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Stream and cream?

Shucking drives? What part of JBOD did you not understand. Half of them don't even fit in the case, they are just piled up on top of each other.

Jellyfin and stick it in

They are not paying for all the streaming services

You can buy this amount each year or pay for Netflix 4k for the same year. HDDs are not that expensive.

The Standard Plan for Nextflix is about 216 bucks a year. A new 10gb HDD runs around $200. Less if you look for deals and/or go for refurbished. But a total of 20tb of storage would be equivalent to two years of Netflix without ads if paying for brand new drives and not looking for deals.

Like $300? Plenty of foxes can afford that.

Trick is to buy used disks. My entire raid pool is cobbled together from large-ish drives that got pulled from commercial servers and sold off on the cheap. Last set i bought was 3x14tb for $400.

You don’t have to buy it all at once

You don't need to buy it all at once.

Long-term planning is a pathway to many powers CEOs would call...unnatural.

I made do with a bit over 2 Tb for a bit over 15 years.
But earlier this year I bought two 3 Tb drives, and they're a bit more expensive here in Denmark due to 25% VAT, so it was 648 DKK per drive (or $101 USD / €87 EUR). And I'm on the lowest income you can get here.
So it is possible to upgrade every now and then, and I'm very happy I'm now on 6 Tb storage (+ 2 Tb NVMe main drive, though not for storage).
I imagine if I had a job in IT, I'd be swimming in it, I'd probably have nerded out on a NAS, though even now I don't see what I'd need it for.

Gotta start somewhere

My nas started with a pile of old 2-8tb drives I had amassed through the years from fixing computers and upgrading storage of various things. Back then 20tb was crazy. Now I have a nas where a single drive is 18tb and the full array is over 200tb.

I highly encourage anyone to build with whatever you can. Get off streaming, save your money. You can run this shit on a raspberry pi with a 4tb hard drive for under $100, probably way less with a refurb drive and a used pi. Or buy an old ewaste pc for $1-200 and stuff it with drives.

it doesn’t need to be a workhorse unless you want to create some monster Jellyfin server that can transcode 8+ uhd remux streams concurrently (and even then it doesn’t have to be that crazy, 10th gen intel igpu will handle a lot). But if you genuinely need that many streams you’ll probably need a gpu so make sure you get something with a pcie slot of appropriate bandwidth (x16 most likely)

Additionally if you truly want to stuff it full of drives def make sure it has pcie x16 so you can add hba card. Most mobos (especially office pcs and stuff like old dells and thinkcenters) come with like 2-4 sata ports max. Lsi 9300-8i or 16i will add 8 or 16 sata lanes for like $30-50 bucks (though beware of the many counterfeits) and you’ll either have to move to a new case ($) or fashion some kind of external drive bay (sff cables running out of host of to whatever drive bay)

Just don't talk about the part where we spend ~$1000 on acquiring 20TB of HDD

Nowadays that could just be an external drive bay with a few HDDs + ZFS.

Or if you just want to rawdog it with no redundancy they make single hard drives with 20 TB capacity now.

yeah to propose

thats what i would be on my knees for too

Harder than plex to set up, but not difficult.

If you want to watch outside the network then you’ll need to port forward.

Install the package, chuck files at it, it basically runs itself.

"Jellyfin and put it in"

You get a cute little user interface to browse through your movies and shows with little posters and information. You also don't have to use a flash drive and move stuff over if you want to watch from your PlayStation or other device. just a browser is enough.

In addition to the UI others have mentioned, I host mine behind a VPN so all my friends can use it over the Internet, too. It gets a decent amount of traffic every week.

If I can just add to what @glinncor@lemmy.world said:

I personally have one so that I don't have to mess around with plugging in any hdmi cables and moving my laptop from where it's docked, I can flick on the server and then it can just be accessed on any tv in the house by anyone.

Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate "trickplay" images so you've thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don't end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.

Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don't Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn't actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).

If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I'd need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I'd need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that'd only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but... no thanks.