this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Frugal
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Discuss how to save money.
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What are you spending the money on? Physical sever devices? Electricity?
Yeah, personal hardware. Replaced my 2 bay (2x 6 TB) NAS that had 5 USB drives attached with more powerful 12 bay NAS and 9x 20TB drives. Luckily before the insane price hikes due to the AI hype. Still, I invest like $7000 over all at least. That's a lot of years of netflix/spotify :D
I don't even bother with the electricity, it just is what it is.
Jeeeeeesus. I've got 20TB and that feels like a lot 😅
8 of the drives are on a raid 6 and one is a hot spare and converted to 1000 based terrabyte, I'm maxing out at 109.1 TB, but max volume size is 108 TB.
But I've interacted with people that had 1.2 PB ... there is always a bigger fish ^^
Meanwhile, I'm over here about to attach a 2tb drive to my Nextcloud server and I thought that was a lot...
It's a lot cheaper if you don't need to keep it. I acquire, watch, and delete.
I spend about $10/mo., and that's a lot.
This is where I'm at after about a decade of being a self-described "data hoarder" and experiencing a drive failure a couple months ago and losing about 8tb of media that I realized I didn't care at all about.
Now I have a custom script that runs on the 1st of every month that A) detects if movies and full TV series have been marked as "watched" more than 7 days ago and/or B) if movies and full TV series have never been started and unmatched after more than a year. I ran those a dry run of the script and saw that I was about to save 12tb of storage and realized how unimportant 99% of the stuff marked was to me. Really important stuff (my David Lynch titles, for example), are manually marked for exclusion.
Anyway, but of a blog post but I've realized this is the way for me. My Plex library is now less cluttered and full of only new things. My other users on the account can still request anything they want and my Usenet+*arr+fiber optic server can have almost anything ready for them in 10 minutes or less
7000/19.99(netflix ad free)+12.99(spotify ad free) is 17 years, and thats excluding any other providers you may have had such as crunchyroll or a content specific provider. Honestly if you leave your unused HDD's off the array/NAS you likely have years of drive life as well
NTA but I spend about $30/month on various self-hosting-specific services: Usenet subscription, VPN, Plex Pass, a few little recurring donations to OSSes that I use, etc.
It's not really self-hosting unless you own the hardware. But I support your sentiment!
I do own the hardware. 5x8tb (down from 6) drives of media on my desktop
It's definitely the hard drives. A 1tb SSD is about $150, and can definitely get you far, but it's never far enough
I use a 1 TB and a 2 TB ssd for temporary storage, sorting and transcoding. But for permanent storage, HDDs are the way to go if you want a lot.
How long would it take to watch 1 TB of video? A lifetime?
Haha. That depends on a few factors. If you're going to the highest fidelity possible, you could fill 1tb up with about 20 UHD movies at ~50gb each.
A single bluray movie will run around 50GB and full TV shows can easily be 100s of GBs.