His problem isn't pirating, it's data hoarding.

"Running my own instance of netflix costs more than a subscription to it"

This post is the real life equivalent of that "I spend $3000/month on candles. Please help me budget, my family is starving" meme.

"piracy is expensive" Actually really dumb of him to generalize like that. Most people that pirate stuff, won't EVER need a $1200 with fucking 30TB of storage, to do it, they will simply download a movie/series, watch, and delete it, MOST people only ever watch something 1 or 2 times (with some exceptions for our favorites movies/shows, but still, not even remotely close to 30TB...). It makes literally no sense for him to state that piracy is expensive simply because the way he does it, is indeed expensive. As said in the video, it is not about piracy, it's about long-term data storage, and that is INDEED expensive. Again, the title is right "*I* probably spent more on piracy that if I just paid for content", but the statement after that is incredible dumb.

Maybe piracy could cost more if you buy high amounts of storage, but even if the cost was higher than subscriptions. I would still argue that piracy is worth it, considering the fact that you have more control over the content you torrent. The office might get pulled from Netflix, but it won't be pulled from your hard drive or media server.

30tb of unseeded content is the equivalent of hoarding mail. Yeah it may be important but after reading it once chances are you’re never going to touch it again

If internet goes down and we enter an apocalypse for 10 years this guy is going to be alright as far as entertainment goes xD That is assuming he stored enough food too.

Damn, this guy must have the ISO of every version of every single Linux distro ever. A true archiver 🙏

Casual pirate here, and I can say it certainly saves me money, and ESPECIALLY convenience. At any time, I can watch the shows I want to watch, without having to make an account, log in, pay for yet another different subscription or any of that fucking shit. Same with video games too. Just got to go to my big ol games folder, click on the game I want, and if I really want to, click on every other file and folder to actively tweak, mod, or fix it! Best/worst part, I would be more then willing to actually pay for the services that I do use to pirate from, as they actually offer a SUPERIOR service then the fucking legalese bound bullshit riddled with exclusivity deals, walled gardens, lack of actual ownership, etc.

OP case is very ridiculous. If he paid for the content, he wouldn't be able to download it and keep it this way, can't he just do the same for pirated stuff, watch it, then delete it, and maybe download it again when needed? And, he still needs something to watch the content in, so he would still pay to maintain a computer/TV! This is not because he pirates, it's because he is a big data hoarder.

The biggest thing for me is ownership. When I want to buy things like movies, I want to OWN them. I don't like being at the behest of the will of any company and whether they decide to renew a contract or decide "Oh! Lets invest in our own streaming service, we have a *great* catalog of content people will pay for!" My biggest thing is buying movies on Google Play, need a way to get them off somehow before Google does it for me for one reason or another. I will gladly go out of my way to actually own my content.

I used to hoard a lot of scanned tabletop games stuff, after a while the lust for digital treasure turns you into a dragon. It's a lot of fun. Plus when someone on a forum asks for something and you know exactly what they want because you've got tags and folders like crazy, it's a really good feeling to upload it somewhere for that guy to grab.

If it's on a hard disk I get the comfort of knowing I'll have it as long as I want. No censorship, no removal.

His logic is flawed, he's not paying for piracy, he's paying for his obsessive need to have a local copy. You can pirate all you want with a 100gb hdd. And 45$ of power per month ? Is electricity that much more expensive in the US (edit: I do realize he mentioned not in the us, but my point still stands, just wasn't paying attention >

I picked up a 16TB drive for like $250, and I really underestimated how much that is, because I have downloaded so much content at this point that if the internet ceased to exist tomorrow, I would have enough fresh content for the rest of my life. I've got hundreds of anime/manga series, hundreds of books, complete ROM sets for several different retro consoles, dozens of ps2/gamecube ISOs, a local copy of wikipedia, and other miscellaneous stuff. The best part is that I've used less than 20% of the available space in the drive, and that's with me _trying_ to fill it. It was definitely a good purchase

