this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Streaming prices are out of hand. What are cheaper alternatives?

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[–] remon@ani.social 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] obelisk_complex@piefed.ca 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Jeeeeeesus. I've got 20TB and that feels like a lot 😅

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[–] remon@ani.social 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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 ^^

[–] djdarren@piefed.social 5 points 4 days ago

Meanwhile, I'm over here about to attach a 2tb drive to my Nextcloud server and I thought that was a lot...

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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 and deletes titles that meet either requirement, while outputting a ledger on my desktop showing what titles have been deleted, the date, and for what reason. I ran 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

[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 4 days ago

Absolutely. But I do want to keep it, the fact that streaming services can just remove shows from their service is one if the reasons I dislike them.

Also a lot family members and friends use that to rewatch old shows or keep up with newer ones at different times, so not an option for me.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

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