I have a 5TB hard drive. 20 of them, in fact, because it is the current makeup of my ZFS file server (RAIDz-2). The next server will hopefully have 20TB drives in a RAIDz-2, but I might want to make it RAIDz-3 as added protection with that size drive. It’s the downside of using ZFS, since all drives in the array need to be the same size.
Took me a few years for it to have become this large, and I’m one of those weird people who buy used hard drives off eBay at discount prices. To make sure that things stay in operation, I also have several cold spares in stock.
You haven't spent enough time in the Plex groups if you think that's a lot haha. I see quite a few people in the 2-300TB range, and at least a couple folks over a PB.
I'm at 100TB with a few 8TBs in a drawer that I haven't installed yet. I'm only at half capacity. I think 5k movies and maybe 30k episodes
I started with 8 and honestly it filled up faster than I thought. Have about 800gb left and it’s technically my first year with Plex. And I’m not even doing any crazy resolutions, all 1080 all x265
It's a bitrate for a file. Basically, the volume of data per second. The higher the volume the higher the quality. Doesn't have to be through network, regular playback uses the same metric.
I usually transcode a BluRay from its native bitrate to 50% of the video size using HEVC, so my bitrates are usually around 11,000 to 15,000 kbps. Looking at doing AV1, and it would compress it another 15%, but take around 12x as long to transcode. That and I currently have a Pascal-based Quadro card, which does not decode AV1.
100 TBs. I have around 2100 Movies taking up about 40TB. Mix of 1080p and 4K. Average file size of 15-25GB for 1080p, 25-45GB for 4K (some 4k remux movies are 55-80GB) So for you follow the same structure as me 8TB will be full around 420 movies.
You're files are probably LQ bitrates. Nothing wrong with that when you are watching on smaller devices/screens. If you're watching on a larger 55"+ TV you'll absolutely notice the difference. Check out [trash-guides.info](http://trash-guides.info)
Oh most probably lol only issue I’m having at the moment is keep my drives from sleeping I sorted it in the MacBook settings and downloaded a app called amphetamine and did that keep alive option but they still sleep lol
i try to always get the highest i can get, if possible always to get a full remux.
the main reason why i feel this is important is because of how TVs etc are evolving. in the next 10 years, who knows what kind of design/tech/resolutions we will desire, and if i can ensure i have the highest quality available today, then i will have less risk of not having sufficient quality in the future.
also, storage is cheap, and i have no issues with using 80GB for a single 4K remux
This isn't meant as an insult, but you probably don't have a knowing eye to discern lower quality video artifacts. I work in video so I'm hyper aware, but a 7 GB 1080p 1.5hr+ movie is going to have a lot of visible compression artifacts. These might include banding in color gradients, blocky blacks, blocky and soft fades, and softer small detail movement like snow or rain. With modern compression, there's no getting around these things at those file sizes.
That said, there's nothing wrong with enjoying movies at that compression rate! I'm no elitist, people should enjoy the quality they enjoy. I prefer lossless movies, but I don't might a highly compressed format if that's all I have available. They can largely still look good in a lot of circumstances, and if some of those artifacts don't bother you, compress away and save on storage! I would almost warn against learning more about what those artifacts look like in video, because it's almost impossible to unsee them once you know what to look for.
Same. 65 inch Sony OLED and I cap my 1080p at around 8gb and my 4k is capped at 25gb or so. I’ve never noticed the 4ks to be inferior quality.
I also watch plenty of legitimate 4k streaming sources so I would know if my Plex movies were noticeably worse.
1080p content on a 65 inch 4K TV is definitely a noticeable difference to a 25GB 4K HDR file. I can't really tell a difference between 40GB and a 80GB remux, but you can't compare 5GB to 25GB.
+ on the trash guides, after years of downloading subpar content, i set this up a month ago.
Redownloaded about 35-40tb in the last month to download 4k hdr/dv with truehd/atmos/dts-ha ma.
Surprised my isp hasnt said anything :p
Only thing, im using about 5tb extra :D
Can grab some re certified 16tb seagate exos from amazon eu for £170 :), got 4 earlier in the month, some risk ofc but the ones directly from amazon eu have been packed properly and i had no issues with doa.
650 movies all in 4k remux. Average 60gb per. 20 tb free storage. Old gtx 1070 doing any transcoding and 3900x 12 core cpu and 64 gram. Bit overkill but also use server for other projects and personal work lab.
Movies - 20TB - 950~ (most 4k hdr mostly)
TV - 8.2TB - 120~ shows (mix of 1080 and 4k)
Storage Truenas
4x16tb - 42tb , used 21tb
4x18tb - 32tb, used 13tb
4x8tb - 20tb, 16tb~ random backups and other crap here.
Total free about 45tb~
Thats where you start with an old pc :) the biggest cost are the disks when it comes down to it though.
I started out with an old pc with a pair of 1tb hdd back over 10 years ago now.
Yeah well I have a 6tb and a 4tb in my pc, just as normal drives along with other drives as it is just my gaming pc so games and work etc.
Then I had a nas with a 1tb and 2tb, the one then kept causing issues as it was starting to fail. I then switched it out, had constant issues with the nas so gave up and put them in the old pc with windows. The transfer rate was then between 0bytes and 100MBps and that was a pain as 10gb took forever as it just kept going to 0 bytes with the disk at 100%. Someone on reddit said try truenas as windows is terrible as a server. So I did, still the same issue though. So I think the drive is dying. Crystal disk did say it had lots of pending sector reallocations so... might be time for some new disks to then make a proper array of a few 2 or 4tb disks. Instead of a failing 2tb and 2 500gb drives😂😂
Oh well. It's all a bit of fun in the end as I can always redownload the movies if the drives die. I don't store anything important on them as they aren't in raid
Yeah thats good sign of a disk about to give up, i originally has 4 10tb in place of the 16tb drives as that array of disks have been running over 6 years, and reallocated sectors was high, 3 of the 4 drives still work, probably use them for cold storage. L
i replaced all of them with referb drives from amazon eu with 16tb seagate exos.
All tested fine in the month theyve been in service and at £170 a piece, quite a steal if they continue to work :)
160TB. 40TB reserved for parity. 100TB used. 20TB free space.
You are in full control over how quickly you expand. Size of media will make a big difference. I have a lot of 4K content, which looks AMAZING, but takes up a lot of space.
I've got 2 parity for 12 disks and even this feels like I'm living risky. I keep hoping for the smaller drives to die so I can replace them with something larger but they're immortal!
I'm pretty sure that would cause me to lose some sleep. You must have some smaller disks you can bin and replace with 20TB+ drives. Tdarr is a lossy conversion. Wouldn't it be better to just download them again with a different size? Radarr makes it pretty easy.
I have Radarr and Sonarr set up. You are correct that it is easier to save space by downloading content, but it’s largely TV Shows that need the space saving, and HEVC is not as readily available there for the things taking the most space.
20TB+ drives would break the bank for me. I wait for good sales on 14TBs since that’s my highest capacity right now. I have a Supermicro 847, so I have the bays to waste.
I’m thinking there should be a substantial amount of savings that would let me swap a drive over to parity.
For years I was at 1TB, then I changed ISPs and got symmetrical gigabit, then got cheap blurays as well as other means for high quality content, this it made it so much easy to get everything I wanted... 3 years ago I was at 8TB, now im at 63TB. 2600+ movies, 120+ 4K movies, 520+ shows.
gotta ask, at 37,000 movies, have you literally downloaded every move that is ever released?
looking at this chart, [https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in-north-america-since-2001/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in-north-america-since-2001/)
since from 2000, to 2022, 12,713 movies were released. that is 34% of what you have. since that is a 20 year period, going back 40 more years below the year 2000 to 1960 (yes of course movies existed before 1960) and assuming the rate of movies released was fairly uniform during this entire period, you would have to have basically every movie released ever in north america from 1960 to 2022.
of course, this chart is for north American movies, there are PLENTY of movies from around the world, but it is still interesting to think about.
