How many spinning hard drives do you have in your desktop?

[Katja]

This is about to become two; new system has a 2TB Seagate Barracuda for excess storage and I'm tossing in a spare 3TB one as well, which basically is a Linux storage drive.

 

Desktop config is gonna be fun.

[hfm]

On 2/12/2022 at 7:09 PM, Custom90gt said:

Ummm a few hundred. I don't know if I want to look at the exact number, lol.

 

lol.. wow.. wouldn't it be cheaper to just pay for a few streaming services hah. I still have an aging MP3 collection on my NAS that I never use anymore. I pretty much stopped contributing to that years ago except for the one off thing I buy on Bandcamp to support an artist, then I end up streaming their music anyway to give them additional streaming revenue. The rest of my 4TBx2 NAS is just incremental backups or time machine for all the devices in the house. I don't bother backing up my game installs just the OS.

 

All that storage just for movies?

[ryan]

lol hfm i was thinking the same thing.....mp3s and divx days are gone we now have spotify and netflix

[Custom90gt]

17 hours ago, hfm said:

 

lol.. wow.. wouldn't it be cheaper to just pay for a few streaming services hah. I still have an aging MP3 collection on my NAS that I never use anymore. I pretty much stopped contributing to that years ago except for the one off thing I buy on Bandcamp to support an artist, then I end up streaming their music anyway to give them additional streaming revenue. The rest of my 4TBx2 NAS is just incremental backups or time machine for all the devices in the house. I don't bother backing up my game installs just the OS.

 

All that storage just for movies?

 

Streaming even at "4k" is far inferior to true 4k films. Having said that I only watch a handful of movies a month so it's worth it to buy them instead of paying for a reoccurring service that may or may not have what I want to watch.  I also have amazon video for all of the little stuff.

 

But yes all of that storage for media, games, pictures, hundreds of gigs worth of backups (including for other family members), and hundreds of gigs worth of resources from my days in engineering school and medical school. All of it besides the media and games gets backed up multiple times and online as well. 

[hfm]

12 minutes ago, Custom90gt said:

 

Streaming even at "4k" is far inferior to true 4k films. Having said that I only watch a handful of movies a month so it's worth it to buy them instead of paying for a reoccurring service that may or may not have what I want to watch.  I also have amazon video for all of the little stuff.

 

But yes all of that storage for media, games, pictures, hundreds of gigs worth of backups (including for other family members), and hundreds of gigs worth of resources from my days in engineering school and medical school. All of it besides the media and games gets backed up multiple times and online as well. 

 

Ahh, I'm just not a stickler for the quality, streaming is good enough for me lol. The only thing I don't have backed up in the cloud is the device backups and MP3 collection, though the MP3 collection is largely meaningless now as it just sits dormant. Basically it would take a house fire where I wasn't able to grab the two macbooks we have to be any meaningful loss of data. My desktop I could lose without consequence it's just games and entertainment. All my code is already in github I don't care about that.

 

I was considering whether the risk of something catastrophic taking out my backups and devices in one swoop is worth the expense of backing up my NAS to the cloud. Was looking at Backblaze, though I can also just use AWS Glacier... decisions. In the end I wouldn't really care much if the NAS just went poof. It would at most be annoying but not life changing. What IS life changing IMO is the fact that I really don't feel the need to store media anymore, the expense of the streaming services is pretty much negligible for me.. we sub to like 7 or 8 of them hah. My time is better spent elsewhere.

[ryan]

1 hour ago, Custom90gt said:

Streaming even at "4k" is far inferior to true 4k films.

? 4k streaming is pretty good/ are you an eagle?

[Custom90gt]

1 hour ago, ryan said:

? 4k streaming is pretty good/ are you an eagle?

 

No, but I can tell the difference, we all have our hobbies...

[hfm]

18 hours ago, ryan said:

lol hfm i was thinking the same thing.....mp3s and divx days are gone we now have spotify and netflix

 

Yeah, I still like to support the artists on Bandcamp, but I sub to YouTube Premium and it came with YT Music, I just use that all the time now. Now that I think about it, i've been subbed to both of those separately for years, I think they might be one product now as I'm just paying one fee. 

