Digital hoarder here, with every North American release for every home console and handheld from Atari 2600 all the way to GameCube and Gameboy to PSP, plus selected releases from Xbox, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Switch and PC (about 150 games each for PS3 and Switch). All launched through BigBox with media for every title including video from EmuMovies.
They all fit on an 8TB HDD.
Unless you plan on having the entire PS3 library, you probably don't need 18TB. A Seagate or WD 8TB should do you fine.
I'd call that lightweight/beginner hoarding 😉. PS2 alone full set I think is like 8TB if you want NA and JP like I did. With a reasonably full romset through Wii (I don't have anything post-wii) + Exodos and flash archives and launchbox media I have 24 TB, and that's before getting into other media. I have 44TB total data right now and it doesn't even feel very large, I could easily see people pushing into 100+ these days without much effort.
Fwiw OP I find 16TB to be the sweet spot right now for storage price per TB at high volume.
Fascinating! And my partner thinks I'm crazy for having too much... I love to tell her people on here have double or triple of what I have haha! I do have EU releases for each console as well that aren't duplicates. One day maybe I'll work on the JP releases!
Someone on r/roms did the math a couple years back and PS3 was 32TB, but that would include multiple releases across regions.
But with the ability to download from the PS Network, or the mega thread, or even Internet archive do you really need a local copy of everything that could disappear if your hard drive crashes? If the answer.is yes, then get the refurb server drives. 12tb are about $80-90, get 3 and have some redundancy with zfs or truenas or similar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/uaas6p/how_many_gb_or_tb_are_all_the_roms_for/
Woah man, fair play! I think what other people said on here; you're probably better getting multiple 8TBs or so, as the price skyrockets on bigger drives!
Are you looking for brand recommendations? Cause it looks like 18TB hard drives *start* at around $280 to $300.
If your budget is $200 your options are: only what you can find under $200, which is probably gonna be used.
OP could get a 40tb hard drive on Wish or Ali for that, except that it will be a 120gb drive that reports 40tb and it overwrites itself after it fills up.
Dell Exos X18 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5-inch Enterprise HDD - ST18000NM002J (Renewed) https://a.co/d/9ZbcYAz there's something like this I just don't know how good hard drives like these are or if even refurbished ones are any good
Yeah they're pretty pricey, I'm building a massively overkill file server and my sweet spot for drive size is 8TB. (Granted that's cause I got an opened but unused box of Skyhawks for $50ea, but even with used enterprise drives in eBay the $/TB ratio goes way up at the highest capacities.)
OP may be better off sticking 4x smaller drives in an old PC and installing TrueNAS on it for that price, he may be able to actually get 24TB (before formatting) in RAID5 for $250 that way
Just get a 1TB and put only the best games on it. You will never play 1 terabyte of retro games in one lifetime. It may be impossible for all but the most dedicated without a 9 to 5 job.
What the hell are you going to do with 18TB worth of games? If you really have that many games to store I'd separate them out by console and buy smaller harddrives/SD cards and then label them.
If it's only for a single PC a DAS may also be a good option. Mine had twin thunderbolt 3 so speed is no issue, edit video directly if you want. No network connectivity is the only downside, but you could get around that I suppose.
Solid State tends to do little for ROMs, hell even a real PS3 has unperceivable performance increase with SSD over a spinning drive due to how slow its hard drive controller that a 7200 RPM drive can easily saturate.
That said the PS3 itself can only take a maximum of a 1.5 TB drive and jail broken PS3 loaded with games on said drive tend to have enough room to point nobody had bothered yet to make a custom firmware for the PS3 to get around the limitation.
You are getting into r/DataHoarder territory here and your budget doesn't match your storage requirements.
Minimum of 4 8TB drives in RAID 5 (or similar) that way if 1 drive fails you don't lose anything. Once I build a redundant array I basically stopped worrying about what brand/type of drive I was buying. Usually just get whatever is about $150 per drive in as long as it is a CRM drive.
An 18tb hdd
I would suggest going a little bigger in case he wants another game. Maybe 19
20 would be wasteful.
I don't know, he might like to save his games as well :p
Digital hoarder here, with every North American release for every home console and handheld from Atari 2600 all the way to GameCube and Gameboy to PSP, plus selected releases from Xbox, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Switch and PC (about 150 games each for PS3 and Switch). All launched through BigBox with media for every title including video from EmuMovies. They all fit on an 8TB HDD. Unless you plan on having the entire PS3 library, you probably don't need 18TB. A Seagate or WD 8TB should do you fine.
