Sometimes i get up in the middle of the night to turn off my torrent app since someone is seeding something from that ONE spot on my hard drive that is loud as hell. I have 4 HDD's in my room i sleep in, but normally mine are quiet enough i don't notice. But maybe 1% of the time they are so loud i can't sleep.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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This might not work for you, but at one point I had three HDDs running all the time in my small apartment. What I did to keep my sanity was set up a schedule in qBittorrent so that it completely stopped at night and used most of my bandwidth the rest of the day. I also recommend setting up permanent seeding with Hardlinks and auto-deletion when it reaches a certain ratio (this may differ based on how popular your torrents are). In my case, it was 10:1.
Just in case you didn't know, this is yet another garbage effect from AI slop being pushed everywhere.
I did know that AI data centers have driven up RAM prices. Didn't know that they have done the same to storage prices. :( F*ck AI.
You can get a lot more storage for less money if you go spinning drive which is better for long term storage anyway. There's 12TB drives for less than $300 currently for me.
Are you data hoarding? The easiest way to save money on drive space is to get rid of media you aren't watching or games you aren't playing
Data hoarding with only 16TB?! scratches head
I've got: 10x 8TB drives (Raid5 with 8 and 2 spare) 8x 16TB drives in 2x 4-disc Raid5 (no spares yet) These 3 storage pools are for Plex/ Jellyfin (movies, TV, misc)
In another "lower power" server, some older 3TB x8 in Raid6 for files and pictures and whatnot.
I've been backing up data for family since the windows vista days, everyone so far has been happy to have stuff archived. Mostly I just back up their physical hard drives or their own backup drives.
No, I'm just torrenting. Video only. Music I stream and games I buy. So for now, we're talking 15TB of series and movies.
Yes but how regularly are you watching any given terabyte of video? You should look into getting some kind of data on what media is accessed and if it hasn’t been accessed in something like 30 days, get rid of it.
I know that, but I also want to keep seeding. It's a balance, I guess. But perhaps I could remove that which I haven't watched for 90 days and whose share ratio has reached 1.0 or that hasn't changed for 90 days. That way, I can enjoy having the files around and keep seeding that which has some popularity.
More important than ratio is how many seeds are left. Keep the ones that are low on seeds, ditch the ones where there are hundreds of others seeding.
You could get some big hdds and move the things there you aren’t seeding anymore, so they won’t be active unless you’re watching something from them.
If you’re really interested in having all of the media locally, this is probably the move for you. I’m a big proponent for paying for a debrid service & using stremio + torrentio and only downloading locally what I KNOW I’m gonna watch again.
You must be young and don't understand seeding lol. Probably on Torrentio or Streamio or whatever.
Pretty rude and condescending to assume I can’t understand the concepts behind seeding etiquette.
Well, I've got stuff seeding far more than 30 days, usually the obscure stuff. But also, I seed until my ratio hits 10:1 just cuz I have the bandwidth/capacity, and I know how hard it is sometimes to get a decent DL.
Some people don't GAF, I don't mean to assume you don't, I just want those who don't to understand, to get its importance!
baller
Curating what content you download is completely unrelated to how long you seed it.
You could consider running your collection through Handbrake. It's pretty easy to shed 90% of video file size while barely losing any noticeable quality.
Wow! I'm saving this regardless. Great "GUI" for ffmpeg and whatnot. Thanks for the recommendation! I'm extremely picky about quality, watching everything on my 43 inch 4K TV. Banding in dark areas and gradations are the worst. XD
Yeah “just running it through handbrake” is a great way to make things look much worse. Encoding is pretty complicated
I routinely reduce size 50%-70% and play it on a 65" 4k TV and you can't tell the difference.
Sometimes I can actually improve the original video by applying noise reduction.
As for power - it really depends on your hardware and what you're trying to do. Since I use an Intel SFF desktop, I have the option of using QSV for conversion and my rig peaks at 80 watts. Not that my peak matters because QSV is very power efficient and fast - takes perhaps 20 min to convert a 6GB video to 1-2 GB.
Using AMD VCE, I've been able to do the same with a remux, taking it from 33GB down to 5GB. My first attempt on that one got the file size all the way down to 3GB but there was some rough artifacting on the studio logos at the start and intro credits. I decided the extra 2GB was worth it for that minor bump. Bizarrely, the rest of the film seemed fine but I could have missed something since I didn't bother with a full watch.
Spoken like someone who has no clue how to use Handbrake.
If your gonna do it I would use something like tdarr which is designed for that purpose, but honestly, thats a huge waste of power and time in my opinion. Best solution long term is to just delete and re-download. It will be a constant problem for you otherwise. You will always need more storage.
Using SSD is going to cost a lot more for the same storage and not really gain anything.
I use SSD for the drives that host VMs since they're quieter when "running" and have a lower power consumption than my spinning disk drives when running.
This allows my storage drives to spin down.
I'd just delete older stuff you've already watched, unless it's something you plan on re-watching at least.
I wonder if theres an argument for an automatic down-scaler after watching it for retention, but tying it to the original torrent file at the same time.
Sigh, should have stood quiet. Now 10 people are going to vibe code this and it's going to be slop and full of security holes. I have to say though, I would love something along these lines. After X number of days on server, downgrade to x265 720p. Would be great for space saving.
OP: I've gone though so many dead disks that I have to rebuild from scratch before my NAS, ONLY keep what you are going to watch/use. If you want to keep the other stuff (harder to find only imo) burn it off to throw it at some external spinning disks that you can unplug and put into long term storage.
Micron is basically the major culprit in the current fucked up memory chips situation, fuck them.
I had 4 of those nice things 4tb evos... Same model. Two died after a few years of being on use 24/7 in my server.... Maybe three years?
Replaced with 6tb hdds and quite happy
Maybe I'll end up doing the same. Maybe I'll buy a properly soundproofed chassi and put it in the kitchen or something. XD