3x16tb in raidz1 here, so 30ish tb useful. Drives are over 5 years old now. Raid is my backup for media, and if i lose it all, who cares, I can download it again.
The craziest thing is that I could sell these drives now, for the same price I bought them new!
Bro, there is absolutely zero chance that if I lost my almost 30tb of content id go back and redo everything. Thats more or less 2.5 years of work finding, downloading, and tweaking things.
If you back up the important things, like your configs, set ups, lists of media and settings. You can get it all back easily. Just back up the media you cant get via arrs on another 3-2-1 system.
I have an external 1Tb hard drive I monthly back up important files/media, and then use BackBlaze for continuous back up of the same stuff + some extra folders cause its cheap enough for me to use as a back up.
Selling 5 year old media drives is just cruel man, some poor sap that doesn't understand the 3-2-1 rule is going to be devastated when he loses his hentai folder.
Just buy 2nd hand from a company. I got 24tb from my buddy for free a few years back bevuase he purchased 400tb+ for less than a grand from a place with sells off old shit.
A 4tb ssd runs you around $600. Regular hard drive is $200. So 32tb worth is anywhere from $1200 to $3600. Not to mention all that time downloading that much media, most of which you will never watch.
I just have a 4tb ssd and download what I want to watch and then delete it. Maybe half of that space is movies and shows I wanna keep to watch casually, but most stuff is watch and delete
Also, Plex just recently jacked up with price a lot. The free version has always been glitchy for me. Jellyfin is so much better
I use newsgroups, with dockers for radarr, sonarr, and sabnzb. I also have an overseer website for people to request content that then pulls from the newsgroups.
Access to the newsgroups does cost, though it’s cheaper than streaming subs and gets me access to every service.
I don’t know if it’s cost efficient now though. I used an old pc for the mobo and cpu, and I bought refurbished server drives before the tariffs and AI. I have about 60TB usable with dual parity and 2 tb of ssd for cache.
I run 64TB Plex and don’t bother backing it up. With a 1GB connection I can just download my files if something goes wrong. Probably faster than restoring from backup or repairing RAID
I'm jealous. I use to torrent and burn things to DVD back in 2003. I got back into stremio last year. I don't have the time or real desire to torrent again and make a giant database like you. I wish!
Nothing to be jealous about, this was built out over 10 years or so before the streaming options were so good. When I discovered how good debrids were first with Kodi then Stremio now with all the other apps I don't think if starting from scratch I would do it again. constantly filling and adding new drives with downloads running sometimes 24/7 trying to keep up with the volume of shows coming out. I enjoyed it, but today it's just not necessary.
I don’t know why more people didn’t leave Plex after they were bought by PI and started charging for shit. It’s only going to get worse. Jellyfin is the way
They cut off options for free remote streaming, so now you have to pay a monthly subscriptions to access the content that you host on your server and your internet connection (or ones you pay someone else to host). So they force you to pay a monthly subscription for something where they aren't the ones paying the ongoing expenses for it. They also tripled the price of the lifetime pass from $250 to $750 to force people into ongoing subscriptions instead. It would likely take decades to break even on the lifetime pass now. Oh and they also updated the UI and a lot of people don't like the new interface.
If you have a lifetime subscription nothing really changed, but then they tripled the price of that too. I would not put it past them to launch Plex 2.0 and "lifetime" away the old subscription.
I love how when the internet goes out I just keep watching my stories…and Plex has a feature where you can add commercials from any era if you miss them.
Theoretically, what would you charge to fill up a couple external harddrives 🤔 I used to have 5TB but I didn't back it up and lost everything. I miss it dearly but I am technologically illiterate and no longer have access to my plug.
Well technically you should wipe the drive every time. Because if you ever get a search warrant there is a possibility the amount of content will be gathered and you could get arrested for it. They could think you’re running some kind of elaborate movie ring and showing it to others as well. One guy already got 7 years for this. So please be careful and take care of yourself.
Yeah, I definitely didn't do that 👀 No way did I obsessively collect movies and shows from every person on my ship that had some and then lend out my hard-drive to coworkers...that would be crazy. I would never host movie night in my shop. Air dropping movies in the chow line? Who would do such a thing.... I was in the Navy, sir, piracy is very frowned upon.
I remember having 10 4TB in my array thinking I will never need to buy another hard drive again. Oh how wrong I was. Now I need to find 32TB drives that aren't over $1,000 each.
It's a server you run on a PC and then can access it from other devices. I think they have some streaming stuff but for the most part, it's bring-your-own-files.
Piracy is the main way, but I guess you could rip DVDs and put the files on your server that way. Let's be honest tho, 99% of Plex Servers are just pirated content.
Think of plex as netflix. In this instance you are finding and downloading the content you want to watch, upload it to plex, and then youll be able to watch it wherever whenever you want completely free and ad free. The UI is essentially netflix as well.
I almost switched to jellyfin when they announced the new lifetime membership price. I got in on the $2.99 a month deal and im sticking with it. Stream from mobile to any TV is a plus. I just need storage to drop back down in price dammit!
I switched to Jellyfin a couple months ago after using free Plex for years and I'm much happier with it. The UI is better and so is title ID process and it's much faster and zero ads/promototed videos on the homepage
Teach me: where and how do you get those things you watch on Plex/Jellyfin? I want to jump on the same ship, but I don’t know where to start finding the gold chest, if you know what I mean?
This is what I have been doing for 2 years now. We pay nobody for streaming and they can fuck right off. Nickel and dime the shit out of you, then say pay more for no ads. Like no.
I backed up a bunch of dvds to my server. Same with my music cds and a few records but im not very good with editing software so my record tracks all have the pops in them and it just plays the whole side instead of each song lmao
Humble 6TB Plex here but it's plenty for just us and our friend group to share. Got the lifetime pass a long time ago, not paying any media subscriptions has been lovely.
Got my little homelab with 24tbs setup a few weeks ago. Cancelling my big D package sub was cathartic. Now i just gotta wait for at&t to finish setting up that fiber line in front of my house and I get to tell spectrum to stuff it as well
35 Tb isn't much...that's only like 4 TB. Gotta watch the capitalization there.
But seriously, having my own server (96TB NAS running Jellyfin) has been my only streaming service for the past 6 years. Having it accessible from anywhere in the world for music, movies, and tv is the greatest thing.
Right now I have about 35TB as well for Plex but I have 4 NAS (3x 8-bay NAS and 1x 4-bay NAS) sitting around with no HDDs. That's 28 HDDs and if I get about 24TB each that's like 672TB of space I could potentially use for Plex. I will never need another streaming service ever again. I will forever sail the seven seas.
EDIT: Probably less space if I implement redundancy.
698
u/PhotoFenix 1d ago
Laughs in 35 Tb of plex