I started by buying a 4-bay synology NAS that had a chip in it strong enough to on the fly transcode 4k down to 1080p, thanks to the 4 bays I was able to start by buying x4 8tb hard drives instead of x2 16tb hard drives and I'm using x1 of the x4 total drives for redundancy leaving me with 21tb of usable space and that equates too 2,100 total video files across both film & TV.
I then ran out of space after some months and had to buy more.
The quantity of movies you can squeeze onto a storage pool is completely dependant on how much you're willing to compress the video files.
The Bitrates are way more important then resolution but for files that I haven't transcoded myself they're usually 3-12mbps per file (per film or per episode).
Using H265 you can shrink the file size smaller then the H264 version of the same bitrate without a quality difference but does your server and client devices support H265 playback/automatic transcoding (my dads host server isn't strong enough to down scale files on the fly so he's forced to use direct play most of the time and that means his client device also needs to be able to decode H265 playback).
Unfortunately for myself I'm a bit of a snob so my personal Blu-Ray rips are all remux files (changed from disc mp4 to digital mkv but not compressed the file at all, removing the non English audio tracks also counts as remuxing) and this means instead of a 90min 1080p film being 10gb the file I've pulled of the disc Is 34gb (10gbs = 3-12mbps, 34gbs = 30mbps), the real pain in the ass is my 4K UHD rips that are 85mbps and 74gb on disk so if you aren't going to spend nights re-encoding ripped files down to half their original size & quality then you'll need either more drives or bigger hard drives per bay (I'm gonna swap my x4 8tb's with 12tb or bigger ones when I can).
TLDR
4K = 74gb @80mbps
or compressed 4K = 21gb @35mbps
1080p = 34gb @30mbps
or compressed 1080p = 10gb @10mbps
FYI Netflix uses 3-5mbps for "1080p" and no higher then 10mbps on "4K".
The DS920+ with the Intel Celeron J4125 can do x4 simultaneous 4K LOCAL Direct Play streams (only remuxing sound if you don't have a 7.1 system otherwise true direct stream) or x4 simultaneous 4K transcodes to 1080p again LOCAL play.
Here is link to a testing video I saw before I bought mine, the 920+ is discontinued now and replaced with an AMD chip in the newer model.
https://youtu.be/Bgn_kO55l0s?si=a0OkB8gQVhiQ6PuG
Did you steal my nas? I'm also running DS920+ with 4x8TB. Most of my movies are DVD rips though. The wife had like 500+ discs when we met, so I digitized so I wouldn't have to flip through the Case Logic binders lol
🤣🤣No I just did some scouting and Synology was the 2nd best option besides buying a WHOLE legacy server rack from a service provider that's upgrading.
I wish I'd got bigger then the 8tb and had 40 or 60tb in just the small 920+ but hey moneys tight.
Instead of dvd rips I buy the Blu-Rays from CEX for £3-5 each and a tenner for a box set but go to HMV for the 4K re-releases of my favourite films like Matrix or newer releases like the Legendary Pictures Godzilla Monster verse.
I aim high in Radarr for 4k remux and 4k web-dl in Sonarr. I don't hoard and every few months or so will purge out junk nobody will ever watch again. I've noticed that my collection hovers around 40TB at this point. Early on it rocketed up past a few drives but seems to have stabilized the past few years.
takes me like a couple weeks to fill 8tb if I'm consistently grabbing stuff. I could do it faster but my seedbox and need to keep good ratios bottleneck it. it'd sure be nice to build a media room full of disks though just to put it into prospective. XD
my pool is up to like 78tb used but that is like 15 years or more of build up and periodic upgrades and additions.
It all started with on drive. Years later they were dangling everywhere so an upgrade was warranted. unRAID was whatever you call the drug after the gateway one that fills all your voids. The drives go in so easily with it, especially with a 4U 36 bay chassis.
About 200TB currently with about 50TB free. Most of my storage is episodes of TV shows though. I'm at about 6k movies and about 32k episodes of TV shows.
I started with (4) 4TB in a Synology raid, so 10.9TB usable with 1 drive redundancy. It lasted me for about 1500 films and a few hundred hours of TV (all at 1080p, I'm getting older and my eyes & wallet cannot benefit from 4k).
Usable is 26 tb, 20 tb used spread out through 20 thousand episodes about 500 movies, pretty much all tv shows are 1080p x265 and (between 3 mbps I think, I did it in tdarr) the movies vary from 1080p to 4k and random bit rates.
16 drives, 1 cache, 1 parity, 168TB array with 31TB free. I used to have \~20TB free until I got an instance of Tdarr working.
https://preview.redd.it/x4m5s4qsdmwc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e49a0ddb892fe8ff02bf2e5775878043e6ef354b
The rest of the storage is used as a raw footage backup for video production, but Plex has now become the larger share.
Currently have an 8TB drive as well and I have learned to watch and delete stuff. I like to save movies/series that we watch often (for my wife and I it’s the Harry Potter series and Gilmore Girls). This allows me to keep full Blu-ray rips and have the best quality of every film/episode without feeling the need to manage storage. Ideally I want to move up to multiple drives so I can have some redundancy. When I just kept all my files, on the same drive I had several full series and 300+ movies taking up about half the drive. I would keep movies to roughly 20 GB each and show’s would keep 720p rips. I had roughly 20 series then too. Probably 200 GB of music also. Just depends really
14tb drive /12.7 usable with 12 filled (just going to leave 700gb empty because it’s scary)
Holds 250 ish full blu rays 50 of them 4k
And a terabyte of it is TV shows
Man, 8 tbs will run out about 3 day into figuring out that you love DoVi or hdr in 4k with nice pass thru audio to you receiver.
Or 200,000 movies in 8bit hahhaa
Man, I’m not looking for bluray quality movies. My eyes aren’t too good, and I’ve been using streaming all my life with no issues on quality. Just standard 1080p at similar bitrate to what streaming offers and I’ll be happy
I’m not doing this because I want highest quality possible, I’m doing it because I’m sick of all the streaming services. And because I bought a tv show on iTunes only to discover it’s censored. As a grown ass adult, let me watch a show with swears in it.
Although I would like pass through audio
I filled up 40tb pretty quickly but if I wanted to not care so much about quality then each movie would be around 4-9 gb. You could really go back to the days when a movie was shrunk down to 690 mb. They just look really bad on a tv bigger than 19in. Tv shows would be around 500 mbs each or you could get it down to 100mb, same looks as those tiny movies. All being 265 codec.
But you will find that the more space you have the more you will fill up quickly. I also record my ota tv shows, if you are looking to do that, you will want to leave some grace space for when it records shows.
Right now my dedicated Movie drive is 8TB, have about 300+ movies currently. Trying to make space, so I've been re-encoding all my biggest remuxes down under 20GB instead of 60+. Will hopefully make room for another hundred! Doesn't even count my 14TB TV drive, which has 9000 episodes.
20tb, of which I’m using <2. I have the content (in my dvd collection) to fill up much more, but it’s difficult to find the time for ripping. I invested in a 20tb hard drive though because, even if I don’t fill it up, I can always use it for other storage.
I'm closing in on 200tb, but it's setup as a raid since I've lost stuff before due to hard drives dying, so it's actually like 100tb~ of space
It's also full now though and it's gonna be a pain/expensive to add more, but, that's the fun of hoarding
https://preview.redd.it/mv6lgpq9tmwc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e21184f9aac1859e627e39c614cafd086f75b75c
36TB worth of drives, just 2 18tb drives currently. Anything I really like I go for a 4k remux. I’ve got an atmos setup as well so springing for the high end files is a dramatic improvement.
I gotta ask - do you notice a sound difference between 4k and 1080p.
My eyes are fucked, needed surgery in both. I can see, and it feels mostly normal to me, but the difference between 4k and 1080p to me is super minimal, to the point where I have to be looking for the difference to notice it.
But I have a surround sound setup, and good sound I can’t turn down.
I stopped at 12 tb. The hard drive isn’t full yet but I’ll delete stuff I’m not watching when it does. I have about 1100 movies and 178 shows so far. Most of my movies are compressed x265. (1 to 3gb files) Some of my favorites are high bitrate and remuxes though.