I appreciate your videos. The thing with the person in question is something which I totally understand. I live in a country where everything is banned, 80% of the useful parts of the internet is blocked by the regime (even Signal, Telegram, Pinterest and ....), also international bandwidth to those parts of the internet which are not banned yet, is reduced as hell to make you use the domestic services which are a piece of crap. I'm writing this comment using a VPN (a private VPN which I deployed because all public VPN servers get banned periodically untill they provide new servers), because KZfaq is also banned here, if you didn't know. And 80% of those 20% of the unbanned part of the internet is blocked by their providers, yeah google is one of them (google tasks, YT music, Docker!, Google Dev and ....) Fun fact: YT Music is blocked by both regime and google, so they are on the same side for us, but for different reasons. And regardless of all the things I mentioned above, we don't have international payments here so we can not subscribe to any of those services even if we would want to. So I have a PC with 16TB storage and about 8300 movie titles since 1918 (I don't like series much) and I'm going to buy another 16TB storage for the next decade. Many years ago I developed an app to manage my movies, then I found Plex which is a great replacement for my homegrown app. So I totally understand why someone would have to store everything they need locally, because we don't know what would happen tomorrow to our country, they may even shutdown the entire international internet for more surveillance over citizens (they did this as a test for a week on Nov 2019 protests and killed many) And also I can not seed anything efficiently, because all internet service providers limited their upload speeds at extreme low (100 KB) for cable and about (400 KB) for mobile 4G. This is because the regime (which is a thug regime if you didn't know) wants to prevent quick spreading of news and videos when an uprising happens. Which is actually happening right now in some parts of our country. So this is it. And I use NewPipe as youtube client and it's awesome, just came to youtube to be able to comment on your video. And if you wanna know, I live in Iran.

That's because he chooses to. Sailing the seven seas costs as much as he chooses.

My piracy cost is 0$ because I need a computer for work anyway so it's a separate mandatory expense. The fact that I pirate movies on it is just a free additional feature.

Honestly, I think the way is to pirate stuff from evil corporations (Netflix, Disney, Hulu...) And to support some smaller independent artists/creators using things like Patreon, Bandcamp, ko-fi, etc. I don't mind spending my money, but I'd rather know that my money is going to the creator directly instead of some huge corporation that will only pay them a cut. (Yes I'm aware that Patreon for example takes a share of the money etc etc)

Hey MO, I'm a data hoarder. I'd love to do an interview with you about my setup. Over 100TB and I don't use RAID-1 or tapes.

It's not about practicality. It's about sending a message

At that point, get a job at the Internet Archive. You want more terabytes? Those lunatics are trying to store the literal internet. They have thousands of multi-petabyte databases. Can you even imagine if all those servers started seeding at once? It would basically be a DDoS.

As a Vietnamese, I can confirm that our streaming services are too based to comply with copyright law. Torrent still has better image quality though.

When i want to watch something, even if i haven't looked at it in years, i find it much easier to navigate to the file in question than having to try downloading it again. A good pirate is joyful if he sees "seeders: 1" in his torrent client. A good pirate doesn't limit his down/up ratio. One of my files has a ratio of 2560:1.

As someone using a macbook with under 300Gb of storage and wanting to get a 1Tb hard drive as a luxury, I can't imagine someone needing to expand a 30Tb what sounds like dedicated storage.

It blows my mind that in the US where I live, I can't legally rip a blu ray THAT I OWN and make a digitized backup of it. Not for sharing, not for anything other than being able to throw it on a home server and stream it to MY other devices. I supported the company and bought the physical media, why would you block me from making a backup of something I own? If I don't actually own it then why wasn't I provided a free copy of it to watch? If you intended to tell me I don't own these things then why would I pay money to buy the media?

