www.makemkv.com

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.

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.

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.