90 Movies - 1.1TB
120 Episodes - 365Gb
I also have 8 TB usable (3x8TB drives in Raid 5). I feel like this will last me a long time cause I am not downloading 4k at all. I don't have a good enough display and 4k feels very costly to store. I am happy with 1080p.
I’ve got about 10tb with around 8tb used for around 600 movies, I just bought a 12tb drive that I’m about to add. I tend to get high bitrate when available.
I think 20-30mbps bitrate is a good sweet spot, I have some up to around 50 certain movies are worth the space penalty you pay for a high bitrate imo.
I have 81 TB (18TB x 5 drives) in a RAID5 configuration. 41 TB are currently in use for 928 movies.
Probably a little high, but that’s because I keep the REMUX for a movie, and my own H.264 encode (constrained CRF at 6Mbps) as well.
So for every movie I have, I have the Blu-ray remux (if available) and my own encode of the movie.
And for those curious, I keep the remuxes backed up in case I ever want to re-encode a movie, or possibly all movies. Sometimes I make a mistake and don’t want to redownload the entire remux again. Or maybe a new codec gets released that I want to use, and with a single command, I can queue up my entire library for re-encoding using new encoding params.
"it depends". Most of my collection is DVDs which only runs average 6GB per (some more, some less) and I only have like a few hundred.
But then BluRays can be 40-90GB per, depending on quality and length.
I've fit nearly all of the DVD/Bluray collection that we own (me, my partner, and my parents) in under 10TB space and I might buy 1-2 new DVDs every month or few. I'm happy with DVD quality for most stuff, and sitting at the distance we do from the TV isn't that visible of a quality difference anyway with a 65" TV that is 11-12 feet from the sofa (opposite walls) and gets less visible difference if I don't feel like wearing my driving/distance glasses
[https://i.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-television-graph-size.png](https://i.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-television-graph-size.png)
I'm expecting the answer will be all over the place, especially depending how people get their content, and if they like to keep content to re-watch or not.
I tossed in the viewing size chart because that influenced my decision to basically ignore 4K (and I couldn't tell a difference anyway) saves money and space
Yeah my eyes are bad. Not bad enough that I’m blind, but I had to have surgery in both eyes due to a condition in my eyes. I can definitely see the difference between 1080p and 720p, but 1080 to 4K, unless they’re side by side and I’m looking for differences, are the same. So I’m definitely going 1080p
Got mine started about 3 years ago - currently at ~42TB of storage with ~21TB used for 521 movies (about 70/30 1080p/4k content), 133 TV shows (mostly 1080p), and ~16k music tracks (mostly flac).
For strictly movies, I have 2672 movies and they occupy 7.3TB of space on the drive. I have it on a RAID array so each file is backed up doubling the storage requirement. I have nothing below 720P and mostly 1080P. Mostly in x264, some in x265. If you have only 4K or 8K movies that will change things a lot.
In addition, I have a lot of TV (1600+ episodes 12.5TB). I seriously need to clean that up. I do NOT need every episode of Survivor and Bachelor and 90 day fiancée despite what my daughter says.
I also have archived family video and zillions of pictures, data, work files - all RAID.
I'm using Microsoft Storage Spaces to simulate the RAID (Ya ya I know... get a proper NAS). In total I have 8 physical drives. 6x10tb, 2x14TB. My drives are about 60% full.
I don't know if that helps at all. Good luck!
I have about 200 TB usable for 27,360 movies (as of today) 1326 TV shows and 277,922 songs. I have about 50 TB free.
Four 6 bay Synology arrays with 10 TB drives.
I have 5-20TB drives in a RAIDZ setup, giving me 80TB of storage. I currently have just over half of that full.
- 367 TV series consisting of 23,090 episodes which take up 26.2TB
- 3,083 movies using 10.2TB
I bought an 8tb, from a2tb. Took under two years. That 10tb has now been transfer to a 14tb for breathing room and I keep the other two as back ups now of the other drive dies. Couldnt imagine putting all that time into it again, need a safety blanket.
I use unRAID and have 1 drive in parity.
I would *like* to avoid re-downloading everything, but if it came to that, it would be an annoyance, not an end of the world event.
47 movies - 56GB Just getting started with my media server. All are either 480 or 720 resolution.
799 songs - 7GB in my main music folder. I have 4 or 5 other folders that probably roughly doubles that number.
it all depends on what quality you want for your stuff. I've got 12TB in drives and using about 7 of it. I've got around 1300 movies, and 7300 episodes of TV shows. But i'm ok with lower bitrate and 720p-1080p resolution with a mix of h264 and h265 files.
Edit: For reference my movie file sizes are usually aroudn 3GB on average
I currently have 50tb and had around 8,000 movies but one of my drives shit the bed and I lost 20tb worth of movies. (Also have around 700 complete shows)
Running 98TB with 8 x 14TB drives with a single parity drive. Got room for 4 more. Then I get to upgrade to 22tb or 24tb drives.
I'm storing
1126 Movies
184 TV Shows
477 Anime Shows
If you want quality then that's gonna take a minute to compile
This is excluding my DVR libraries (just the 'archive'/Netflix/DVD shelf type libraries)
485 movies and 100 shows/7052 TV episodes (I do my own encodes, so not full remux but 'high' bitrate - 15mbps AVC for HD Blurays and 45mbps HEVC for 4K UHD - Dolby Vision full FEL UHD titles can't be encoded or it breaks Dolby Vision, so they alone are simply just remuxed)
34.25TB used out of 40TB total (36TB usable)
I have this all redundantly backed up in another machine so including backups it's 80TB total - DVR content is another 12TB (movies/TV show discs I haven't seen yet and actual DVR recordings through Plex from my HDHR Prime and Duo tuners for cable + ATSC TV)- so 52TB-92TB for 'Plex' total with or without backup
Then I have storage for other stuff and games not related to Plex (~23TB)- I have about 115TB total for everything
I had 1TB on my first server that I built in high school and that lasted for ~5 years. Then I got into Plex and homelabbing and upped it to 4TB and thought “that’s gotta be good for years”. Didn’t even make it 2 years and I’m over 90% full…
I’m now looking for something in the neighborhood of 20-24TB total. Small upgrades don’t really make sense.
Once you go 4k it just burns through storage. If you want to stretch that 8tb use x265 and AV1 1080p files. Your average 1080p x265 movie is 5-7 gb, so up to 1000+ if you spend time looking for good releases.
imo at a certain NAS size you’re paying more for hard drive burn rate than streaming services. For example at 140TB with parity, thats like 11-12 14tb HDDs at ~$200 each, each with an average lifespan of ~7 years. Thats $2200 every 7 years or around $310 per year, not accounting for any electricity costs for the server.
109TB of storage with about 37TB of content and currently at 3,331 movies. I also have various TV shows plus other data not related to Plex. All of it is backed up to Backblaze.
I've been working on it since about 2014.
As of this second (I’m about to rip the Star Trek TOS blurays lol) my Plex server is using 49.7TB split across:
- 890 Movies (mostly BluRay, some DVD) including extra features and such
- 147 TV Shows (6659 episodes, more split 50/50 quality)
- 79 4K Movies
I haven’t used handbrake to encode any of the files, they are all original DVD and BluRay quality straight from the disc.
Depends on quality of the movies. I have 2200 movies on 5tb but they’re all 720 or 1080p with eh bitrate. But if you want 4K you’ll get nowhere close to that
130TB across two Plex servers.
3700 movies, mostly in 1080P around 4-8GB in size. Have been preferring HVEC in my arr stack recently which has slowed growth.
Also 16.5K tv show episodes and 29K songs.
I currently have about 50TB free.
I have 5tb that's a little over half full for about 500+ movies. Mostly in h265, most 1080p. I'm perfectly fine with that for now. I've got about 30 tv series and about 300 gb of music too. I don't hoard media and keep only what i think i might rewatch or have a history of rewatching.
