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Hello,

Before I start collecting and ripping UHD Blu Ray discs, I need to the know average .mkv file size for the main feature. This way, I know what hard drive I need. Note, I will not be doing any compression with handbrake or other software.

I have 57 HD Blu Ray titles and they average out to be 22GB each.
I'm thinking about 58GB for each UHD Blu Ray title, is this correct?

Thank you,

leosantare wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 25, 2022 3:39 am

Hello,

Before I start collecting and ripping UHD Blu Ray discs, I need to the know average .mkv file size for the main feature. This way, I know what hard drive I need. Note, I will not be doing any compression with handbrake or other software.

I have 57 HD Blu Ray titles and they average out to be 22GB each.
I'm thinking about 58GB for each UHD Blu Ray title, is this correct?

Thank you,

Most UHD movie MKV files end up somewhere between 55GB and 75GB. The occasional one's (triple layer discs) can be 75GB-90GB in size.

Personally, I reencode mine to around 20GB-30GB (keeping the original audio) and do not notice any loss of quality but that is dealer's choice!

I do the same, rip and no additional compression or modifications. I currently have 66 UHD discs averaging about 58GB each.

73 UHDs, averaging 53GB (Highest: 81.9GB; Lowest: 37.3GB). 45/73 are under 55GB — these include large studio releases.

Current average is about 55-60 GB, but it depends on the length of the movie and the publisher. Major studio releases tend not to go too far above 60 GB for a two hour movie. On the other hand, Criterion's UHD release of Citizen Kane is close to 73GB despite being only 2 hrs, B&W, mono, and pillar boxed. Mulholland Drive was over 85 GB.

Thanks everyone.

Assuming that you did not use any type of compression with 2K HD blu rays, why bother upgrading to 4K UHD blu rays if you are using compression?

I don't mean to offend, I'm just asking.

leosantare wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:20 am

Thanks everyone.

Assuming that you did not use any type of compression with 2K HD blu rays, why bother upgrading to 4K UHD blu rays if you are using compression?

I don't mean to offend, I'm just asking.

I always use compression. Standard blu-ray's are compressed to around 7-12GB. UHD's around 20-30GB.

leosantare wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:20 am

Assuming that you did not use any type of compression with 2K HD blu rays, why bother upgrading to 4K UHD blu rays if you are using compression?

Compressing a 1080p blu-ray makes it easier to put a few movies on a phone, tablet or laptop for viewing while traveling.

Thanks everyone, this gives me a good idea of what to expect.

I would be looking for a UHD collection of no more than 200 titles. At 60GB each, that would put me right around 12TB and I understand you should never exceed 80% of the drive. I would also be putting my documents, my music and my picture files on the same drive which all amount to less than 1TB. In total, I would be around 12.8TB.

I could go with (1) 16TB HDD or (2) 8TB SSD's in RAID.
Any suggestions?

Also, are the 4K UHD discs really an upgrade to 2K HD discs? I've been reading a lot of the 4K UHD reviews and most say the video quality is worse than 2K.

Thank you,

leosantare wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:11 am

I would be looking for a UHD collection of no more than 200 titles. At 60GB each, that would put me right around 12TB and I understand you should never exceed 80% of the drive. I would also be putting my documents, my music and my picture files on the same drive which all amount to less than 1TB. In total, I would be around 12.8TB.

I could go with (1) 16TB HDD or (2) 8TB SSD's in RAID.
Any suggestions?

Also, are the 4K UHD discs really an upgrade to 2K HD discs? I've been reading a lot of the 4K UHD reviews and most say the video quality is worse than 2K.

Thank you,

there are some rare cases that they make the 4k look worse but for the most part they look better
the main benefits are 4K resolution very high bitrates and HDR.
i would go for the 16tb HDD easier to expand in the future.

I agree with Billycar11; I'd go with a single 16TB or larger disk. Reading or writing large sequential files is the optimal workload for spinning disks so the performance will be more than enough. The cost is dramatically less as well. If you're concerned about the speed for access to your other documents, you could put them on a fast, smaller SSD and still spend less than compared to a pair of 8TB SSDs.

It has been my experience with 4K movies that they generally look better especially for more recent films or older films that have had extensive restoration. The expanded color palette and HDR can really let a movie look great. For example, the 2018 restored version of Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is really something special.

Okay, thanks for the tips. I like the idea of having one drive myself. Mainly because of I have no idea how to setup a RAID configuration. Are there any 16TB internal drives you can recommend?
Should I look for a certain type?

I'm not setting up any network, this drive will just be used on my desktop PC. Mainly to store my mkv files and possibly my documents, music and picture files as well.

I will think about getting a separate 1TB drive for my documents, music and picture files.

Thank you,

There are basically only 3 companies making hard drives these days… Western Digital, Seagate & Toshiba. I have and am using drives from all three. I don't personally think one brand is better than another.

High capacity drives come in two flavors CMR or SMR. There's been a lot written about the differences between the two technologies, but the short, short version is performance of SMR drives can, in some situations, be worse than CMR drives. SMR drives are theoretically cheaper than CMR drives, but the marketplace reality is that is often not the case. I generally just buy CMR drives.

I typically buy the enterprise class drives, like Seagate Exos or WD Gold drives. They usually have a longer warranty though they can often be a bit louder in operation than more consumer oriented drives like the Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue. The drives oriented for NAS or Surveillance or for 'gaming' probably aren't worth it for your use case.

I like to use https://pcpartpicker.com to get a feel for the market prices for hard drives. I'm sure there are other, similar sites equally as useful.

If you want to go deeper on drive reliability, Backblaze buys a lot of hard drives for their backup operations and they blog about their experiences with drives. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaz ... -for-2021/

Finally, digitizing a movie library can consume a lot of bytes, but more importantly, it can represent a lot of time. It is probably worth thinking a bit about having a backup. Drives fail occasionally and it would be unfortunate if you lost the results of all your efforts with a single drive failure.

dcoke22 wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 04, 2022 4:31 am

I typically buy the enterprise class drives, like Seagate Exos or WD Gold drives. They usually have a longer warranty though they can often be a bit louder in operation than more consumer oriented drives like the Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue. The drives oriented for NAS or Surveillance or for 'gaming' probably aren't worth it for your use case.

Thank you, this is very helpful for me since it really narrows down the selection. I was checking out the WD Gold 16TB already and like them. How about the WD Ultrastar?

I'm going to look into SAS vs SATA since I don't know much about it. Do you use SAS drives, would you recommend it in my case?