Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I'll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10's of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

I can see both sides though. There's certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume--and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I'm not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.

I've almost entirely ditched streaming because of my library. I like to think I've learned how to encode media at a quality better than most services stream. Only service I still subscribe to is crunchyroll. I also run a plex server and share access with my family, so it's got its uses. Its not just me watching all of it. But I'm probably adding around 5 movies/tv shows to my server almost every day. The threat of ever dwindling disk space looms large.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

exos are fine if you don't mind them being loud as hell.

They're not really meant for desktop use, so not really an issue. Also don't keep your servers under your bed, the ventilation is quite bad.

I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.

Backs up anything "really important" to cloud storage

Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.

Same here. I initially had high hopes that my family would take advantage, but apparently my parents would rather bug my siblings monthly for their Hulu/Netflix/Max/Disney+/Prime logins than install Plex or Jellyfin lol.

I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.

It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.

No thanks. I'd rather have 4TB SSDs that cost $100. We were getting close to that in 2023, but then the memory manufacturers decided to collude and jacked up prices.

I thought prices seemed to be taking a while come down on 4TB SSDs as I had been looking at them for a while.

Don't really want it enough to spend £200 though. Would be to replace a 1+2TB HDD LVM. Now that I think about it, I have never copied a few TBs of data in one go.

Yes, if you have money to burn, sure. I'll go with the financially better approach.

one day you will get to move out and then you can build any kind of server you want

I've been moved out for 25 years

I just hoped that my family would take advantage of me offering up my server for them to stream from.

i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.

honestly though. I kinda dislike that a 40 or 50tb mechanical drive is even a thing. What we really need is larger, more affordable solid state drives. Mechanical drives have had their place, but their limits are fairly clear at this point. And your point about rebuilding an array makes that obvious. They are just too slow. This move by seagate to make ridiculously large mechanical drives, should not be the beginning, as this article suggests. It should really be the end.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

i don't mind that, if it means that lower capacity drives will get cheaper