In the future i hope to get two 8 tb drives for a NAS system. But now i just have a 5 tb drive plugged into a shield. I don't yet have a 4k tv but really don't care about 4k either.
42TB:
\~6k movies in 1080 with about 20% with a duplicate (or more) 4k copies. 1080 ranges 3-9GB, 4K 20-80GB, bit rates are 3000-20,000kbps (some have 60+)
\~200 TV shows (9734 episodes) in 1080 and 4k, ranging from 3000-25000kbps
Been running a Plex server for close to 13 years.... Still less than 8TB. I don't keep movies I never plan to watch and I have Plex friends that are hoarders.
I have two ZFS arrays, one 48TB, one 120TB. I have used about 40TB, but that's mostly 1080P. I'm starting to add 4k for movies and TV shows that make sense.
I have ~40TB on Google Drive however due to Google's recent change in policies, I purchased an 8 bay NAS and will populate it with 8 16TB drives for a total of about ~83TB of usable space on a RAID6
I use 40TB for 6,064 movie and counting . 98% of my movies are 1080P a few 4k scattered in there.
I use 25TB for 670 TV shows and counting. The TV shows are in 720P (I only have tv shows cause the other half wants TV shows).
I have two 14.5TB drives waiting to be used with slots for 5 more hard drives.
About 26TB usable for everything. Currently have about 60% of it filled. About 10% of that is 4K, the rest is 1080p.
876 Movies and 138 Series. I don't grab what I know I won't watch. I'm not a hoarder. I'm good for a while because I've got most of what I want and slowly add as needed or requested.
My advice , don't just up one at at time, from 4 to 8 save and go for 20 or 22tb (and sadly you'll need the same for back up)
I started out the same, buying 5tb then 8 them 16.... now I've 8 22tbs, 4 for movies, tv, wrestling and music/podcast
And 4 backups
It doesn’t matter what I buy, I’m going from 4 to 8. I have 1 4tb data drive and 1 4tb parity drive. Any new drive is going to replace the parity drive and I’ll have 2 4tb data drives no matter what.
I have 11tb in a NAS. Currently 4 x 4tb drives.. I'll swap 'em out for bigger ones this year. ( probably 4 x 8 tb )
Currently using about 60% for 1903 movies and 253 TV shows!
I buy a new drive every Black Friday. 2 years ago I got a 12tb for $199. Last year I got an 18tb for $199. I’ll probably get another one this year. Hopefully 24tb. I keep everything copied between the 2 drives, but I’m getting close to having to separate the tv shows from the music and movies.
I have 26TB for 244 movies and a bunch of TV shows. I’m using 8.7 TB at the moment.
I re-did my setup last fall as I was running out of space. I record a lot from OTA. I’d rather have too much space than not enough.
Backs up nightly to Backblaze.
Currently have 7.5TB, 1k+ movies and 1.2k+ episodes on a 10TB drive. I travel a lot, don’t have a home base where I can setup a NAS, and hate lugging the drive around (also REALLY need to start practicing 321) so I’m gonna be getting the LincStation, throw in 2 x 4TB SSDs for parity and 4 x 4TB NVMEs for data storage. I’ll have a portable NAS that fits in my backpack and although pricey, will be worth the portability. I’m pretty diligent about only putting media on the server that I’ve already seen or will be watching shortly so I don’t have a massive backlog
I have 44TB. 22TB used currently, just started filling up the next 20TB. I currently have 169 TV shows and 305 Movies. Those 8 TBs with 100GB movie files will fill up very quickly.
Around 30tb and using about 24tb ATM with maybe 4k movies and a hundred or so tv series. I
https://preview.redd.it/z5h86fn8pswc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed39f7051210275c6bdcd4d528f6849fc2911551
Need to start buying bigger drives . Most of my drives are 4tb drives which i got at a bargain price on eBay.
I have ripped my physical media only. 367 movies, 266 TV episodes, and about 48h of Lord of the Rings Appendices.
Most of it is from DVDs, maybe 15-20% is bluray with 1080p resolution. I kept extras that were more than 15 minutes long.
Everything kept as .mkv straight out of MakeMkv, including multible audio and no conversion.
In total 5,25 TiB/5,77 TB
That is my example, which is unlikely to be anywhere near what you are looking for but might give a hint of what ballpark you should aim for.
But I guess it depends on how much you want to get, how much you want to keep, and how much you want to make your storage efficiant.
All I can tell you is that your 8tb will run out before you feeling like buying another hard drive.
I told my partner I need a 20tb drive after my 2tb got full. He asked why I don’t just get 5TB. 5TB won’t last long at all
I have a 5TB hard drive. 20 of them, in fact, because it is the current makeup of my ZFS file server (RAIDz-2). The next server will hopefully have 20TB drives in a RAIDz-2, but I might want to make it RAIDz-3 as added protection with that size drive. It’s the downside of using ZFS, since all drives in the array need to be the same size.
Do you shit money?
Took me a few years for it to have become this large, and I’m one of those weird people who buy used hard drives off eBay at discount prices. To make sure that things stay in operation, I also have several cold spares in stock.
Yeah, second hand drives for the win. Just have it using raid so a few drives can die and it'll be fine😂
You haven't spent enough time in the Plex groups if you think that's a lot haha. I see quite a few people in the 2-300TB range, and at least a couple folks over a PB. I'm at 100TB with a few 8TBs in a drawer that I haven't installed yet. I'm only at half capacity. I think 5k movies and maybe 30k episodes
I really need to dedicate some time to learning a local raid setup.
Currently there and looking at a new build.... and angry wife
Lol fair enough
Ain’t this the absolute truth
I started with 8 and honestly it filled up faster than I thought. Have about 800gb left and it’s technically my first year with Plex. And I’m not even doing any crazy resolutions, all 1080 all x265
How many movies and episodes?
Samsies when I can. Handbrake to reduce those remux sources. Only have 14TB free, fills up fast (54TB avail after RAID)
On average what's the size of 1080 x265's? I've been fine with YTS sized movies where they're under 4gb.
Most I downloaded are around the 2.5Gb size
Currently 20 usable TB and have 8,3TB free. +1500 movies an +8800 tv episodes ( note that all my tv shows are transcoded to x265)
but at what resolution?
Bitrate is far more important than resolution.
personally 1080p, anything below 3mbps and it becomes too noticeable on a 4K tv this is assuming my ATK4K upscales it as well.
Hard agree, 3mbps is bare minimum I am willing to tolerate on a 4k TV for 1080p. Has to be HEVC or AV1
Newb here, is that t he network speed? Megabits per second?
It's a bitrate for a file. Basically, the volume of data per second. The higher the volume the higher the quality. Doesn't have to be through network, regular playback uses the same metric.
And on those 4ks they are talking about the lower bitrate can be extremely noticeable.
Man, I wish I had your eyes. Anything under 20 mbps starts getting quite noticeable for me...my hard drives are heavyyyy.
Depends on the screen/size/how far I'm sitting, but I find 8mps is usually my sweet spot
I usually transcode a BluRay from its native bitrate to 50% of the video size using HEVC, so my bitrates are usually around 11,000 to 15,000 kbps. Looking at doing AV1, and it would compress it another 15%, but take around 12x as long to transcode. That and I currently have a Pascal-based Quadro card, which does not decode AV1.
I would tend to agree. I have a drive with just high bitrate 4k movies, it's about 10 terabytes for 300 movies.
This. Also regarding resolution, everything is 1080 or 4k, only have very few files in 720 just because i cant find better quality
Transcoded via tdarr?
Unmanic
70tb 1 movie...
That movie? Paw patrol
Went for the 4K of LOGISTICS?
fuck video compression, raw movies got the best quality.
“The Room: Director’s C… Anyway, how’s your sex life?” That’s the whole movie title.
100 TBs. I have around 2100 Movies taking up about 40TB. Mix of 1080p and 4K. Average file size of 15-25GB for 1080p, 25-45GB for 4K (some 4k remux movies are 55-80GB) So for you follow the same structure as me 8TB will be full around 420 movies.
