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Where do you get your hard drives?
This is directed more at providers since hardware is part of their business and i'm sure they get good deals somewhere, but all are welcomed. I get mine from newegg, but they're not really ideal for bulk buys, but I am happy to see HD prices seem to be lowering finally 
I'm looking for space in particular, not really concerned with speed. TIA.
Comments
The hard drive fairy, that is the only place to get the unlimited drive space.
That's hardly helpful, and I don't want unlimited I want good prices on decent size drives, 500GB-1TB would be ideal. It's time I put BuyVM out of business.
We use 1,5T and 2T drives. You'd better have a lot of cash to pony up on hardware if you want to even have a standing, let alone compete, in this market.
We've invested close to $10k in the hardware we do own, I shudder to think of what you guys have spent...
We get some off ebay when the warranty is still long enough.
If you're good enough at bargaining you can usually snag drives well under market value. I picked up 48 1.5TB's off a guy at the peak of the flood prices and i paid $65/ea. All with plenty of warranty left.
Francisco
I still cry.
Francisco
My wallet often feels like someone took a sniper rifle to it, then proceeded to light it on fire.
The same place anyone near Kansas City gets their hard drives, Micro Center.
BuyVM or not, you don't walk into this market with no reputation and put anyone out of business. People want VPS that are geographically diverse, so BuyVM can't even touch the majority of consumers out there as they do not fill the need. Clients also like to spread their eggs across many providers even when that provider has multiple locations to choose from. I know from your previous posts you are not exactly thrilled with them, and if you are planning to get into the market with hurting others, you stand little chance of success. Know what is going on in your market, but frankly, I don't really pay attention to what others are doing, my time is best spent providing the customers that choose to pay me the best experience I can give them.
Honestly I use all 500gb drives in my OpenVZ nodes and have never run short on space, but my build is based on small nodes deployed quick and cheap. Where do I shop? NewEgg, SuperBiiz, Amazon, eBay, or anyplace else I find a good deal that day
I have one node with usage over 500 GB, so I can agree with that. You'll run out of IP space long before you run outa disk. If you want "the best" go for 4x500 GB for RAID10 and you'll never run out unless you put 500 people on a node.
@BlueVM that's a nice chunk of change, I thought you were a reseller for some reason.
I'm not going to run out of IP space anytime soon, that is for sure, and all my nodes are raid10 with about 900gb for /vz
We're about 50/50 at the moment... trying to go 100% our hardware.
I mean per node... either way usually the limiting factor for providers in order is: IP Space, Disk I/O, CPU, Bandwidth, RAM, Disk Space
@mitgib - You've been lucky with drives then. We originally rolled with 2TB (8 x 500G) in each node and we were running out =\ We then moved to 4 x 2TB's but we didn't have enough performance to keep up with things so off we went to 8 x 1.5's.
2TB's are still far too high in price considering i'm doing 1.5's for $65-$70/ea.
Francisco
Doesn't that imply actual oversell, though? (the actual definition of the term) If you only have 2T of space, you either have to sell more HDD than you actually have, or put so few people on a hardware node that you're in the red <_<
Nah. You can rent servers for just a tiny bit more (and I'd argue less) than what it would cost to build one and colo it for three years. And you never have to worry about extra hardware for failures or selling off the server in a few years when you have to migrate to something better. It just depends on the datacenter.
What do you have 64 GB of RAM and 32 Cores Per Machine or something? Either that or you host the largest torrent enterprise on the planet.
@subigo - true enough. Difference of business philosophy, I suppose; we prefer to actually own all of our hardware, rather than take any risk of it being yanked out from under us (or have other issues)
Nah, we're just generous with the plans, and refuse to overcommit. (inb4maounique)
48GB, 16 cores. Going with 1.5's weren't 'that' much more than 1TB's so we just wanted to buffer there. While it's not a super common thing, we do have users that buy lots of additional space.
From what I gather, a bunch of the 'big' space users moved onwards to the storage plans we offer when they're in stock.
@subigo - I've seen limestone give some nutty deals and unreasonable amounts of 'grace' on bills. Hostrail was a prime example of that. Rumours are that they're getting much tighter on things and not giving people a month to settle up though.
Francisco
VPS6 just put together a nice machine
Puts BuyVM hardware to shame i'm sure. And wait a minute, isn't VPS6 new to the low end space? YUP
Hard disk wise not really. We have at most 100 clients on our biggest node (which has 4x1TB). Our plans range up and even if we put 100 of our base clients on at node full disk usage would be 1000 GB.
All the new KVM nodes I just put up in LA have 2tb drives since NewEgg had a $120 deal on em a few weeks back, and I've used almost always used a larger drive for KVM. Now if I could just get my power run to the cabinet. OpenVZ I think I'm a bit higher on power consumption than you are, at 1.6A per 2 nodes which has about the same capacity as your 5520 nodes. I am not as generous with disk space either, but I don't hear much fuss about it.
Fair enough. Was more a question than accusation, sorry if it seemed that way :P I'm in the midst of writing the smarty page for our TOS/AUP update, so I didn't have a chance to do the math on your plans :P
I thought you guys were all based in Canada or something? Are any of you in the U.S.? Putting hardware that I own in a U.S. based datacenter is not something I would want to mess with if I didn't live here.
Didn't I make a comment a thread or so ago saying we weren't the top for gear? o_O Fairly sure it's Inception that's using E3 1270's that will bench higher than our 16 cores. We need the core count though. You're a terrible at trolling, boss, comeon
@mitgib - Our's are doing around 1.7A with 8 drives and the likes. You'll usually find that RAM is what gobbles your power (I know it did on our L5420's)
Francisco
Only i'm a canuck, the rest just dream of being one. The rest are all in the US with our onsite guy actually working a full time job inside Coresite
Francisco
To clarify:
@Francisco - Victoria, BC
Anthony - Florida
Karen - Georgia
Dilt, Myself - Louisiana
Matt - San Jose/Freemont
This is not Field of Dreams, build it and they will come. That is a single node. I build 4 nodes a month, every month, and seem to sell all the stock within a week of putting it out there, so I constantly hear when will there be stock, just not as loudly as I see them chant for BuyVM. I'd love to build more, but I only have about $5k free to grow with each month.
Maybe make them wait longer? :P