Ballpark Estimate of Price of a Digital Collection Aug 2026

[AbbottRabbot]

I'm wondering the approximate startup cost of getting one's own digital library going with their personally owned disks in Aug/Sept 2026?

This is also an information summary for current people like me trying to get into the space in Aug 2026. And also a question about the best enclosure for my selected drive.

I've been carefully looking at the market for good 4KUHD players such as the Pioneer/Verbatim external drives, though sadly it does seem like they are being wholy discontinued and are extremely difficult to find if not in the $750-1250 range on sites like E-Bay. The ones on this site are sold out as well.

The most recent full YouTube guide for starters that just want to rip 4KUHD Bluray is a video by TwoGuyzTech in April 2026 https://youtu.be/XUgXxLpLFoY?si=dONj7P_tMvd1a3C2 that shows off the BU40N drive. Following some research, I discovered the former LG/ASUS BU40N's previously had negative reviews as an internal laptop drive making scratches if insufficiently supplied with power, but the current listings on amazon (in his affiliate link) are HL BU40N series (the HLDS BU40N and 9.5mm Tray-Loading SATA Internal 4K UHD Blu-ray/DVD Writer BU40N Blu-ray Burner BD-RE BDXL Writer Drive listings) and those HAVE made great progress to fix that. BU40N drives generally are also popular for their faster write speed, the main drawback being for these "Amazon purchaseables" is that they lack an external enclosure (i.e. it's a fragile internal laptop drive just sitting on your desk).

Even at the end of the video TwoGuyzTech explains that he was going to include a guide on installing it in an enclosure, but it wasn't worth including in the video bc it was too complicated. (And I suspect too hard to come by as only the slimline SATA Blu-ray drive that is recommended on the main forum is the only one available on amazon: viewtopic.php?t=19634). It also looks to have a weird USB type B 2.0 cable external port...

Wondering just what my cheap options would be for getting an enclosure for the HL BU40N as I intend to do? Would I still need a Slimline SATA cable if use the Silverstone TS14 slimsata 9.5mm to USB? I'm still trying to understand all this before I buy.

[dcoke22]

If you read the first post on Asmcom's thread (https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19387) he talks about BU40Ns. I think he's even got some for sale for a reasonably price currently, which is not always the case.

Pioneer drives are considered the best but since Pioneer stopped making optical drives in 2024, new ones are pretty rare. You can find used ones but there are a lot of fakes for sale on places like ebay too.

In my experience, having more than one optical drive can be helpful. Some drives just don't seem to like some discs. Having an alternative drive will improve your successful rip rate. There are plenty of posts on this forum of people who report they ripped their large collection of discs with their 1 drive and ended up with a small stack of discs that they couldn't get their drive to rip. When they got a second drive, several discs in their failed pile ripped successfully on their second drive.

Beyond getting an optical drive or two, the hard drive storage for the resulting rips is a consideration. As frontier AI labs consume all the world's compute resources, buying big hard drives has gotten expensive. Big spinning drives, if you can buy them at all, cost about 3x what they cost a couple of years ago. As a rule of thumb, figure a movie ripped from a DVD is about 5GB, a movie from a regular blu-ray is about 30GB, and a movie from a 4K UHD is about 60GB.

Even if you're going to use Handbrake or whatever to transcode them to something smaller to use on your Plex or whatever server, I encourage you to consider keeping your rips. Optical discs degrade over time and just because you were able to rip the disc today there's no guarantee that you'll be able to rip the disc in the future. Additionally, whatever format you transcode rips into today might not be the right choice in the future. If your rips are still around and accessible, they're easy to transcode again.

I have found having my personal movie library accessible via Plex is transformational. My collection of DVDs and blu-rays was mostly gathering dust since it was easier to find something to stream than to put a disc in a player. Now it is all accessible from my couch via a remote. As such, I now have almost no streaming services and instead buy more discs to rip and watch. When I started my original back-of-a-napkin math for how much storage I needed was 9TB. I doubled that and had 18TB of storage (four 6TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration). I'm way past that now since I'm buying new discs again.

[stanice]

Damn, it's sad to hear how high prices have gone on Pioneer drives!

About the "weird USB type B 2.0 cable" - don't let that stop you, I've had great success using a cable with that end and USB-C on the other end.

Newer USB-C ports can supply a lot more power over one cable than old USB-A ports could, so it's no longer necessary to use those weird hydra cables with multiple USB-A ports to get sufficient power to the drive.

I believe this is the exact cable I'm using with an LG slim blu-ray drive in an OWC enclosure that has one of those old-school Mini-USB ports.

Looks like OWC doesn't have that black plastic slim optical drive USB enclosure for sale any more, but they do claim to have a slot-loading Panasonic slim blu-ray drive in stock for $100 if that interests you. OWC Optical drives & Media

It's definitely not difficult to put a slim or 5.25" optical drive inside an external USB enclosure. I agree it's good to have at least a couple different drives from different brands as some do better with certain disks than others. Fine to start with whatever drive is readily available and keep an eye out for your dream drive, it'll pop up someday!

EDIT: the only gotcha with slim optical drives is to pay close attention to the 9mm vs 12mm drive heights. Make sure you get the appropriate height enclosure to match the height of slim drive you have.

[billbillw]

Dang. I'm sure glad I bought a Pioneer BDR-212 back in October 2023. Firmware flash from Billycar11, and it has been solid. It was $85 shipped back then and another $25 for the firmware. Now I see someone selling a flashed drive on eBay for $859.95!!! I guess I need to treasure this thing. I was also lucky to have built my server before memory and HDD prices spiked. I have two other LG Bluray readers, but neither can do 4K discs.