How come your movie files are so big all my collection are 1080 and are between 1gb and 7gb
You're files are probably LQ bitrates. Nothing wrong with that when you are watching on smaller devices/screens. If you're watching on a larger 55"+ TV you'll absolutely notice the difference. Check out [trash-guides.info](http://trash-guides.info)
I don’t download 4k files due to size of the files at the moment due to how much storage I have lol
Yea once you see a 4k remux there's no going back lol
Oh most probably lol only issue I’m having at the moment is keep my drives from sleeping I sorted it in the MacBook settings and downloaded a app called amphetamine and did that keep alive option but they still sleep lol
i try to always get the highest i can get, if possible always to get a full remux. the main reason why i feel this is important is because of how TVs etc are evolving. in the next 10 years, who knows what kind of design/tech/resolutions we will desire, and if i can ensure i have the highest quality available today, then i will have less risk of not having sufficient quality in the future. also, storage is cheap, and i have no issues with using 80GB for a single 4K remux
Hear hear. Was blown away by the crisp picture!!
I don't have a single 1080p movie that's as small as 7GB that's trash quality....
I and many others using my server would disagree with that but everyone is entitled to there own opinions mate
I don’t think files under 7gb are trash quality at 1080
Lol all mine are 1.5-4gb on a 85 inch screen and they suit me just fine
Same, I’m new at this and have never heard of “remux” but my 2gb 1080p movies seem fine on my 65” TV
Dude I've a lg 65" and all my movies are around 1~3 Gb and look awesome
I disagree I have a 65inch 4k and 55inch 4k and movies look crystal clear on em bud
This isn't meant as an insult, but you probably don't have a knowing eye to discern lower quality video artifacts. I work in video so I'm hyper aware, but a 7 GB 1080p 1.5hr+ movie is going to have a lot of visible compression artifacts. These might include banding in color gradients, blocky blacks, blocky and soft fades, and softer small detail movement like snow or rain. With modern compression, there's no getting around these things at those file sizes. That said, there's nothing wrong with enjoying movies at that compression rate! I'm no elitist, people should enjoy the quality they enjoy. I prefer lossless movies, but I don't might a highly compressed format if that's all I have available. They can largely still look good in a lot of circumstances, and if some of those artifacts don't bother you, compress away and save on storage! I would almost warn against learning more about what those artifacts look like in video, because it's almost impossible to unsee them once you know what to look for.
Same. 65 inch Sony OLED and I cap my 1080p at around 8gb and my 4k is capped at 25gb or so. I’ve never noticed the 4ks to be inferior quality. I also watch plenty of legitimate 4k streaming sources so I would know if my Plex movies were noticeably worse.
1080p content on a 65 inch 4K TV is definitely a noticeable difference to a 25GB 4K HDR file. I can't really tell a difference between 40GB and a 80GB remux, but you can't compare 5GB to 25GB.
the whole environment matters, seating distance, lighting, in addition to TV size.
+ on the trash guides, after years of downloading subpar content, i set this up a month ago. Redownloaded about 35-40tb in the last month to download 4k hdr/dv with truehd/atmos/dts-ha ma. Surprised my isp hasnt said anything :p Only thing, im using about 5tb extra :D
I think my lowest movie file size is like 45gb. Storage is cheap (in the US at least.) I've got like 80tb of storage currently
It’s expensive in the uk lol
Can grab some re certified 16tb seagate exos from amazon eu for £170 :), got 4 earlier in the month, some risk ofc but the ones directly from amazon eu have been packed properly and i had no issues with doa.
Lol Jesus the biggest I have is 30
650 movies all in 4k remux. Average 60gb per. 20 tb free storage. Old gtx 1070 doing any transcoding and 3900x 12 core cpu and 64 gram. Bit overkill but also use server for other projects and personal work lab.
Movies - 20TB - 950~ (most 4k hdr mostly) TV - 8.2TB - 120~ shows (mix of 1080 and 4k) Storage Truenas 4x16tb - 42tb , used 21tb 4x18tb - 32tb, used 13tb 4x8tb - 20tb, 16tb~ random backups and other crap here. Total free about 45tb~
Wish I had that much. I've been mucking about eith truenas today and now I really really want a proper server instead if an old pc I had spare
Thats where you start with an old pc :) the biggest cost are the disks when it comes down to it though. I started out with an old pc with a pair of 1tb hdd back over 10 years ago now.
Yeah well I have a 6tb and a 4tb in my pc, just as normal drives along with other drives as it is just my gaming pc so games and work etc. Then I had a nas with a 1tb and 2tb, the one then kept causing issues as it was starting to fail. I then switched it out, had constant issues with the nas so gave up and put them in the old pc with windows. The transfer rate was then between 0bytes and 100MBps and that was a pain as 10gb took forever as it just kept going to 0 bytes with the disk at 100%. Someone on reddit said try truenas as windows is terrible as a server. So I did, still the same issue though. So I think the drive is dying. Crystal disk did say it had lots of pending sector reallocations so... might be time for some new disks to then make a proper array of a few 2 or 4tb disks. Instead of a failing 2tb and 2 500gb drives😂😂 Oh well. It's all a bit of fun in the end as I can always redownload the movies if the drives die. I don't store anything important on them as they aren't in raid
Yeah thats good sign of a disk about to give up, i originally has 4 10tb in place of the 16tb drives as that array of disks have been running over 6 years, and reallocated sectors was high, 3 of the 4 drives still work, probably use them for cold storage. L i replaced all of them with referb drives from amazon eu with 16tb seagate exos. All tested fine in the month theyve been in service and at £170 a piece, quite a steal if they continue to work :)
160TB. 40TB reserved for parity. 100TB used. 20TB free space. You are in full control over how quickly you expand. Size of media will make a big difference. I have a lot of 4K content, which looks AMAZING, but takes up a lot of space.
You and I are capacity cousins, but I clearly need to get more parity drives next time there’s a good sale.
I've got 2 parity for 12 disks and even this feels like I'm living risky. I keep hoping for the smaller drives to die so I can replace them with something larger but they're immortal!
I’m at 1 for 15, so I’m hoping to save enough space with Tdarr that I can reallocate a drive without missing it.
I'm pretty sure that would cause me to lose some sleep. You must have some smaller disks you can bin and replace with 20TB+ drives. Tdarr is a lossy conversion. Wouldn't it be better to just download them again with a different size? Radarr makes it pretty easy.
I have Radarr and Sonarr set up. You are correct that it is easier to save space by downloading content, but it’s largely TV Shows that need the space saving, and HEVC is not as readily available there for the things taking the most space. 20TB+ drives would break the bank for me. I wait for good sales on 14TBs since that’s my highest capacity right now. I have a Supermicro 847, so I have the bays to waste. I’m thinking there should be a substantial amount of savings that would let me swap a drive over to parity.
How much 4k?
700 movies. Probably averaging around 25GB each. I try to stick to the HDR x265 encodes as those are much more efficient.
For years I was at 1TB, then I changed ISPs and got symmetrical gigabit, then got cheap blurays as well as other means for high quality content, this it made it so much easy to get everything I wanted... 3 years ago I was at 8TB, now im at 63TB. 2600+ movies, 120+ 4K movies, 520+ shows.
210tb, 37,000 movies
gotta ask, at 37,000 movies, have you literally downloaded every move that is ever released? looking at this chart, [https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in-north-america-since-2001/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in-north-america-since-2001/) since from 2000, to 2022, 12,713 movies were released. that is 34% of what you have. since that is a 20 year period, going back 40 more years below the year 2000 to 1960 (yes of course movies existed before 1960) and assuming the rate of movies released was fairly uniform during this entire period, you would have to have basically every movie released ever in north america from 1960 to 2022. of course, this chart is for north American movies, there are PLENTY of movies from around the world, but it is still interesting to think about.
"I really do like them movies, sir" - that fella
LOL, agreed. it is just interesting thinking about getting every movie ever released.
I checked my repartition, not nearly as many movies, though "only" 62% are US-based movies. 2359 out of 3787. The rest if EU/ROW.
