenty of drives with under $10/TB listed here some looking legit: https://diskprices.com/

So it is actually only $1200

The server cost is going to be the problem here, since you'll need SAS drives and a JBOD to house these hard drives, especially if you want to run a raidx for redundancy.

You can get 10 SATA ports for $40 with a PCI-E card on Amazon. That's in addition to up to 6 the motherboard would have.

And the hard drives go where? But yeah, $3k would more than fund such a server.

Amazon has a 5 drive rack for $25.

You can also get dual-drive USB adapters for $20.

Define 7 has 14 drive bays.

And the crazy thing is it's not even designed specifically for storage, it just kind of has that space. Good for big GPUs. I have a define 7 for my gaming pc with 0 HDDs installed (M.2 only)! It's a great case anyhow.

I very nearly bought a second one to replace an actual designed-for-NAS case which only has room for 8 HDD; the only reason I didn't is because that older Fractal Design case still works fine. It lives in the living room in the open without shame, and the Design 7 would look even better.

You can buy a server for $700 or so that has 36 sata bays, ports, and PSU for all of it. I have two in my house. They are loud AF.

> They are loud AF.

That probably is the real problem. Although you could plop them in some separated utility space like a garage.

Libgen is mostly stored on ipfs.

> You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this.

Donation drive?

https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-raises-tens-of-thousands-...

I run a 36 bay supermicro server I got for $900 on ebay which could easily host all this. I buy used 6tb sas drives off ebay for $26 a piece. They'd be even cheaper in bulk. That's $4.33 a tb, or about $520 total. You'll want to add a handful of drives for redundancy (we are talking used drives here) but either way it's entirely possible to host this entire thing including hardware for under 1500. Well within reason for someone passionate about it.

I've been speccing a home storage server in the 50-100tb range and was considering this, but annual electricity costs made it infeasible. How much power does a machine like this consume?

My calculation off a Dell 2U was something like 195W idle - ~900 kWH / year. I'm in California so paying 50 cents per kWH, that would be ~$450 per year -- decided to scale back to a low power tower with huge disks. More upfront, but less annually. More disk drives (6tb vs 18tb) increased that to the point where I figured it was better to have fewer larger disks, even if they are pricier, because of the cost to run them.

> I'm in California

You have identified the problem.

I haven't checked exactly how much juice the server is pulling now. It was somewhere in 120-150w range with low utilization when I first got it, but I have considerably more disks and VMs now so probably around 200 to 250ish.

I did some rough estimates to see if the big disks were more cost effective than the 6tb ones and came to the conclusion small disks were worth it for me. The long term cost was pretty close though in the midwest where electricity is like 15 cents per kWh, giant disks would definitely be the better choice in CA.

A 20TB NAS HDD is $350, new. A 5-6 bay new enclosure is $100. $2400 for brand new storage + a little Raspberry Pi to serve it (another $100) is less than the price of a single new MacBook Pro.

It's easily within the means of relatively affluent professionals anywhere.