External Hard Drives

[Motoxxx]

Hello,
I'm kinda new to all this, just trying to understand all mkv stuff.
I just ordered a pre flashed drive from a member here.
I just want to rip bluray and 4k movies and then plug it in my Sony OLED TV.
What storage should i use? I'm thinking about external drive, what External Hard Drives do you guys recommend?
Sorry if this the wrong section.

Thanks in advance.
Chris

[Woodstock]

Depends on what you need. I have a pair of Synology drives that feed my video to "everything", but they use a number of network capabilities to fit their environment. Some people use drives that attach to their servers, rather than "net drives" like I do. It has nothing to do with MKV files, per say, because I have both MKV and MP4 files for video, and other file for other reasons. My clients are TVs, as well as Linux and Windows computers.

What do you want to be able to read the system? Is your TV going to be directly accessing? Does it read a particular network better?

[Motoxxx]

Thanks for the quick response,
I don't know a lot of computer stuff, just the basics.
I just want to rip the movies to the external hard drive or whatever the easiest and then plug it my tv or avr. What are your recommendations? I don't have a lot blu-ray or 4k movies
Chris

[jinx100]

I watch my movies from a hard drive connected to the TV USB port. I just looked at an original rip of Top Gun Maverick BR and it played fine on a Samsung TV from a WD Passport portable drive. Keep in mind that the MKV file is 32GB so that would be about 30 movies on a 1TB drive. Read your Sony TV manual carefully to verify it accepts MKV containers with H264 and H265 video plus AAC and AC3 audio streams.

I just like to watch a movie and don't need the full theater experience so I use HandBrake to compress the original film to about 1.5 GB (1280 pixels width and stereo). At that size, I can get 1300 movies on a 2TB drive.

Most of the readers here do want the full fidelity of the original BR and have network systems with large storage that can send the movie to various devices in their home. You have infinite choices.

[dcoke22]

For spinning hard drives, I like to think about it in terms of cost per TB. For consumer grade drives, you should easily be able to find reputable drives for < $20/TB. For example, this WD 14TB drive is about $220 on Amazon currently. A thing like that isn't small and it will have a power supply that'll need to be plugged in but it'll be able to store a lot of movies for not a lot of money.

If you want a spinning hard drive that is physically smaller, there are things like this WD 5TB drive. The cost per TB on these drives is generally higher and the maximum capacity is limited to 5TB, but they are powered through their USB connection.

There are SSD choices of course, but they're more expensive. The extra money buys speed, but that speed is of little value if you're watching a movie. A spinning hard drive is fast enough.

Others here have mentioned making sure your TV will work as you expect. I agree with this. Before spending a lot of money on this stuff, do some tests and make sure things work that way you want them to work before spending a lot of money on hard drives.

Finally, you need to figure out how to have a backup of this stuff. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to rip a stack of movies. If the only place those rips live is on a hard drive that your cat will knock off the shelf, you'll be unhappy having to rip those movies a second time. Even if your backup is a second copy on a second external drive, that's better than nothing.

[Motoxxx]

Thanks guys, great advice!

[Motoxxx]

So I received my drive in the mail. Rip couple 4k movies and then plugged it in the TV and Blu-ray player USB port. Picture looks great but it can pick up Dolby vision or atmos tracks. Also no subtitles option. Is there a way to watch Dolby vision and atmos on my TV/ AVR ?

[furiousyellow]

Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to back up without having a duplicate Hard Drive?

[Woodstock]

Not sure what you're referring to. "Backing up" is usually done to a hard drive. Are you suggesting some other media?

[dcoke22]

Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to back up without having a duplicate Hard Drive?

I'm not sure I understand the question. If you want to make a backup of a file, in one way or another you need to make a copy of it and store it on a different storage medium. An easy way to do this is make a copy onto a second hard drive. Otherwise, you can store the backup in a cloud somewhere. A service like BackBlaze is designed to back up people's computers to their cloud for a modest fee.