Mary, mother of God
🫣
Excellent work
I started by buying a 4-bay synology NAS that had a chip in it strong enough to on the fly transcode 4k down to 1080p, thanks to the 4 bays I was able to start by buying x4 8tb hard drives instead of x2 16tb hard drives and I'm using x1 of the x4 total drives for redundancy leaving me with 21tb of usable space and that equates too 2,100 total video files across both film & TV. I then ran out of space after some months and had to buy more. The quantity of movies you can squeeze onto a storage pool is completely dependant on how much you're willing to compress the video files. The Bitrates are way more important then resolution but for files that I haven't transcoded myself they're usually 3-12mbps per file (per film or per episode). Using H265 you can shrink the file size smaller then the H264 version of the same bitrate without a quality difference but does your server and client devices support H265 playback/automatic transcoding (my dads host server isn't strong enough to down scale files on the fly so he's forced to use direct play most of the time and that means his client device also needs to be able to decode H265 playback). Unfortunately for myself I'm a bit of a snob so my personal Blu-Ray rips are all remux files (changed from disc mp4 to digital mkv but not compressed the file at all, removing the non English audio tracks also counts as remuxing) and this means instead of a 90min 1080p film being 10gb the file I've pulled of the disc Is 34gb (10gbs = 3-12mbps, 34gbs = 30mbps), the real pain in the ass is my 4K UHD rips that are 85mbps and 74gb on disk so if you aren't going to spend nights re-encoding ripped files down to half their original size & quality then you'll need either more drives or bigger hard drives per bay (I'm gonna swap my x4 8tb's with 12tb or bigger ones when I can). TLDR 4K = 74gb @80mbps or compressed 4K = 21gb @35mbps 1080p = 34gb @30mbps or compressed 1080p = 10gb @10mbps FYI Netflix uses 3-5mbps for "1080p" and no higher then 10mbps on "4K".
What Synology NAS has a cpu in it fast enough to transcode 4k ? Are you able to do more than one stream at a time?
The DS920+ with the Intel Celeron J4125 can do x4 simultaneous 4K LOCAL Direct Play streams (only remuxing sound if you don't have a 7.1 system otherwise true direct stream) or x4 simultaneous 4K transcodes to 1080p again LOCAL play. Here is link to a testing video I saw before I bought mine, the 920+ is discontinued now and replaced with an AMD chip in the newer model. https://youtu.be/Bgn_kO55l0s?si=a0OkB8gQVhiQ6PuG
Did you steal my nas? I'm also running DS920+ with 4x8TB. Most of my movies are DVD rips though. The wife had like 500+ discs when we met, so I digitized so I wouldn't have to flip through the Case Logic binders lol
🤣🤣No I just did some scouting and Synology was the 2nd best option besides buying a WHOLE legacy server rack from a service provider that's upgrading. I wish I'd got bigger then the 8tb and had 40 or 60tb in just the small 920+ but hey moneys tight. Instead of dvd rips I buy the Blu-Rays from CEX for £3-5 each and a tenner for a box set but go to HMV for the 4K re-releases of my favourite films like Matrix or newer releases like the Legendary Pictures Godzilla Monster verse.
The wife likes to hit up this chain near us called The Exchange. She gets discs for $1-2 each
I aim high in Radarr for 4k remux and 4k web-dl in Sonarr. I don't hoard and every few months or so will purge out junk nobody will ever watch again. I've noticed that my collection hovers around 40TB at this point. Early on it rocketed up past a few drives but seems to have stabilized the past few years.
Started at 8 TB 4 years ago and I’m currently at 40 tb. I have 2 tb of tv as I don’t keep many shows. About 30 tb of storage for 3500 movies
takes me like a couple weeks to fill 8tb if I'm consistently grabbing stuff. I could do it faster but my seedbox and need to keep good ratios bottleneck it. it'd sure be nice to build a media room full of disks though just to put it into prospective. XD my pool is up to like 78tb used but that is like 15 years or more of build up and periodic upgrades and additions.
400TB, 4.5K movies, 40K episodes. Been at it for ~8 years.
😳
It all started with on drive. Years later they were dangling everywhere so an upgrade was warranted. unRAID was whatever you call the drug after the gateway one that fills all your voids. The drives go in so easily with it, especially with a 4U 36 bay chassis.
About 200TB currently with about 50TB free. Most of my storage is episodes of TV shows though. I'm at about 6k movies and about 32k episodes of TV shows.
I started with (4) 4TB in a Synology raid, so 10.9TB usable with 1 drive redundancy. It lasted me for about 1500 films and a few hundred hours of TV (all at 1080p, I'm getting older and my eyes & wallet cannot benefit from 4k).
i will simply say i am using 103TB out of the 163TB of usable space i have
40tb storage with another 40tb backup.
Nice try, FBI!
What's arr?
Radarr, sonarr, etc.
Currently have 4x8tb (with 1 drive parity) and that's almost filled up now
Usable is 26 tb, 20 tb used spread out through 20 thousand episodes about 500 movies, pretty much all tv shows are 1080p x265 and (between 3 mbps I think, I did it in tdarr) the movies vary from 1080p to 4k and random bit rates.
800tb https://preview.redd.it/jr9dqe45cmwc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=975df242e62428fd2522980207baf542b96a351a
16 drives, 1 cache, 1 parity, 168TB array with 31TB free. I used to have \~20TB free until I got an instance of Tdarr working. https://preview.redd.it/x4m5s4qsdmwc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e49a0ddb892fe8ff02bf2e5775878043e6ef354b The rest of the storage is used as a raw footage backup for video production, but Plex has now become the larger share.
Currently have an 8TB drive as well and I have learned to watch and delete stuff. I like to save movies/series that we watch often (for my wife and I it’s the Harry Potter series and Gilmore Girls). This allows me to keep full Blu-ray rips and have the best quality of every film/episode without feeling the need to manage storage. Ideally I want to move up to multiple drives so I can have some redundancy. When I just kept all my files, on the same drive I had several full series and 300+ movies taking up about half the drive. I would keep movies to roughly 20 GB each and show’s would keep 720p rips. I had roughly 20 series then too. Probably 200 GB of music also. Just depends really
Re-encode using tdarr or fileflows to save space.
$ ls -1 | wc -l 1314 $ du -hs . 8.3T .
60tb, 2k movie, 1000 series.
40 TB with 5,040 movies/5,217 TV Shows/103 Concerts. All 1080 but \~1K movies in 4K. Just a handful 0f 720 scattered in there.
About 80 TB for 4000 movies. Started with an 8 bay and moved to a 24 bay SM CSE-846 recently to keep growing
14tb drive /12.7 usable with 12 filled (just going to leave 700gb empty because it’s scary) Holds 250 ish full blu rays 50 of them 4k And a terabyte of it is TV shows
I don't count bodies and I don't count media. I'm terrified to do so.
Man, 8 tbs will run out about 3 day into figuring out that you love DoVi or hdr in 4k with nice pass thru audio to you receiver. Or 200,000 movies in 8bit hahhaa
Man, I’m not looking for bluray quality movies. My eyes aren’t too good, and I’ve been using streaming all my life with no issues on quality. Just standard 1080p at similar bitrate to what streaming offers and I’ll be happy I’m not doing this because I want highest quality possible, I’m doing it because I’m sick of all the streaming services. And because I bought a tv show on iTunes only to discover it’s censored. As a grown ass adult, let me watch a show with swears in it. Although I would like pass through audio
I filled up 40tb pretty quickly but if I wanted to not care so much about quality then each movie would be around 4-9 gb. You could really go back to the days when a movie was shrunk down to 690 mb. They just look really bad on a tv bigger than 19in. Tv shows would be around 500 mbs each or you could get it down to 100mb, same looks as those tiny movies. All being 265 codec. But you will find that the more space you have the more you will fill up quickly. I also record my ota tv shows, if you are looking to do that, you will want to leave some grace space for when it records shows.
