
Ask HN: How to distribute hundreds of terrabytes of data across servers? - alexdumitru
I&#x27;ve found myself in a difficult situation. I have some kind of file sharing websites that grew unexpectedly fast and I can&#x27;t seem to find any good option for file distribution.<p>I&#x27;m using bare metal servers from Hetzner, because AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;Google Cloud would be too expensive.<p>Currently I have two ways of distributing the files:
1. GlusterFS, which doesn&#x27;t seem very stable, is really slow and is using a ton of resources, but it made it pretty easy and fast to setup. I don&#x27;t think this is going to be a viable solution as my data is growing.<p>2. The second thing I tried after getting disappointed by GlusterFS was application-level distribution. What I do basically is split every HDD into 1TB partitions (so I can mirror them easier,as I&#x27;m using different size HDDs) and upload the file randomly&#x2F;to the emptiest one.<p>The second option works pretty good, but there are some drawbacks. Searching for files is easy, but very slow with GlusterFS, harder, but faster with the second option.<p>My question is: What better option do I have? Did I misconfigure GlusterFS or is it normal to be slow?<p>Thanks!
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snazz
Do you need to be storing this data forever? I don’t know how your application
works, but you could always require some kind of payment from users to be able
to store a file for more than a week or two. If you don’t need to store data
in perpetuity, your storage costs and the overhead of storing that much data
should go down significantly.

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juangacovas
Seems that Hetzner is BETA testing "volumes" for their cloud, up to 10 TB per
volume. Have you looked at this?

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alexdumitru
I didn't know, but I'm gonna check it out.

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chatmasta
Have a look at minio [0]

[0] [https://github.com/minio/minio](https://github.com/minio/minio)

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segmondy
S3?

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alexdumitru
It's more than 10 times more expensive than Hetzner. It's not viable.

