Have you tried a patch cable‽

Easy solution. “The Internet Archive” should rebrand itself to “Archiving the Internet” to confuse everyone who talks about how “AI” should be able to steal books.

Agreed about changing the copyright law.

Until that happens though, they must not be allowed to have it both ways - call us “pirates” when we copy their shit without paying for it, and tell us that paying for shit they copy is “impossible”.

Libraries are still a thing. You can still go there to borrow a book, read it, and return it, so that others can read it.

Public libraries are under assault from every direction.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1119752817/local-libraries-have-become-a-major-political-and-cultural-battleground

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/book-bans-librarians.html (apologies for nyt link)

https://apnews.com/article/book-bans-libraries-lawsuits-fines-prison-0914fa6cbb2a99b540cbbd28a38179b4

https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-want-to-defund-public-libraries-book-bans

Pretty soon you either won’t find the books, or even the libraries themselves. Piracy is the only way they are leaving to us.

Porn piracy is absolutely huge. I think you’re just doing a bad job downloading it.

Unless you have a very particular kink or fetish, porn is the one thing that you can find for free all over the internet. You don’t even have to look that hard.

Piracy of movies, TV, music, & books is alive and well with no intention of slowing down. If anything, the advent of streaming helped get media in higher quality sooner than before. It’s even easier if you’re willing to pay a little for a private tracker membership, of a Newsgroups subscription.

Gaming is the most difficult part because cracking copy protections carry a very high risk of infecting your computer with a nasty virus. Even then, if you know where to look, there are trusted groups that value their reputation and pride themselves on releasing clean repacks.

Bottom line is, there’s not going to be a “post-piracy world” OP asks about. The game simply changed to paying for a single all-in-one subscription instead of being nickel-and-dimed to death by corporations. And it’s already here.

Nintendon’t

Aruba S2500-48P. Picked up a used one for $130 on eBay 4 years ago, and it’s been solid in my rack. 48 PoE 1GbE ports, and 4 10GbE SFP+ ports. At that price what more could you ask?!

Are you planning to use this only for media storage, or other tasks as well?

Many dedicated NAS boxes from the likes of Synology and QNAP come with low-powered CPUs that in addition to handling media storage can do many other useful things. For example - running various self-hosted apps like password managers, photo organizers, even office suites. Those do have many downsides as well. They use proprietary hardware and software, so you are at the mercy of the manufacturer if they suddenly decide that your NAS is too old for them to support. The CPUs in them are not as powerful as consumer-grade ones found in most desktops, and they don’t usually come with a lot of RAM. They are also quite expensive for what they offer - for example, a very basic 4-bay enclosure with 2GB RAM and Realtek 4-core CPU costs $370, and that’s without the cost of the disks. For that kind of money you can build a desktop from used server parts that will be ten times as powerful, and more versatile since it will be able to run any OS that you want. Granted, it will not be as small or power efficient.

If you just need a turn-key off-the-shelf solution, a prebuilt NAS may be the way to go. If you want to tinker with hardware and experiment with software however, self-built system with used parts may be better suited for you. Most homelabbers don’t start off with a rack full of equipment, they grow their hardware organically. You have outgrown your external enclosure, so now you have several choices. For prebuilt NAS appliances Synology and QNAP are not the only choices; there are many other lesser known in this category - Asustor, Terramaster, Buffalo, to name a few. For building a server on your own I would recommend doing some research before going on a shopping spree - https://serverbuilds.net is an excellent resource.

That said, I’d echo others’ answers. RAID is not backup. It offers some resiliency from disk failure, but that shouldn’t replace a proper backup strategy. Synology offers various RAID levels, including their own take on it that allows for different sized drives. For self-built option there’s UnRaid which handles resiliency differently, but requires an entire separate drive for parity.

In terms of hard drive choice, it all depends on how comfortable you are with possible data loss. If you back up your critical data (e.g. family photos, important documents) and don’t care about downloaded media (you can always re-download it) then go ahead and use whatever - shucked, used, etc. If you absolutely cannot handle any data loss, then new drives made specifically for NAS appliances are the way to go. Enterprise level HDDs are an option also, but those mostly use SAS interface instead of SATA, and require specialized hardware (HBA adapters).

I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.

Also Netflix: “Let’s cancel all the popular series that we hyped up all last year because they are too expensive.”

What is your storage situation currently? Just trying to figure out why you think expanding it is expensive, because hard disks have been getting cheaper. Especially used “enterprise” SAS drives - the 12TB drives can be had for under $100. You’ll need a $40 HBA card and $10 breakout cables as well.

And these racks usually start with “I found this super cheap rack server on eBay” and not an actual need.

Hey! I resemble that!

Proof…

While digital security experts have doubted the veracity of that claim, in any case it doesn’t seem consistent with, say, HP allowing USB devices to connect to its laptops, an interface that surely offers more opportunity for viruses and malware to access critical hardware than a printer cartridge.

Stop giving them ideas!

Server side is UnRaid hosting various arr Docker containers, with a dedicated Intel QuickSync box for Plex and Jellyfin Servers. On the client side 2 Roku Ultras and a couple of Chromecasts.

WhyNotBoth.gif

Seriously. People don’t realize how well Intel QuickSync transcodes (non-4k) stuff. My Plex/Jellyfin server is on a 6th gen Celeron with 12GB DDR3, and it can transcode 10+ streams simultaneously. Cost me under $150 USD.

MP3s are quite compressed, meaning a lot of data is thrown away in an effort to have smaller files. The quality of audio is sacrificed quite a bit though.

Lossless formats retain as much data as possible as to not impact the sound quality, but at the expense of larger files. The OP says “smaller” because that’s in comparison to the raw uncompressed sound data stream. But they are larger than MP3s because MP3 is a lossy format.

File size used to matter a lot in the past when digital music players first came out. My first player had 128 MB storage, for example. At 3-5 MB per song that would fill up quickly. Nowadays larger storage of portable devices is more ubiquitous, with even the cheapest phones sportiing 32-64 GB, and more. So people prefer audio quality and don’t care as much if each song takes up more space.

Roku Ultra 4800R.