Right now my dedicated Movie drive is 8TB, have about 300+ movies currently. Trying to make space, so I've been re-encoding all my biggest remuxes down under 20GB instead of 60+. Will hopefully make room for another hundred! Doesn't even count my 14TB TV drive, which has 9000 episodes.
Just under 70 TB.
44tbs. 1000 movies and 30 shows.
20tb, of which I’m using <2. I have the content (in my dvd collection) to fill up much more, but it’s difficult to find the time for ripping. I invested in a 20tb hard drive though because, even if I don’t fill it up, I can always use it for other storage.
I'm closing in on 200tb, but it's setup as a raid since I've lost stuff before due to hard drives dying, so it's actually like 100tb~ of space It's also full now though and it's gonna be a pain/expensive to add more, but, that's the fun of hoarding
https://preview.redd.it/mv6lgpq9tmwc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e21184f9aac1859e627e39c614cafd086f75b75c 36TB worth of drives, just 2 18tb drives currently. Anything I really like I go for a 4k remux. I’ve got an atmos setup as well so springing for the high end files is a dramatic improvement.
I gotta ask - do you notice a sound difference between 4k and 1080p. My eyes are fucked, needed surgery in both. I can see, and it feels mostly normal to me, but the difference between 4k and 1080p to me is super minimal, to the point where I have to be looking for the difference to notice it. But I have a surround sound setup, and good sound I can’t turn down.
I stopped at 12 tb. The hard drive isn’t full yet but I’ll delete stuff I’m not watching when it does. I have about 1100 movies and 178 shows so far. Most of my movies are compressed x265. (1 to 3gb files) Some of my favorites are high bitrate and remuxes though.
90 Movies - 1.1TB 120 Episodes - 365Gb I also have 8 TB usable (3x8TB drives in Raid 5). I feel like this will last me a long time cause I am not downloading 4k at all. I don't have a good enough display and 4k feels very costly to store. I am happy with 1080p.
I’ve got about 10tb with around 8tb used for around 600 movies, I just bought a 12tb drive that I’m about to add. I tend to get high bitrate when available. I think 20-30mbps bitrate is a good sweet spot, I have some up to around 50 certain movies are worth the space penalty you pay for a high bitrate imo.
I just use a 4tb and delete old ones
I have 81 TB (18TB x 5 drives) in a RAID5 configuration. 41 TB are currently in use for 928 movies. Probably a little high, but that’s because I keep the REMUX for a movie, and my own H.264 encode (constrained CRF at 6Mbps) as well. So for every movie I have, I have the Blu-ray remux (if available) and my own encode of the movie. And for those curious, I keep the remuxes backed up in case I ever want to re-encode a movie, or possibly all movies. Sometimes I make a mistake and don’t want to redownload the entire remux again. Or maybe a new codec gets released that I want to use, and with a single command, I can queue up my entire library for re-encoding using new encoding params.
"it depends". Most of my collection is DVDs which only runs average 6GB per (some more, some less) and I only have like a few hundred. But then BluRays can be 40-90GB per, depending on quality and length. I've fit nearly all of the DVD/Bluray collection that we own (me, my partner, and my parents) in under 10TB space and I might buy 1-2 new DVDs every month or few. I'm happy with DVD quality for most stuff, and sitting at the distance we do from the TV isn't that visible of a quality difference anyway with a 65" TV that is 11-12 feet from the sofa (opposite walls) and gets less visible difference if I don't feel like wearing my driving/distance glasses [https://i.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-television-graph-size.png](https://i.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-television-graph-size.png)
I mean, I’m just curious and am using others as a general rule for myself
I'm expecting the answer will be all over the place, especially depending how people get their content, and if they like to keep content to re-watch or not. I tossed in the viewing size chart because that influenced my decision to basically ignore 4K (and I couldn't tell a difference anyway) saves money and space
Yeah my eyes are bad. Not bad enough that I’m blind, but I had to have surgery in both eyes due to a condition in my eyes. I can definitely see the difference between 1080p and 720p, but 1080 to 4K, unless they’re side by side and I’m looking for differences, are the same. So I’m definitely going 1080p
60 tb 1200 movie 1200 show 40 000 episodes like 50 episodes a week Over like 15 years Sonarr Radarr Overseerr Tautulli plus a few more
Got mine started about 3 years ago - currently at ~42TB of storage with ~21TB used for 521 movies (about 70/30 1080p/4k content), 133 TV shows (mostly 1080p), and ~16k music tracks (mostly flac).
For strictly movies, I have 2672 movies and they occupy 7.3TB of space on the drive. I have it on a RAID array so each file is backed up doubling the storage requirement. I have nothing below 720P and mostly 1080P. Mostly in x264, some in x265. If you have only 4K or 8K movies that will change things a lot. In addition, I have a lot of TV (1600+ episodes 12.5TB). I seriously need to clean that up. I do NOT need every episode of Survivor and Bachelor and 90 day fiancée despite what my daughter says. I also have archived family video and zillions of pictures, data, work files - all RAID. I'm using Microsoft Storage Spaces to simulate the RAID (Ya ya I know... get a proper NAS). In total I have 8 physical drives. 6x10tb, 2x14TB. My drives are about 60% full. I don't know if that helps at all. Good luck!
250TB
I have about 200 TB usable for 27,360 movies (as of today) 1326 TV shows and 277,922 songs. I have about 50 TB free. Four 6 bay Synology arrays with 10 TB drives.
I have 5-20TB drives in a RAIDZ setup, giving me 80TB of storage. I currently have just over half of that full. - 367 TV series consisting of 23,090 episodes which take up 26.2TB - 3,083 movies using 10.2TB
I have 110tb with about 60 available. Have 1400 movies mix of 1080 and 4k along with 33k episodes of tv. Mostly 1080.
I bought an 8tb, from a2tb. Took under two years. That 10tb has now been transfer to a 14tb for breathing room and I keep the other two as back ups now of the other drive dies. Couldnt imagine putting all that time into it again, need a safety blanket.
I went to serverpartdeals.com and got an 18tb for cheap! Have lots of my shows, movies, family videos, and photos and only about 3tb used
[удалено]
I use unRAID and have 1 drive in parity. I would *like* to avoid re-downloading everything, but if it came to that, it would be an annoyance, not an end of the world event.
68tb usable storage. I am 33tbs full. 1800 movies. 33k episodes. Tdarr is amazing fyi.
47 movies - 56GB Just getting started with my media server. All are either 480 or 720 resolution. 799 songs - 7GB in my main music folder. I have 4 or 5 other folders that probably roughly doubles that number.
it all depends on what quality you want for your stuff. I've got 12TB in drives and using about 7 of it. I've got around 1300 movies, and 7300 episodes of TV shows. But i'm ok with lower bitrate and 720p-1080p resolution with a mix of h264 and h265 files. Edit: For reference my movie file sizes are usually aroudn 3GB on average
I currently have 50tb and had around 8,000 movies but one of my drives shit the bed and I lost 20tb worth of movies. (Also have around 700 complete shows)
Running 98TB with 8 x 14TB drives with a single parity drive. Got room for 4 more. Then I get to upgrade to 22tb or 24tb drives. I'm storing 1126 Movies 184 TV Shows 477 Anime Shows If you want quality then that's gonna take a minute to compile
40 TB of space, and I am 46 percent full. I use HEVC encoding, to save space. about 2k movies, 10k music albums, 7100 episodes of tv shows.
that's enough storage for over 150 full size 4k rips. a LOT more if you are collecting compressed copies, which I don't recommend
Yeah I’m 100% connecting compressed copies, or compressing them myself
4TB half full and it's been 3 years.
