I've seen people create their own streaming site. Basically you set up a server at home with terabytes of all the shows/movies you want, and then just log in remotely. Now you can use that to watch all of your content ad free from anywhere.
If I was ever going to go some route, that would be it. I've done the whole stacks and stacks of CD's back in the day, never again.
I had the computer (an 10+ year-old HP Z210 workstation with a 4-core Xeon and 8GB ECC RAM) already. Ebay says they're on the order of $100-$150. It's a workstation-grade system, so it's all server components in a tower form factor which is nice.
It's running TrueNAS Scale, which is free. ZFS has some really nice features, which is why I went with it. Downside is ZFS shits the bed performance-wise if you go above 80% capacity. You start to get alerts if you go over 70% capacity.
Drives are 5x 14TB factory refurbs in a RAIDZ2 (ZFS equivalent to a RAID-6, so 2 drives can fail) configuration. Paid about $130/ea which varies depending on supply, so ~$700 including shipping. 14TB was about the sweet spot for price/size when I built the thing.
The drives run on the warm side, especially the one at the top of the tower. It probably would have been smart to put the drives in a caddy with a big fan.
Performance-wise it's limited by my gigabit ethernet household LAN. It probably could keep up with a 2.5 gig connection.
I've seen people create their own streaming site. Basically you set up a server at home with terabytes of all the shows/movies you want, and then just log in remotely. Now you can use that to watch all of your content ad free from anywhere.
If I was ever going to go some route, that would be it. I've done the whole stacks and stacks of CD's back in the day, never again.
That's what I do. I have a 42 TB NAS that I put everything on with a bunch of Kodi instances connected to it and a central SQL database.
Works pretty much exactly like a streaming site would except the video quality is much higher since most of my movies are just raw disc rips.
How much does that cost? Including disks, server/array, redundancy, everything.
I had the computer (an 10+ year-old HP Z210 workstation with a 4-core Xeon and 8GB ECC RAM) already. Ebay says they're on the order of $100-$150. It's a workstation-grade system, so it's all server components in a tower form factor which is nice.
It's running TrueNAS Scale, which is free. ZFS has some really nice features, which is why I went with it. Downside is ZFS shits the bed performance-wise if you go above 80% capacity. You start to get alerts if you go over 70% capacity.
Drives are 5x 14TB factory refurbs in a RAIDZ2 (ZFS equivalent to a RAID-6, so 2 drives can fail) configuration. Paid about $130/ea which varies depending on supply, so ~$700 including shipping. 14TB was about the sweet spot for price/size when I built the thing.
The drives run on the warm side, especially the one at the top of the tower. It probably would have been smart to put the drives in a caddy with a big fan.
Performance-wise it's limited by my gigabit ethernet household LAN. It probably could keep up with a 2.5 gig connection.
/u/KeeperOfTheGate
Damn, I had no idea how cheap 12tb drives were. That's amazing.