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.