This guy is doing what I plan to - I currently have 1tb full with a list when I upgrade to ~20 with raid 6. I collect roms, and as of rn, I have nearly full sets of various systems. My end goal is a media server with decades of content to pass on to others via a private shared network. I don't seed, but I do share and archive. If the main copies ever go down, I'll have one to use

Content gets removed for arbitrary reasons, it's region locked or service locked, it can get "remastered" and the originals can be completely removed etc. Local storage is the only way to actually own the data rather than just pay for permission to access it, even if piracy was more expensive, which it isn't, I'd still do it for that reason alone. If you're smart about it you don't even have to spend too much to build a home server and be completely free from the shackles of DRM. I've got about 14TB of storage space on my home server and I've spent a minimal amount of money on it, if electricity is expensive where you live you can set up Wake On LAN and only use the computer when you need it. It's just an old PC and old HDDs or HDDs ripped out of enclosures since you can get them for about half the price of just the HDD when they're on sale though you don't have warranty in that case of course.

oh, I've definitely spent more on piracy than I would have on streaming services... including buying blurays (and sharing them!)

2:30 Why would you ever put 30 TB of harddrives in raid 1? Raid 1 means that every harddrive is a copy of the first. Unless you create several pools of 2 drives each. You still lose half your capacity though and you would be better off using one large raid 10 pool because you would get better performance. A better option though would be raid 5 or 6 depending on how much redundancy you want. The best option would probably be TrueNAS so that you can use ZSF.

Here in México, if you don't have a good enough internet connection (20 USD a month) you can buy some bootleg blurays for like 2 bucks, sometimes they pack whole series in a couple of blu ray discs in lower quality but at least you don't need internet.

Man I just have to say you quickly took first place in the top five KZfaq cyber channels no disrespect to the other guys and gals but you seem to get the most useful and valuable information across with minimal fluff and maximum Contant in a humble way and you’re clearly on the level so it’s immensely educational at least somebody like me, thanks!!

"and I would never break those rules, because that would be BAD"

I don't like the idea that other people are monetising my choices, tracking me constantly and building a database on me to earn that fraction of a cent more on their quarterly profits. I hate that.

Now I know who has been seeding my Linux ISOs for me. Thank you, Sir.

No, I agree. After pirating all the new games, the new PC I built to play them cost me WAY more than a Netflix subscription. ... I may have misunderstood this video. (also my video card literally caught on fire last June so I haven't played a game since then)

im at 96tb but building and maintaining the array is part of the fun. its a hobby and thats better to spend $ on than subscriptions.

Remember, piracy is NEVER okay, unless you have a big ship, a hat with a skull and crossbones, a pegleg, a hook for a hand, a parrot on your shoulder, and a treasure map leading to a faraway beach which leads to a buried treasure chest.

On the topic of piracy (not data hoarding), a lot of the times the issue are the prices! I'm Portuguese, and video games have always been very, very expensive. Not only that, but they would neve drop down in price, not just Nintendo, but also Sega, Sony and Xbox! During the 2000s and 2010s, with online shopping me and many other Portuguese discovered online shopping and started buying online, mainly from the UK. Due to the EU there were no taxes, and even with a strong pound it would be so much cheaper. At launch they would probably cost the same, but while in Portugal a game stayed at full price for years, in the UK prices would start to drop after a few months. With this I completely stopped pirating games and built an huge collection, and the one who lost was the Portuguese state and Portuguese distribuiters.

I used to pirate games as a kid cause I had no money. Nowadays I do it out of principle. I treat digital media like freeware with a donation option. If you make good shit and you do so ethically then obviously we want more of that and you deserve my money. If not, tough luck. Not getting a dime from me for something I wouldn't even actually own. When done en masse this is the quickest and easiest way these companies will ever learn, but unfortunately people keep giving money to companies who openly hate them. Lots of people still think piracy is only about money, especially the companies trying to stop it. This guy's problem is obviously a form of digital hoarding, lol. I have a 10TB HDD that I'm only just now getting close to filling yet most of it are games. I couldn't imagine filling that shit up with shows and movies, like god damn. Is he downloading the highest quality shit every time? I have garbage AT&T internet with a 150gb cap and 600KB/s download yet I'm definitely not losing money by pirating compared to streaming all that data and paying for subscriptions.

