Hey all you beautiful selfhosters,
What are your suggestions for frugally obtaining HDDs in the current economic climate? Specifically the EU (Netherlands).
I’m looking at second hand drives, but even those go for €100+ now, with bad sectors and all.
Can we organise a collective AI datacenter robbery and doll out some stolen drives? 😁
I have family photos starting in 2001, scanned/captured photos and video going back 50 years, music, and backups of all my Xbox DVDs (WTF is the original Xbox even called today?). But that’s a few terrabytes. It can all fit on a few USB sticks. (Which I do as a third level backup.)
The real space killers are the TV shows and movies that I will watch at most once every 20 years. I could delete almost all of it. But I don’t. Instead I keep looking for bigger storage options.
I’ve become much more selective with my video quality. I’ve found that 480p encoded from a raw source produces pretty acceptable quality, anything that isn’t made to be eye candy I’ll encode myself from a raw file down to 480p. There have been many things that have been very hard to find, so I feel it’s more important that they exist, rather than be in the highest definition possible. Quality of pixels is more important that quantity of pixels.
This really depends on what you’re watching it on. 480p can look fine on a phone but like garbage on a 65" OLED. I find that 720p is good for most shows that aren’t visually stunning (like Foundation) while most movies look fine in 1080p on the aforementioned OLED.
My Bravia does some magic that makes video files look better than they do on PC. I’ve started replacing many of my 2160p files with 1080p ones, the difference is often barely noticeable, depending on the quality of the respective rips.
I don’t generally go below 720p but some old stuff that hasn’t been remastered has no reason to go above 480p.