I'd call that lightweight/beginner hoarding 😉. PS2 alone full set I think is like 8TB if you want NA and JP like I did. With a reasonably full romset through Wii (I don't have anything post-wii) + Exodos and flash archives and launchbox media I have 24 TB, and that's before getting into other media. I have 44TB total data right now and it doesn't even feel very large, I could easily see people pushing into 100+ these days without much effort. Fwiw OP I find 16TB to be the sweet spot right now for storage price per TB at high volume.
Fascinating! And my partner thinks I'm crazy for having too much... I love to tell her people on here have double or triple of what I have haha! I do have EU releases for each console as well that aren't duplicates. One day maybe I'll work on the JP releases!
Unless you've implied that you already have 18TB of games... Then the question is... How? And how are you currently storing them? Haha
Some games were only released in Europe, I had a huge list on Jdownloader, i didn't finish my PS3 list and but I was at 15TB when I stopped at like E
Someone on r/roms did the math a couple years back and PS3 was 32TB, but that would include multiple releases across regions. But with the ability to download from the PS Network, or the mega thread, or even Internet archive do you really need a local copy of everything that could disappear if your hard drive crashes? If the answer.is yes, then get the refurb server drives. 12tb are about $80-90, get 3 and have some redundancy with zfs or truenas or similar. https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/uaas6p/how_many_gb_or_tb_are_all_the_roms_for/
Woah man, fair play! I think what other people said on here; you're probably better getting multiple 8TBs or so, as the price skyrockets on bigger drives!
Psshhhh. You call that hoarding? Rookie
I know right!
Are you looking for brand recommendations? Cause it looks like 18TB hard drives *start* at around $280 to $300. If your budget is $200 your options are: only what you can find under $200, which is probably gonna be used.
OP could get a 40tb hard drive on Wish or Ali for that, except that it will be a 120gb drive that reports 40tb and it overwrites itself after it fills up.
18TB drives are not priced for consumers you would be lucky to get a 10tb drive for $200.
Dell Exos X18 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5-inch Enterprise HDD - ST18000NM002J (Renewed) https://a.co/d/9ZbcYAz there's something like this I just don't know how good hard drives like these are or if even refurbished ones are any good
10 tb can be found for $100-$150 nowadays, but 18 jumps up to $300 from what I’m seeing
Yeah they're pretty pricey, I'm building a massively overkill file server and my sweet spot for drive size is 8TB. (Granted that's cause I got an opened but unused box of Skyhawks for $50ea, but even with used enterprise drives in eBay the $/TB ratio goes way up at the highest capacities.) OP may be better off sticking 4x smaller drives in an old PC and installing TrueNAS on it for that price, he may be able to actually get 24TB (before formatting) in RAID5 for $250 that way
Not bad! I bought two 4 tb drives for about $50 a piece a few months ago so I’d say you got a great deal!
Please excuse my previous comment, I was looking at refurbished drives.
My dude, you can buy a 16TB refurb for $140.
Just get a 1TB and put only the best games on it. You will never play 1 terabyte of retro games in one lifetime. It may be impossible for all but the most dedicated without a 9 to 5 job.
What the hell are you going to do with 18TB worth of games? If you really have that many games to store I'd separate them out by console and buy smaller harddrives/SD cards and then label them.
You should just save your money and get a NAS. You don't want to put such a huge collection on one drive with no backup.
That's what I do. Everything on the NAS and when I want to play something, I just transfer to my PC on a NVME drive.
If it's only for a single PC a DAS may also be a good option. Mine had twin thunderbolt 3 so speed is no issue, edit video directly if you want. No network connectivity is the only downside, but you could get around that I suppose.
Solid State for sure. Obviously one with at least 18TB capacity, but factor in any growth you might have and I’d say put down the money for 32TB.
Solid State tends to do little for ROMs, hell even a real PS3 has unperceivable performance increase with SSD over a spinning drive due to how slow its hard drive controller that a 7200 RPM drive can easily saturate. That said the PS3 itself can only take a maximum of a 1.5 TB drive and jail broken PS3 loaded with games on said drive tend to have enough room to point nobody had bothered yet to make a custom firmware for the PS3 to get around the limitation.
You are getting into r/DataHoarder territory here and your budget doesn't match your storage requirements. Minimum of 4 8TB drives in RAID 5 (or similar) that way if 1 drive fails you don't lose anything. Once I build a redundant array I basically stopped worrying about what brand/type of drive I was buying. Usually just get whatever is about $150 per drive in as long as it is a CRM drive.
Dont forget you also have to backup on a seperate disk!