The media company I work with handles 800+ TB on a daily basis and runs with 10Gbit fibre Internet and Networking. And I guess I've gotten so desensitised by it that when you said 30TB was a lot I was a bit stunned, then snapped back to reality.

"Its not about the money, its about sending a message"

Tbh I've probably spent more on my current 30TB server and usenet over the years than I would have by subscribing to a couple streaming services in that same time but I like the convenience of not having to delete old stuff, having a backlog of new stuff to watch and just watch whatever I want regardless of who owns the rights

This is probably the stupidest anti-piracy argument I've ever seen 😂

Pre-timeskip one piece was one hell of a linux iso back in the day. After that there was just too much bloat and I was not a fan of the UI redesign. Oda is a hack programmer.

"30t is more than enough" you did not put p-o-r-n in the equation dude

As with most things, convenience is the most expensive factor here. Since he wants access to all of it, all the time, it's costing him. It wouldn't matter if it's via piracy or not, he would simply choose whatever was path of least resistance. If these companies all allowed you to pay to download their content locally forever, he would probably do that, because hunting down what he wanted would be easier. He says he buys stuff on steam, after all.

I definitely relate to the "availability" aspect. I am really picky with movies/shows. I like a lot of indie films and old black and white films. I've explored the catalogs of several streaming services, none come close. Either I go through the hassle of having a physical library of DVD's (too much space) or I splurge on a nice NAS for my downloads. My major concern with streaming services is, like mainstream media, you're at the mercy of what the corporation decides it wants you to see or what you're allowed to see. It's ultimately susceptible to social engineering and narrative manipulation.

My Data Hoarding is not a problem! I can quit whenever I want! 😉

This is such a lie. A singular 12TB WD HDD is $200. Another thing you may need is a VPN, which is like $5/Month. I don't see why you need to pay for indexers, Radarr, Sonarr, etc. is free! A 1.5h movie file is 1-2GB in 1080p, that's thousands of movies and TV shows with a budget of $300. Less than paying Netflix and Amazon Prime for a year.

I was at a AirBnB once and the owner had a sideboard full of multiple 64TB NAS on which was a collection of movies across all genres and centuries. He was a software engineer who recently sold his company and it seemed as this was his main occupation now. I‘d guess he now runs a popular torrent site.

Thanks for seeding those ISOs man, everybody should seed their downloaded ISOs. Helping the community, right? XD

I’m in the same boat. Space can be more easily filled enough if you get high quality, high bitrate 4k linux iso’s rather than something super duper compressed. Whatever the case, data sovereignty is nice to have, the pendulum has swung too far towards centralization imo.

I've been downloading pirated things since I learned the magic of torrents when I was 12. It's legal where I'm from, internet is unlimited and Electricity is cheap af. Win win situation

Size and total time are not always easy to calculate; it depends on quality. For example, high quality/bitrate BD rips for a single movie can easily run up to 10-15GB, while Remuxes are obviously as big as a BD (~40GB or more). Especially 4K. If you're pirating LQ stuff, sure, you can fit 1200 hours of content or more, but say you got a multiple 4K HQ stuff (~30GB for almost 2hrs of runtime) and you can see how it can quickly build up. But yeah, data hoarding is the #1 reason so much storage costs go anywhere near that high.

I don't pirate, I rip all my stuff myself, but the cost of DVDs and Blurays aside, hard drives and server maintenance can get REALLY expensive. Once you account for the drives in the server, the drives that make up your off-site backup, the electricity and the time you spend organizing and collecting it all, you can get into some serious money. But, nobody can take content away from me if it's on my own personal server. They can't just unilaterally yank something out from under my feet because a licensing agreement expired or something.

It kinda depends on how much you want to keep archived for the long term. If you watch and delete most stuff, should be cheaper.

I bought a 12 3.5" sled bay chassis for like $125 on sale from NewEgg, bought 10x 3TB and 2x6TB enterprise SAS used drives, a used 16 channel RAID SAS controller, and tossed in a couple cheap Samsung EVO SSDs. I bought a 3000G AMD APU, 2x8GB RAM, and a meh mobo. I may have spent like $900-1000 total. It is my custom NAS and utility server. I imagine this will last me 5+ years. It's not that bad a deal. Tag on the $90 for 3 years of PIA I got for ** YAR ** and I come out WAAAYYY on top of what I would have spent on F'ing streaming subscription crap services.