[ryan]

yeah I used to see a slight and I mean slight difference....but now with the improvements of streaming services....almost no difference

 

 

dare i argue at 4 feet away you can't spot the difference unless you do have cyborg eyes

[Sandy Bridge]

7-8 streaming services... if they average $13 per month, which seems reasonable given Netflix/HBO Max/Hulu Adless being above that, that's $100/month, or $1200/year.  You can buy a 12 TB HDD for less than $300.  So if you add in redundancy, that's up to 24 TB of local storage per year for the cost of being able to stream pretty much whatever you want.

 

But for Blu-Rays, some of that would go to media.  Looking at BestBuy.com, it seems the average price for a new Blu-Ray is about $15.  You could buy 80 average-priced Blu-Rays for $1200 year, assuming you already had infinite storage.  That would be way more films than I watched last year, so for me it would be cheaper to buy Blu-Rays than to subscribe to 7-8 streaming services.

 

Without additional compression, a Blu-Ray backup takes about 30 GB... so 12 TB can back up 400 of them.  So let's say over five years, you buy two 12 TB drives for redundant backup... that's $600 out of the $6000 budget, leaving room for 360 Blu-Rays, which use up 90% of that back-up space.  72 new films per year, that would keep me happy, although it may not be enough for someone who views a lot of them.

 

Whether you can tell a difference also will depend on the size of the screen.  On my 48" TV, it's pointless to go above 1080p.  If you have an 85" TV or a 4K projector, odds are better than you'd be able to tell a difference.  It may also depend on the streaming service.  I know some (e.g. Fandango) are horrible at standard def relative to a DVD.  I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of compression used for 4K varies by streaming service as well.  It would be interesting to read a comparison evaluating that sort of thing, but so far I haven't seen any studies on it.

[ryan]

7-8 streaming services is a bit overkill...all you need is disney plus/netflix/hulu(if in the states)/crave...thats 4 at like 13 bucks a pop..I actually don't know of anyothers besides prime that are worth getting

[hfm]

On 4/4/2022 at 11:38 AM, Sandy Bridge said:

7-8 streaming services... if they average $13 per month, which seems reasonable given Netflix/HBO Max/Hulu Adless being above that, that's $100/month, or $1200/year.  You can buy a 12 TB HDD for less than $300.  So if you add in redundancy, that's up to 24 TB of local storage per year for the cost of being able to stream pretty much whatever you want.

 

But for Blu-Rays, some of that would go to media.  Looking at BestBuy.com, it seems the average price for a new Blu-Ray is about $15.  You could buy 80 average-priced Blu-Rays for $1200 year, assuming you already had infinite storage.  That would be way more films than I watched last year, so for me it would be cheaper to buy Blu-Rays than to subscribe to 7-8 streaming services.

 

Without additional compression, a Blu-Ray backup takes about 30 GB... so 12 TB can back up 400 of them.  So let's say over five years, you buy two 12 TB drives for redundant backup... that's $600 out of the $6000 budget, leaving room for 360 Blu-Rays, which use up 90% of that back-up space.  72 new films per year, that would keep me happy, although it may not be enough for someone who views a lot of them.

 

Whether you can tell a difference also will depend on the size of the screen.  On my 48" TV, it's pointless to go above 1080p.  If you have an 85" TV or a 4K projector, odds are better than you'd be able to tell a difference.  It may also depend on the streaming service.  I know some (e.g. Fandango) are horrible at standard def relative to a DVD.  I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of compression used for 4K varies by streaming service as well.  It would be interesting to read a comparison evaluating that sort of thing, but so far I haven't seen any studies on it.

 

so you just pirate the content? nah..

[ryan]

lol was thinking the exact same thing..

 

LInks or else...I want free movies that are legal also!! damnit I want freeeeeeeeeeeee

 

 

edit I'd like too add we are on the interent and no info is safe? why would you advertise pirating on my baby NBR

[Sandy Bridge]

On 4/10/2022 at 3:17 PM, ryan said:

 

LInks or else...I want free movies that are legal also!! damnit I want freeeeeeeeeeeee

 

Ask, and ye shall receive: https://archive.org/details/feature_films

 

Admittedly, it can be hard to stay engaged with silent films in this age of talkies... I look forward to the mid-late 2020s when talkies start going out of copyright.

