Black Friday 2025 Purchase Log
2025’s Black Friday was even colder than 2024. In the second half of the year, under the impact of AI, prices for hard drives and RAM kept climbing. Well‑known European cloud provider OVH recently warned that as overall hardware costs are rising rapidly, it expects cloud service prices across the industry to go up by 5%–10% by mid‑2026, and prices may even start increasing before then. Since September 2025, DDR4 prices have risen 158%, DDR5 prices have risen 307%. SanDisk directly bumped its contract prices by 50%, while Samsung raised prices for some memory products by 60%. Compared to last year, LowEndTalk has dropped the old $7 baseline and pushed it up to $10, with average deal prices roughly 10% higher than last year.
Enough talk—here’s what I picked up this Black Friday.
Netcup RS2000
Nothing much to introduce here: a long‑standing European provider. This time I bought in the US region. Compared to Germany, where tons of PT seeders are hoarding boxes, the US situation is overall a bit healthier.
Server Specs
- Provider : Netcup
- Type/Plan : RS 2000 G11
- Processor : AMD EPYC 9635 84-Core Processor
- Num of Core : 8 Cores
- Memory : 16 GB
- Storage : 100****0 GB NVMe
- Bandwidth : 120TB @ 2.5 Gbps IN | 2.5 Gbps OUT
- Location : AT
- Price : € 14.08/ Month
Yabs
Basic System Information:---------------------------------Uptime : 5 days, 19 hours, 24 minutesProcessor : AMD EPYC 9645 96-Core ProcessorCPU cores : 8 @ 2296.548 MHzAES-NI : ✔ EnabledVM-x/AMD-V : ❌ DisabledRAM : 15.6 GiBSwap : 0.0 KiBDisk : 1007.8 GiBDistro : Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTSKernel : 6.8.0-88-genericVM Type : KVMIPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ✔ Online
IPv6 Network Information:---------------------------------ISP : netcup GmbHASN : AS214996 netcup GmbHHost : netcup GmbHLocation : Manassas, Virginia (VA)Country : United States
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vda3):---------------------------------Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 184.05 MB/s (46.0k) | 1.07 GB/s (16.7k)Write | 184.54 MB/s (46.1k) | 1.07 GB/s (16.8k)Total | 368.60 MB/s (92.1k) | 2.15 GB/s (33.6k) | |Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 1.07 GB/s (2.1k) | 1.46 GB/s (1.4k)Write | 1.13 GB/s (2.2k) | 1.56 GB/s (1.5k)Total | 2.21 GB/s (4.3k) | 3.03 GB/s (2.9k)
Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:---------------------------------Test | Value |Single Core | 1487Multi Core | 7876Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/23938683
YABS completed in 2 min 34 secHostBrr Flash Deal: 2c6g 40G NVMe 6T HDD
German oneman. This was the first‑day flash‑sale model, which has basically become HostBrr’s routine for the anniversary / Black Friday. The big advantage is the price, and I generally use these for seeding or backups. My luck’s been pretty good every year—this makes four “heirloom” storage boxes in my hand.