I can agree storage, and your ISP can both be a factor in cost especially if your ISP doesn't support an unlimited Data plan, and you live in a rural area that has no other options, you can realistically be expected to pay a premium everytime you go over that data cap, which can get expensive af, on top of storage costing $100 for 4tb's ATM which is just not enough and if you want to create a PLEX streaming service throughout your home that will still cost data for streaming, even if you don't watch it out of your local network which I'm sure you'd eventually want to do given everyone has a busy life now. It can cost a pretty peny.

I personally have 36 TB for my Linux ISOs, but I can tell you that you can definitely get away with less than that. But yes, it's probably going to be more expensive, unless you also use the server for other things. I use mine for game servers, many use it as cloud storage as well and for VMs to play around with stuff. As long as you're using the hardware for more than just seeding Linux ISOs, I don't think it's that bad in terms of cost. I also like to seed almost-dead torrents indefinitely to make sure they stay available. I have many torrents with ratios well over 100.

I don't pirate, I just buy or stream everything. Curiously, I don't have the resources to distinguish legitimate providers from illegitimate ones.

MentalOutlaw’s videos talking about downloading Linux ISOs are my favorite videos

Yoooo you just got a shout out from THE Muda

I watched "all One Piece episodes" about 10 years ago, the first 70 or so were torture, the rest went by like a breeze. Although I remember taking brakes with something more serious like Ergo Proxy. Good times, 10/10 would do again.

It’s interesting to me that the same companies that encourage us to be “green” encourage or have subscription services. Obviously downloading something I’m gonna watch over and over once and keeping it forever is way more energy efficient than downloading it every single time I watch it. I wonder what the net energy cost of that is

I remember going to a ISP and talking to the owner and stuff.. One of the tech guys was like so proud how the ISP d/l'd 6GB a day of usenet stuff.. Damn they sold the company for 10's of millions.. yay? dey rich AF now!

I pay for a seedbox, filled with obscure lesser known movies and oldie movies like silent films. Most files are only available through private trackers, but I do seed on a public one too, and the sheer volume of leeching going on there is rampant, some files from that tracker has a total of 10TB upload, ratios in the thousands, and still, there is only 3-5 seeders on these files..

The sarcasm. The sarcasm was beautiful.

I like how he tries his best to not get stiked by KZfaq

My friend has a slave pc with 68 terabytes of everything from 4k movies to the old godzilla movies and 300 plus anime and anime movies and every show that is coming out. Plex comes in clutch when your friend is rich

👏🙂 I love all people like you who seed Linux isos

I don't think this calculation holds any weight. Streaming is temporary and conditional. Movies and series are pulled from streaming services all the time. When you store something on a drive, you keep it. Its more like buying a copy than watching a stream. To buy 30TB worth of content would undoubtedly cost a lot more than $1200.

Theoretically I can be considered in his camp with 20TB and a $800 computer, but my storage has expanded over the course of years, and is just using hardware from an old main pc that is otherwise just sitting there. And really, they sound like someone who listened to Reddit instead of buying as needs expand.

Wow, you seem to be really dedicated to seeding Linux ISOs!

Im a content hoarder by nature. I'm the kind of friend that you ask for that weird comercial from the 90's or that cartoon forgatten in time. Also, because of my work editing videos, i really need a lot of space for footage. And a few minutes of 4k raw content can really fill many HDD or SSD. And i also need to backup everything (because yes, hdd dies without warning) and archive. What i mean is that it isn't that weird to need that much storage.

Respect to the Man!

3:03 WELL ACKCHYUALLY... torrenting gnu/linux iso's violates the GPL v2. Each seeder is NOT sufficiently disclosing the source code to who they're distributing it to. This was fixed in version 3 of the GPL, giving an exemption to the seeders (but whoever starts the torrent must still share the source code), but of course, the kernel never upgraded to version 3.

