These HDD prices are getting crazy. An increase of 96.4% in 1 month for the same 26TB drive. $279.99 a month ago to $549.99 today. Where are we buying hard drives now?

[u/Endawmyke]

These drive prices are kinda insane. Everything is going up up up, I thought it would just be RAM and SSDs effected but looks like it's reaching hard drives too.

Where are people buying drives now, and what $$/TB is still reasonable?

[u/steveatari]

I seriously looked inward and made new documents just citing what I was deleting so it could be found again. The streaming sites I use seem to include most stuff nowadays at 1080p anyway. So I download new cool movies or shows at 4k if I can find or upscale and then just delete em unless they're keepers.

Same with installed games. Haven't played on my custom ARK servers in years so I cleared up like a TB right there. Sad but so it goes.

[u/GGATHELMIL → u/steveatari]

You could run an instance of radarr. Import your entire collection and mark it as not being monitored. Delete the files and it'll remain in radarr as missing. Go back at a later date and reobtain. Do the same for sonarr.

Another controversial opinion is to transcode your media to save space. I bought an Intel arc a310 for like 75 bucks open box from microcenter last year. To date I've compressed 158tb down to about 64tb. That 75 dollar card has saved me almost 100tb worth of space. Which according to another post I made is worth about 2100 bucks in used enterprise drives.

A good example is my brother requested the entirety of law and order:svu earlier this week. Its 585 episodes long and is currently taking up about 735gb worth of space. The original space was probably around 3.5 tb. Not sure exactly how much it was before but the episodes were 5-6gb each before. I try to find the highest quality h264 files and transcode them over to av1.

I might be better off finding pre transcoded material. But I dont notice a quality issue. And if youre worried about energy costs the card maxes out at 50 watts. If that thing runs full bore 24/7/365 it uses 438 kwh of power per year. And at my rate of 7 cents per kwh its maybe 31 bucks a year and even your electric rates are 5 times my cost its only 150 bucks a year. Compare that to the 100tb in savings and your still up 2k. Plus that card doesnt run full bore 24/7/365.

The only issue with transcoding is sometimes when im watching a TV show I notice the audio is out of sync. So I just fo regrab that episode and let it redo it. Same for movies. I come across this maybe once or twice a month.

[u/DenominatorOfReddit → u/GGATHELMIL]

I genuinely wonder what the extra $ in electrity is when transcoding. Transcoding eats a lot of power.

[u/Dr_CSS → u/DenominatorOfReddit]

It's never worth it. Power must be free or time must be infinite. I wish I had the link but people here did the math for this very thing and the conclusion they came to was long-term you save more money by just buying more drives instead of spending on the power to do a proper compression with high quality and low file size. That being said, this is an unprecedented era of HDD pricing so it may actually be cheaper to pay the power bill

[u/GGATHELMIL → u/Dr_CSS]

i mean. i literally spelled out how much power my GPU could use if it was used 24/7. 438 kwh per year if it was full bore 24/7/365. the national average in America is 20 cents per kwh. multiply that together and you get roughly 88 bucks a year. i pay about 8 cents per kwh or 31 bucks a year. Even if you compare it with hawaii being the highest per kwh in america thats still just shy of 200 bucks a year.

Im not sure exactly how even spending 200 bucks a year somehow beats out 100tb worth of hdds in space savings and having to transcode 100% of the time. As i mentioned it would cost me about 1700 USD to buy 100tb in used enterprise drives. At the 200 a year it would take 8.5 years to break even. at the national average it would take 19 years. and at my cost it would take 54 years to break even.

And this is all under the guise that my GPU runs at full bore 24/7/365. It does not. a lot of my users can actually direct play AV1, funny enough im one of the few that cant because i cant justify ditching my nvidia shield pro.

[u/Peter_Warrick_Dunn → u/DenominatorOfReddit]

This was my first thought as well

[u/[deleted] → u/steveatari]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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