 

In this age of $10/month streaming services, $2 Redbox rentals, and free library collections, though, why bother with piracy?  Amassing a large Blu-Ray collection is a hobbyist's task, and if that's your hobby, you can spend money on it.  But if you just want to enjoy some movies for less than the cost of a single movie ticket at many theaters... that's eminently possible via legal services nowadays.

 

Though the two-for-a-dollar 5-day rental option at Family Video was nice while it lasted.

[ryan]

? amassing 100 year old films\

[K4sum1]

The amount of hard drives I have changes all the time, I currently have 3, but soon I want to have 1 or 0 in my system. I currently have 3 4TB drives, and 2 3TB drives, I'm thinking of compacting my data to it fits onto 7TB, and do a RAID 1 setup with a NAS, and use the leftover 4TB for my PC.

 

[jaybee83]

a bit late to this party, but here goes:

 

currently all SSD as stated in my sig, plus a 1 TB M.2 2242 inside an USB 3.1 10Gbps enclosure (basically self-built USB stick with waaaaaay better IOPS performance than trashy standard sticks 😛 )

 

for my upcoming desktop build im actually planning to incorporate some spinning rust again, likely an 18 or 20 TB HDD, basically as a backup of all my sh*t. 

[ryan]

thats a beast amount of SSD storage..I have a 1tb ssd now and might buy a 2tb ssd for backup I just dont see why you would need more than 3-5tb I have like 300 steam games and other platforms like epic and I think for shits and giggles I downloaded all good or bad and i still had 1 tb left on my 5tb hdd

[jaybee83]

9 hours ago, ryan said:

thats a beast amount of SSD storage..I have a 1tb ssd now and might buy a 2tb ssd for backup I just dont see why you would need more than 3-5tb I have like 300 steam games and other platforms like epic and I think for shits and giggles I downloaded all good or bad and i still had 1 tb left on my 5tb hdd

movies (~2800), tv shows (141) and games (56), my friend! 😄

they are currently totaling about 5.4 TB, so my 2x4 TB 860 Evos are now 75% filled 😛 curious to see how much longer they will last haha

[Katja]

Girlfriend and I have an external enclosure with like.. something around 16tb or so, so a decent amount. We're discussing building a NAS, which won't happen at least until after we get our new fibre line installed; aiming to have that run into my office so I can manage it easily. I'd say with all of the storage we have laying around, we could potentially have somewhere in the ballpark of 30tb, but that depends on what hardware we have/end up getting.

 

Honestly I need to look through her old systems and see if any have enough sata support for a project like this; worst case I can make a double-duty plex and storage server with some extra hardware if need be. That enclosure has something in the ballpark of 5 drives, and if I set it up, I want redundancy, not just pure storage.

Now, if it were an ideal build, I'd probably aim for all-sata SSD storage, but I'm honestly unsure if I wanna foot the bill for that (gotta pay to get some stuff shipped over here from the US I have with some family there, which is gonna cost a bit) on a project that could potentially not work out. Still gotta think on that, since I'm heavily considering buying some cheap x79 or x99 boards/CPUs for something like this. She's got about 2TB of NVME storage in her PC, and I have about 3TB worth, so who knows. All planning for that, but who knows.

[ryan]

5.4tb? my man jesus wants you to clear your cache..but i want answers....how u gonna play 2800 movies.....you guys are nutso

[ryan]

On 7/8/2022 at 3:54 AM, jaybee83 said:

movies (~2800)

hmmm..are you asian lol....like 2300 kung fu movies 500 anime

[jaybee83]

🤣 theres no cache to be cleared here hahaha, its all actual data 😋😁

 

and im totally not a fan of anime or kung fu movies. but in general, were talking all types of stuff, action/scifi/drama/thrillers/comedy/romance/documentaries/fantasy, etc... whatever seems interesting 🙂

 

been collecting for like 20 years now, so naturally theres quite a pile forming 😁

[Katja]

On 7/10/2022 at 1:01 AM, ryan said:

hmmm..are you asian lol....like 2300 kung fu movies 500 anime

No, you gotta store ALL THE ANIME

[Katja]

Pulled girlfriend's old PC out of the closet since I permission to use it as a project system and it's got like 4 sata drives, which I thought was kinda cool. Probably somewhere in the realm of like 6tb of storage if I had to guess.

 

Oh, it also had some old versions of Debian and Kubuntu on it, oldest kernels being somewhere in the 2.6.x release area.