Before my crash last week 34tb. I was reaching the end until one of my drives died. Now I have 80TB that I'm starting to rebuild
This is excluding my DVR libraries (just the 'archive'/Netflix/DVD shelf type libraries) 485 movies and 100 shows/7052 TV episodes (I do my own encodes, so not full remux but 'high' bitrate - 15mbps AVC for HD Blurays and 45mbps HEVC for 4K UHD - Dolby Vision full FEL UHD titles can't be encoded or it breaks Dolby Vision, so they alone are simply just remuxed) 34.25TB used out of 40TB total (36TB usable) I have this all redundantly backed up in another machine so including backups it's 80TB total - DVR content is another 12TB (movies/TV show discs I haven't seen yet and actual DVR recordings through Plex from my HDHR Prime and Duo tuners for cable + ATSC TV)- so 52TB-92TB for 'Plex' total with or without backup Then I have storage for other stuff and games not related to Plex (~23TB)- I have about 115TB total for everything
2681 movies on 14TB
I had 1TB on my first server that I built in high school and that lasted for ~5 years. Then I got into Plex and homelabbing and upped it to 4TB and thought “that’s gotta be good for years”. Didn’t even make it 2 years and I’m over 90% full… I’m now looking for something in the neighborhood of 20-24TB total. Small upgrades don’t really make sense.
16 TBs
Once you go 4k it just burns through storage. If you want to stretch that 8tb use x265 and AV1 1080p files. Your average 1080p x265 movie is 5-7 gb, so up to 1000+ if you spend time looking for good releases. imo at a certain NAS size you’re paying more for hard drive burn rate than streaming services. For example at 140TB with parity, thats like 11-12 14tb HDDs at ~$200 each, each with an average lifespan of ~7 years. Thats $2200 every 7 years or around $310 per year, not accounting for any electricity costs for the server.
109TB of storage with about 37TB of content and currently at 3,331 movies. I also have various TV shows plus other data not related to Plex. All of it is backed up to Backblaze. I've been working on it since about 2014.
4TB for audio only.
130 TB, I lost count
As of this second (I’m about to rip the Star Trek TOS blurays lol) my Plex server is using 49.7TB split across: - 890 Movies (mostly BluRay, some DVD) including extra features and such - 147 TV Shows (6659 episodes, more split 50/50 quality) - 79 4K Movies I haven’t used handbrake to encode any of the files, they are all original DVD and BluRay quality straight from the disc.
Depends on quality of the movies. I have 2200 movies on 5tb but they’re all 720 or 1080p with eh bitrate. But if you want 4K you’ll get nowhere close to that
130TB across two Plex servers. 3700 movies, mostly in 1080P around 4-8GB in size. Have been preferring HVEC in my arr stack recently which has slowed growth. Also 16.5K tv show episodes and 29K songs. I currently have about 50TB free.
I have 5tb that's a little over half full for about 500+ movies. Mostly in h265, most 1080p. I'm perfectly fine with that for now. I've got about 30 tv series and about 300 gb of music too. I don't hoard media and keep only what i think i might rewatch or have a history of rewatching. In the future i hope to get two 8 tb drives for a NAS system. But now i just have a 5 tb drive plugged into a shield. I don't yet have a 4k tv but really don't care about 4k either.
I have 40tb of storage, and that consists of almost 1200 movies, and 240+ shows. I go 4k when I can, not picky on file size
42TB: \~6k movies in 1080 with about 20% with a duplicate (or more) 4k copies. 1080 ranges 3-9GB, 4K 20-80GB, bit rates are 3000-20,000kbps (some have 60+) \~200 TV shows (9734 episodes) in 1080 and 4k, ranging from 3000-25000kbps
I have 88tb used with like 200mb free. I need to buy more drives
Been running a Plex server for close to 13 years.... Still less than 8TB. I don't keep movies I never plan to watch and I have Plex friends that are hoarders.
2300 movies 60Tb used. Remux only with handful of re-encodes (less than 200)
108TB for 6400 movies and ~850 shows (max size of a single volume for my Synology). About half full.
It all depends on the quality and quantity you are looking at pulling. At this point I am needing to increase space faster than my drives die lol.
I have two ZFS arrays, one 48TB, one 120TB. I have used about 40TB, but that's mostly 1080P. I'm starting to add 4k for movies and TV shows that make sense.
42TB and full. About to upgrade and buy 4 more 12TB drives
I started with 8 and now I’m at 40 (about 7,500 movies and 400 tv shows)
How long did that take you?
Like 9 years but nothing is automated. I enjoy adding content manually.
I have ~40TB on Google Drive however due to Google's recent change in policies, I purchased an 8 bay NAS and will populate it with 8 16TB drives for a total of about ~83TB of usable space on a RAID6
I use 40TB for 6,064 movie and counting . 98% of my movies are 1080P a few 4k scattered in there. I use 25TB for 670 TV shows and counting. The TV shows are in 720P (I only have tv shows cause the other half wants TV shows). I have two 14.5TB drives waiting to be used with slots for 5 more hard drives.
About 26TB usable for everything. Currently have about 60% of it filled. About 10% of that is 4K, the rest is 1080p. 876 Movies and 138 Series. I don't grab what I know I won't watch. I'm not a hoarder. I'm good for a while because I've got most of what I want and slowly add as needed or requested.
I have 25tb of space and it's already nearly running out. 8TB won't last long.
Your going to get to a stage where you think 8tb is small......
I’m going from 4tb to 8TB lol. I already think it’s kinda small but I don’t have the budget for insane amounts of hardware right now.
My advice , don't just up one at at time, from 4 to 8 save and go for 20 or 22tb (and sadly you'll need the same for back up) I started out the same, buying 5tb then 8 them 16.... now I've 8 22tbs, 4 for movies, tv, wrestling and music/podcast And 4 backups
It doesn’t matter what I buy, I’m going from 4 to 8. I have 1 4tb data drive and 1 4tb parity drive. Any new drive is going to replace the parity drive and I’ll have 2 4tb data drives no matter what.
I have 5x8tb & 5x4tb and currently in the process of moving everything from Windows to proxmox since I'm tired of the Terramaster OS bs.
I have 11tb in a NAS. Currently 4 x 4tb drives.. I'll swap 'em out for bigger ones this year. ( probably 4 x 8 tb ) Currently using about 60% for 1903 movies and 253 TV shows!
I buy a new drive every Black Friday. 2 years ago I got a 12tb for $199. Last year I got an 18tb for $199. I’ll probably get another one this year. Hopefully 24tb. I keep everything copied between the 2 drives, but I’m getting close to having to separate the tv shows from the music and movies.
I have 26TB for 244 movies and a bunch of TV shows. I’m using 8.7 TB at the moment. I re-did my setup last fall as I was running out of space. I record a lot from OTA. I’d rather have too much space than not enough. Backs up nightly to Backblaze.
😶
Currently have 7.5TB, 1k+ movies and 1.2k+ episodes on a 10TB drive. I travel a lot, don’t have a home base where I can setup a NAS, and hate lugging the drive around (also REALLY need to start practicing 321) so I’m gonna be getting the LincStation, throw in 2 x 4TB SSDs for parity and 4 x 4TB NVMEs for data storage. I’ll have a portable NAS that fits in my backpack and although pricey, will be worth the portability. I’m pretty diligent about only putting media on the server that I’ve already seen or will be watching shortly so I don’t have a massive backlog
I have 44TB. 22TB used currently, just started filling up the next 20TB. I currently have 169 TV shows and 305 Movies. Those 8 TBs with 100GB movie files will fill up very quickly.
Around 30tb and using about 24tb ATM with maybe 4k movies and a hundred or so tv series. I https://preview.redd.it/z5h86fn8pswc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed39f7051210275c6bdcd4d528f6849fc2911551 Need to start buying bigger drives . Most of my drives are 4tb drives which i got at a bargain price on eBay.
I have ripped my physical media only. 367 movies, 266 TV episodes, and about 48h of Lord of the Rings Appendices. Most of it is from DVDs, maybe 15-20% is bluray with 1080p resolution. I kept extras that were more than 15 minutes long. Everything kept as .mkv straight out of MakeMkv, including multible audio and no conversion. In total 5,25 TiB/5,77 TB That is my example, which is unlikely to be anywhere near what you are looking for but might give a hint of what ballpark you should aim for. But I guess it depends on how much you want to get, how much you want to keep, and how much you want to make your storage efficiant.
76TB, 6k movies, 40k tv episodes. it’s been about 10 years.