Hard Drive Prices

[BrianDW]

As we all know, storing our MAKE MKV files consumes a lot of space.

Hard drives (external or internsl, ssd or hdd) are skyrocketing in price.

Luckily I bought several 22 tb drives before the current pricing crisis, but they won't last forever.

Has anyone come up with a way to deal with exponentially rising hard drive prices?

[HomerJay]

I’ve just gone through the process of converting all my Blu-ray rips (HD) to HEVC. That’s a video codec that’s about twice as efficient as AVC, VC-1 and MPEG video used on blu-ray. So theoretically half the disc space for same video quality.

I saved over 20TB of NAS storage. I kept original audio so no space spacing there (I want lossless audio), I was also a little conservative on the video settings, encoding HEVC video to approx 60% of the original bitrates.

I ended up writing some code to set the encoder settings based on each rip’s bitrate and ran the conversions on two PCs with NVidia GPUs using hardware encoding, About 20 minutes per 2hr movie/concert. Shorter for TV episodes.

[Hittsy]

After an initial investment for my plex server, I've just started budgeting it into my film and TV show purchases.

A 4k film takes up about 80GB, or ~1/10 of a TB. Assuming a price of around $10/TB, I put $2 into my piggybank per film. Of course, with drives costing $15/TB, I need to adjust some figures...

[GeorgeMech]

I suspect the forces driving unprecedented demand will hit a wall economically sometime in the next 2 years, cratering prices for RAM, storage, and there will be a glut of absurdly capable GPUs flooding the market. Even if AI is broadly useful at some point, I don’t see how OpenAI survives financially, and if OpenAI fails there will be industry contagion due to the economic and organizational tendrils they have in each other.

[kaysee]

Possibly, but what is more predictable is the ability for supply to catch up with the spike in demand.

[Y_Wrench]

It’s a far less than ideal scenario, but I would consider burning to Blu-Ray discs (with the cost of an extra drive just for burning factored in) for some things if I fill the spare 26 & 28 tb drives I bought in November.

[PixelPerfect]

The bubble is already looking unstable, RAM prices seem to have started dropping already, granted not nearly to reasonable levels. I'm just getting started with MakeMKV, and all this, but I'm keeping an eye out for these new HDDs western digital is working on, seems like an ideal solution on the horizon. 100tb platters that are approaching NVME speeds seems like a solid solution, if and when.

https://www.techpowerup.com/345945/west ... i-o-speeds

[BrianDW]

Thank you for the link.

[Stavevan887]

For now the best way to save space for hard drives is converting all H264 to H265 HEVC by using FFMPEG. This can shrink H264 files size down by 40% or more.

[seamus]

Before getting carried away with H.265 as a way to save disk space, perhaps you should consider the topic of Generation Loss.

The problem is this: Your source data (BD/DVD) contains video data that has already been encoded/compressed using a lossy codec; i.e. mpeg2 with DVDs, H.264, Hi Profile with BDs.

Unfortunately, you are fighting this immutable law:
The only way to avoid generation loss is by using uncompressed or losslessly compressed files ... Put another way, lossy compression "throws away" some data, and that data cannot be restored or recovered.

You don't have losslessly compressed data on a DVD or BD. Consequently, re-encoding will result in generation loss.