okay to be clear i did pay for the hard drives, a bit below market price but i didn't just find 16 identical 14 TB drives lying around somewhere :P

the trick is not only to re-check e-waste bins at a bunch of different companies/institutions regularly (i normally make the rounds once a week at different points in the week), but also to befriend the IT guys if possible :) sometimes the big stuff (like servers and racks) doesn't get chucked in the regular ewaste, but if you become enough of a familiar face (be "that person" who's always rummaging around back) you can start asking if they have other things or even get first dibs on some stuff - the IT department at my local high school now texts me whenever they're about to throw out something big lol. of course this is predicated on the assumption that the IT guys are friendly, which isn't always the case.

as for nix: i just did ye olde sudo apt install nix and then for any project i'm working on with dependencies not in the debian repos, i set up a nix config with the necessary libraries and headers and just do all my dev work inside a corresponding nix-shell. can recommend learning how nix works, it's pretty cool :)