2:40 If you're putting any amount of drives in a raid 1, it always has the same space as 1 disk (ie 16TB I think you mean raid 0, which would have 64TB of storage with 4x 16TB drives

Also, what about if there's some software you need for say some project, but you're only going to use that software for only a day or two? Is that worth paying for?

You're such a good plant Kenny 🥰 You'd NEVER *steal* from daddy amazon and netflix 🥰🥰🥰

I dont get why not just have a hard drive dock and just have hard drives on a shelf and just swap them in when you want to access something else

Piracy is about 5 times less expensive when you are considering data storage / average amount of time a person has available to watch a show.

I wanted to build a storage server for cheap, so I got a couple of 18TB drives for a few hundred bucks from a hardware surplus company. (Super low hours on the hardware.) And I got an old HP desktop with a 6th gen i5 and 16GB of RAM for like $65 on eBay. All in, I had a decent storage solution for under $400. I will use that solution for years. Compared to what I would spend in streaming services to get the access to the same content, I would spend multiples of that. It's still cheaper, but you have to know where to get your gear at a reasonable price.

I have 2.5TB of archives from a single vtuber because she graduated a while back. Getting yt-dlp to do that without getting throttled was a pain, and even then it took me almost the full month advance notice that I had. I have everything and my downloads ended 3 days before the graduation (the stream of which I also downloaded), and by midnight that day everything was removed from her channel. What should I do with that data? I can't just spend another hundred bucks on a 5TB HDD, and I would need two for redundancy.

even if this was true for everyone, i still wouldn't pay for microsoft office, adobe, or anything except games i really like

Most linux isos i try to download are in between 600 megs and 2 gigs. I dont really need dolby and 8k resolution. That itself saves a bit of space for data hoarding. If you have the computing power, convert stuff to h265

The problem with buying content is, that is has often severe drawbacks as well. Often you don't even own the stuff you bought, then it comes with copy protection that makes it cumbersome to consume. There are country restrictions and with BluRays it's often hard to even buy them or only with dramatically overprised shipping cost

Used to be like that myself. Would go through great lengths to get the smallest possible file size without sacrificing perceived quality to the point I wrote my own transcoder for x264 which would scrape various movie sites to produce proper chapter lists and all that fanciness. At some point I realized bit rot was ruining videos more often than I was able to watch them and that's what got me to back off. Still have a huge problem hoarding code I wrote that just isn't all that useful because "you never known" failure of logic but getting there on solving that one by combining it into a library and discarding anything that fails reasonable testing or can't be adopted into a somewhat loose guideline (for consistency sake).

I personally Think that paying more for piracy would be worth it because you actually own the content. No matter how much it costs I would still rather not use services. I personally pirate music and tv most and I love it compared to spotify or netflix.

This man is rockin 30TB of content.. That's like 6TB more than my Ultra Street Fighter IV collecion of footage... This is a worthy foe indeed! Godspeed to this man, Fedora's off! LOL

The other issue if you're living out in the sticks (like I do) is internet plans. While I do get reasonable speeds with satellite, the amount of bandwidth each month is prohibitive to streaming. They finally updated plans a little while back where it's unlimited most of the day except between 4pm and 12am (when you're most likely to watch video streams). But I do see their point that the actual equipment isn't cheap. I recently updated to a new NAS (QNAP) which was around the $1000AU mark. Add in 4x8TB drives @$300ea plus 4GB RAM (about $50) I'm up to $2250 just for equipment. Electricity would probably be about $150 a year so just in that, would pay for a monthly subscription. And lets face it for $2250 that would pay for about 12yrs of streaming at $15 a month. Add in also how many times you'd actually re-watch any show/movie? You could probably count on two hands how many shows you'd watch a second time. Although the one upside to streaming your own content is you're not at the whim of streaming services discontinuing shows/movies because their distribution deals don't suit them.