Server Specs
CPU:
- 2 vCore AMD EPYC Turin 9655 / AMD Threadripper 9995WX Pro (randomly assigned) Memory:
- 6 GB DDR5 ECC RAM Storage:
- 40 GB NVMe Gen4 SSD
- 6000 GB HDD RAID-50 (NVMe cache acceleration) Traffic & Network:
- 10000 GB traffic @ 10 Gbps IP:
- 1× IPv4
- IPv6 /64 Location:
- Frankfurt, Germany Price:
- €7.5 / month
Yabs
Sun Nov 30 01:38:56 PM CST 2025
Basic System Information:---------------------------------Uptime : 0 days, 1 hours, 32 minutesProcessor : AMD EPYC 9655 96-Core ProcessorCPU cores : 2 @ 2599.998 MHzAES-NI : ✔ EnabledVM-x/AMD-V : ✔ EnabledRAM : 5.8 GiBSwap : 1024.0 MiBDisk : 5.9 TiBDistro : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)Kernel : 6.12.38+deb13-amd64VM Type : KVMIPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ✔ Online
IPv6 Network Information:---------------------------------ISP : dataforest GmbHASN : AS58212 dataforest GmbHHost : dataforest GmbHLocation : Frankfurt am Main, Hesse (HE)Country : Germany
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vda3):---------------------------------Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 372.66 MB/s (93.1k) | 3.11 GB/s (48.7k)Write | 373.65 MB/s (93.4k) | 3.13 GB/s (48.9k)Total | 746.31 MB/s (186.5k) | 6.25 GB/s (97.6k) | |Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 358.65 MB/s (700) | 1.76 GB/s (1.7k)Write | 377.70 MB/s (737) | 1.88 GB/s (1.8k)Total | 736.35 MB/s (1.4k) | 3.65 GB/s (3.5k)
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vdb):---------------------------------Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 586.00 KB/s (146) | 7.05 MB/s (110)Write | 616.00 KB/s (154) | 7.40 MB/s (115)Total | 1.20 MB/s (300) | 14.46 MB/s (225) | |Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 25.56 MB/s (49) | 33.60 MB/s (32)Write | 27.34 MB/s (53) | 36.42 MB/s (35)Total | 52.91 MB/s (102) | 70.02 MB/s (67)
Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:---------------------------------Test | Value |Single Core | 1594Multi Core | 3038Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/23938571Hetzner AX162-S
Black Friday waived the setup fee, so I grabbed one—and I’m very happy that I again drew brand‑new disks this time. For detailed benchmarks, see https://catcat.blog/hetzner-ax162s-benchmark.html
Server Specs
- CPU: EPYC 9454P (48C96T)
- RAM: 256GB DDR5 ECC / 128 GB DDR5 ECC
- Disks: 2 x 1.92 TB (Gen 4) / 2 x 3.84 TB (Gen 4)
- Price: €199 / month
Yabs
Tue Nov 25 02:52:53 PM CET 2025
Basic System Information:---------------------------------Uptime : 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutesProcessor : AMD EPYC 9454P 48-Core ProcessorCPU cores : 96 @ 1500.000 MHzAES-NI : ✔ EnabledVM-x/AMD-V : ✔ EnabledRAM : 125.5 GiBSwap : 4.0 GiBDisk : 3.4 TiBDistro : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)Kernel : 6.12.41+deb13-amd64VM Type : NONEIPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ✔ Online
IPv6 Network Information:---------------------------------ISP : Hetzner Online GmbHASN : AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbHHost : HetznerLocation : Nuremberg, Bavaria (BY)Country : Germany
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/md3):---------------------------------Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 377.98 MB/s (94.4k) | 1.58 GB/s (24.7k)Write | 378.97 MB/s (94.7k) | 1.59 GB/s (24.8k)Total | 756.95 MB/s (189.2k) | 3.17 GB/s (49.6k) | |Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ----Read | 2.44 GB/s (4.7k) | 2.54 GB/s (2.4k)Write | 2.57 GB/s (5.0k) | 2.71 GB/s (2.6k)Total | 5.02 GB/s (9.8k) | 5.26 GB/s (5.1k)
Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:---------------------------------Test | Value |Single Core | 1596Multi Core | 44409Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/23924790
Geekbench 6 Benchmark Test:---------------------------------Test | Value |Single Core | 2177Multi Core | 19030Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/15226126
YABS completed in 5 min 6 secS.EE Short URL & Link Analytics Platform
A new project from the xtom boss: a privacy‑friendly short‑link and link analytics platform aimed more at professional use cases. From now on, I won’t have to overthink which shortener to use in my scripts—I’ll just use this one. Nice and simple.
Plan Details
- Feature and quota of the lifetime plan:
- 200 short URLs per month
- 200 QR codes per month
- 20 GB storage / max 5 GB per file
- 1 custom domain binding
- Link analytics data retained for 1 year
- 2 team members
- Password protection / expiration control
- A/B testing
- Full API
- Priority support
- Price: US$59 lifetime
# Englishcurl -sL https://ba.sh/sick | bash
# Chinesecurl -sL https://ba.sh/sick | bash -s -- -cnSummary
Overall, this Black Friday has been much quieter than in previous years, with few real surprises. The rest is just renewing the good stuff I bought in the past.