External Hard Drives
Re: External Hard Drives
It depends on the size of drive you need. For large HDDs search for "Backblaze" which gives reliability of many HDDs. The price of SSDs has fallen like a rock recently so for 1 to 2 TB these are a good choice.
Re: External Hard Drives
I would use something you have lying around or something inexpensive to start. This way you haven't spent a lot of money if you decide to go for an alternate playback setup.
There's nothing wrong with plugging storage into your TV for playback. This style of setup has relatively few moving parts. TV players can be a bit picky about the format of the files, but that can usually be overcome. (I don't have any experience with Sony OLEDs, this is just a general statement.) Shuttling a hard drive to & from your TV every time you get a new disc can get old.
The convenience of a Plex setup (or any of the other similar systems) is high, although it means you have to have a computer running Plex somewhere and a robust enough network to your TV to let it work. But it can work on all your TVs and mobile devices.
If you're not going to transcode your movies (via Handbrake or whatever), a good rule of thumb is a 2 hour movie from a 1080p blu-ray is about 30GB. The same movie from a 4K UHD is about twice as big, 60GB. If it is from a DVD, it is about 5GB. The storage requirements for even a medium sized collection can grow quite big. Spinning hard drives have a very low cost per GB compared to SSDs. They're slower for sure, but generally fast enough for movie playback.
Finally, the most time consuming part of this process is ripping the discs in the first place. You should have a backup of your rips, especially if they're on a portable hard drive connected to your TV. You don't want to be one hard drive failure away from having to rip all your discs again.
There's nothing wrong with plugging storage into your TV for playback. This style of setup has relatively few moving parts. TV players can be a bit picky about the format of the files, but that can usually be overcome. (I don't have any experience with Sony OLEDs, this is just a general statement.) Shuttling a hard drive to & from your TV every time you get a new disc can get old.
The convenience of a Plex setup (or any of the other similar systems) is high, although it means you have to have a computer running Plex somewhere and a robust enough network to your TV to let it work. But it can work on all your TVs and mobile devices.
If you're not going to transcode your movies (via Handbrake or whatever), a good rule of thumb is a 2 hour movie from a 1080p blu-ray is about 30GB. The same movie from a 4K UHD is about twice as big, 60GB. If it is from a DVD, it is about 5GB. The storage requirements for even a medium sized collection can grow quite big. Spinning hard drives have a very low cost per GB compared to SSDs. They're slower for sure, but generally fast enough for movie playback.
Finally, the most time consuming part of this process is ripping the discs in the first place. You should have a backup of your rips, especially if they're on a portable hard drive connected to your TV. You don't want to be one hard drive failure away from having to rip all your discs again.