the fact that this is the worst-merchandised franchise in the world is incredibly annoying

I can’t agree with this more. It’s insane the disparity between ST merch and Star Wars merch. It’s like Trek stuff is always the “Wish version” of what the people behind Star Wars are putting out. Lego is a good example, they’ve put out hundreds of Star Wars sets over decades while Star Trek is relegated to the shitty knockoff Lego-clone companies who think they can charge as much as Lego for what they offer.

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-not-at-all-sad-history-of-89890804/

That lowered Sienna looks pretty sick.

Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.

I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.

I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.

Or they funnel it all to GallowBoob or whoever his replacement is.

I searched, and surprisingly none within 50 miles of me.

I bought my last 14TB drive with them after buying new ones over the last 6 years. I definitely wish I would have heard about them sooner as I could have a lot more storage at a lot lower price if I had.

Considering this guy is looking to slap some drives into his personal computer in order to store some movies, who gives a shit if they’re enterprise drives or not? I have numerous 6 year old ‘junk’ drives in my server that haven’t given me a single issue the entire time powered on 24/7. It’s not like he’s looking for drives to put in a Facebook datacenter.

Don’t use Amazon or Ebay, use something like serverpartdeals.com so you know you’re not buying from some fly-by-night company that’ll disappear when you try to do a warranty claim.

$18/TB is a crazy high price. I’ve bought most of all my WD drives new for <$15/TB by waiting for sales on Easystore/Element drives

You can still use one of these with the NAS as storage. A Synology doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to run programs directly on their hardware so if you plan on doing something like a media server you might encounter some issues. An optiplex (or any other PC) running Proxmox will let you run a bunch of different containers or VMs separately

You might look for a used Optiplex SFF or micro form factor PC. These can be purchased for around $100 in the US and have full fledged PC hardware which is capable of running most things. The downside here is less peripheral support for things like PCIE or internal storage.

This type of shit drives me up the wall. I recall that Verizon has 3 different tiers of “unlimited data” which is all horseshit because “unlimited” means unlimited. I wish the FTC would grow some balls and go after companies falsely advertising like this.

They might ve referring to changing the settings for stuff like “active torrents” and maximum connections. I’ve fiddled with all this stuff but never really bothered digging into finding the ‘proper’ settings

Pretty much. I have 1080P Bluray for movies, two 720p for TV, and a “give me the lowest resolution available” for stuff my users request but I feel has little value (like reality TV). For TV I have two 720p profiles but one maxes out at 720p with only lower resolutions below the cutoff while the other includes 1080p but only if 720p isn’t available meaning they’re placed below 720p in order of priority.

Yes I was actually sad to leave Mullvad, and the developer was pretty cool about giving refunds, so I’d definitely go back if things changed in the future.

AirVPN does have port forwarding and is what I wound up switching to. So far, everything is working fine and there are a decent number of servers available.

A lot of the private trackers I use specifically block its usage.

NordVPN also doesn’t have port forwarding so you’re unlikely to be able to seed anything back. This’ll get you banned from private trackers and goes against the whole concept of torrenting.

Provided it’s available in your location, and still being sold/produced. Furthermore Blurays are only going to be harder to find as time goes on with companies like Best Buy stating that they’ll no longer be selling them.