[Coopervid]

Dang. I'm sure glad I bought a Pioneer BDR-212 back in October 2023. Firmware flash from Billycar11, and it has been solid. It was $85 shipped back then and another $25 for the firmware. Now I see someone selling a flashed drive on eBay for $859.95!!! I guess I need to treasure this thing. I was also lucky to have built my server before memory and HDD prices spiked. I have two other LG Bluray readers, but neither can do 4K discs.

You should post the LG drive info. Maybe they can be flashed.

[billbillw]

Dang. I'm sure glad I bought a Pioneer BDR-212 back in October 2023. Firmware flash from Billycar11, and it has been solid. It was $85 shipped back then and another $25 for the firmware. Now I see someone selling a flashed drive on eBay for $859.95!!! I guess I need to treasure this thing. I was also lucky to have built my server before memory and HDD prices spiked. I have two other LG Bluray readers, but neither can do 4K discs.

You should post the LG drive info. Maybe they can be flashed.

No, they are too old. Talking 2012 build dates. One is a WH12LS39 and the other one is a BD reader only (with DVD/CD writing) that is on loan to a friend right now so I can't remember the model number.

[Coopervid]

Dang. I'm sure glad I bought a Pioneer BDR-212 back in October 2023. Firmware flash from Billycar11, and it has been solid. It was $85 shipped back then and another $25 for the firmware. Now I see someone selling a flashed drive on eBay for $859.95!!! I guess I need to treasure this thing. I was also lucky to have built my server before memory and HDD prices spiked. I have two other LG Bluray readers, but neither can do 4K discs.

You should post the LG drive info. Maybe they can be flashed.

No, they are too old. Talking 2012 build dates. One is a WH12LS39 and the other one is a BD reader only (with DVD/CD writing) that is on loan to a friend right now so I can't remember the model number.

OK.

[soulshadow]

Well, it's NOT a cheap hobby, that's for sure. BUT all those streaming services start to add up REALY fast. And if you already have a decent collection of physical media (as i did) then it really does make sense as a long term storage and access solution.

I got started on this roller coaster around 2020. While always an avid adopter of digital media, all the way back to the 90's, I also own large audio (over 600 CD's) and movie (well over 1,000 DVD/BD) collections. So when I started the process I knew I'd need quite a bit of space. Initially I planned to transcode everything to very high quality h264/aac mkv's. But time was more limited then space and I couldn't transcode fast enough. Then after adding 2 additional laptops to the mix I decicded to switch to high quality (think RF15 to RF18 on Slow preset) h265/aac. This worked well and eventually I was able to automate a lot of the process... but then AV1 started to hit the scene. At this point I stopped transcoding altogether as I figured I'd eventually just have to redo everything in AV1 anyway.

I run Jellyfin on my NAS so it really doesn't matter that much if I transcode or just keep the disc rips. So, eventually I got rid of the transcodes and just kept the rips (which I had originally kept for future conversion to h265 then AV1). Though I did make 1 compromise: I only keep the disc rips of the movie or show episodes. ALL extra content is transcoded to a medium to high quality then the originals are deleted. That saved quite a bit of space for content that rarely gets watched anyway.

Things were good for a while. I started with 6 8TB disks (36.4TB usable) in a raid5 array. After choosing to keep all the original rips I added another 5 18TB disk array (65.4TB usable). I figured that would go a long way.

And then I showed my wife how to rip discs...

Initially I focused solely on BD's, but that only accounted for about 1/3 of our video collection. My wife went to work on the DVD's and she too became addicted. Eventually she ran out of our home media and started borrowing titles from family, friends and the local libraries. At present we have OVER 1,700 movies, 150 shows and over a dozen mini-series. Also, we now have over 150 4k discs in the collection.

AND THEN... Video games.

So you'd think that just over 100TB of space would go a long way. But here's the thing, once you have a NAS set up you find more and more uses for it. Early on I established a network home dir and personal file backup on the NAS. Then about a year ago I had the bright idea to use some of the NAS space to create a home cloud video game collection (classic games plus my steam library). Well that ate up another 10 or so TB. And now I find myself with 2TB of free space out of 100TB and tripled pricing on new HDD's (I'm eyeing another 5 disk array, with 20+TB drives depending on supply and sale pricing).

All in all I've dropped about $3k USD on NAS, expansion enclosure and HDD's.
(about $ (I forget) on the original synology DS1621+ NAS, $500 on the synology DX517 expansion enclosure and about $200 / drive at the time each batch was purchased)
Oh, and lets not forget the pure sine wave battery backup for the NAS. Another $200 x 2 (first one recently died).
AND there's all the home networking gear I have. 16-port master switch plus multiple 5 or 6 port switches in individual rooms. While the network was mostly set up before the NAS it's still an important consideration as Wifi really isn't good for streaming high bitrate video, especially to multiple devices at once.

And of course we've spent enough money over the years, and presently, on Amazon to purchase well over 1,000 disks, movies, sets and/or collections. I can't truly estimate the cost, but we do try to only buy them on sale, so I'd say we averaged $8/DVD over the decades and about $14/BD and so far about $20/4K - for single movies. TV series obviously vary.

BTW, for those curious the 600+CD collection takes up about 80gig as 256bit VBR mp3's. A drop in the bucket...