Depends how you feel about ownership. Personally I don't know what's worse, policy not living up to what it should take ownership of, creators' rights to ownership, or an end user's capacity to store data? If that ain't a kerfuffle. The only thing more kerfuffling is spell check knowing to change kurfuffle to kerfuffle.

As someone who has been pirating various forms of media for most of the time I've been alive, I recently had the revelation that while I still want permanent local copies of the stuff that is important to me, (pre-Kurtzman Star Trek, Stargate, the Borderlands franchise, Minecraft, Factorio, some medieval music and psytrance from the turn of the century, and a small library of films) I will never have enough local space for everything, and that's completely fine. So while I do pirate a few current streaming shows, (Picard, the Mandalorian, Boba Fett) the Mandalorian is the only one of the three which I am likely to keep long term. I'm also now subbed to CuriosityStream, but there's basically nothing there that I regret being unable to keep locally, either. Netflix specifically, however, are cordially invited to suck the entire universe's weight in dicks. I don't watch their shit, and I don't pirate it; although I did pirate The Good Place. My brother also showed me an episode of The Boys, which I consider appropriate given how strongly he often reminds me of Homelander.

Just trying to log into amazon on linux to watch a few episodes of a random show reminded me of why piracy is a good thing. Paying an absurd annual fee, yet I had to waste most of my free time jumping through hoops just to stream a couple episodes to my PC.

Step 1) VPN. Already pay for it. Step 2) Change DNS configuration if you’re feeling really spicy Step 3) Torrent Step 4) Walk away because the entire purpose of pirating is to save money.

The only thing you can't buy, or pirate, is a brain. If you have 40tb of content you don't need to have all the drives spun up 24/7 wasting power. Just index it and only spin up the drive when you access the content on it. You'll have 10 seconds of latency when you click on the video but it'll save you the outrageous energy costs.

"Do you really need more?" "do you even need that much to begin with?" Yes, we need more, go ahead and try to find a peer on a 10+ year old torrent and you'll get your answer. Edit: Well, movies are the mainstream when it comes to torrents, most have seeds due to popularity and there's always a different rip, but software? Books? Good luck...

It cots more those laws tha prohibits to share or to reproduce bits in my own screen. As a content creator I can put all kind of difficulties to prevent others to get access to the content I own but the moment you find the way to access it I can do anything. Subscriptions has we know it today is more expensive because it need a large amount of resources to protect the content but since companies are not who pay the cost. Those who pay taxes are the ones who pay the cost of protection through "copyright laws" that goverments enforce.

I can't image the nightmare of dealing with 30TB when it comes to drive failure. Sure you could set it up in a raid but that costs money and kinda sucks to lose drive space for recovery. What I do is firstly encode videos with a lower bitrate to save space. A single episode of any TV show doesn't need to be 1 Gig. Use Handbrake or WinFF to make it into a much smaller file. You won't need that level of quality and good chance you're planning to Plex which smaller files do help with that. Another thing to do is not buy Seagate or Western Digital brands of hard disks. They suck, especially Seagate. Personally I stick with Hitachi, HGST, and Toshiba. They may not perform the best but I don't need fast drives, I need reliable drives. Another thing I do is keep an eye on the smart status of the drives. When something bad starts to happen like a bad sector then I replace it. This has saved me countless times of losing all my data. You can still use the drive for many years but what I've found is that when one sector goes then others will soon follow. Use something like CrystalDiskInfo to see the status of your drives. Also drives tend not to live for more than 5 years on average so I'd just replace them when the 5 year mark is up. All drives fail remember. It's not a matter of if but when.

1) It's worth watching a blu Ray movie at full quality especially if it's got something like Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. I was amazed at the difference. Although That's about 70GB per movie, Watching at for example Netflix is such a downgrade even if it's 4k. 30 TB would be enough for about 530 such high quality movies. 2) Torrenting amongst its many benefits as a technology **provides much faster download speeds, the more people seed, the more connections you have**, imagine if no one would ever need to stop seeding lol, we could download Linux ISOs, lol, instantly at our max theoretical bandwidth !